money 2

By John, September 21, 2012

I mentioned in a previous post that “the getting of money” a phrase borrowed from Chris McCully, was the single most quoted problem for people seeking freedom in their lives.

Freedom in this sense means the freedom to decide what you do at any given moment in time, so it generally means not working for someone else.

It stands to reason that just about everybody in the world would like to be free; free from the capitalist creation that is work as we know it today.

Of course work has arisen in our lives due to us becoming more “civilised”. The pay that we receive for work is a direct replacement for the time that we would have spent in pre-history staying away from predators and catching or foraging for food. It this sense, we probably have never been free to just laze around.

So being free isn’t necessarily to do with idles-ness, although that depends on how you define idleness; I personally don’t have any problems with the concept of being idle at certain times of the day or year.

Security is another reason that we have ended up working; we need somewhere to live, food on the table and we need to know that this will continue without interruption.

In recent times however, it seems less and less likely that we can feel genuinely secure working in the traditional “employed” way. Creating your own income and dictating when you work and what you do and generally being in better control of your income is surely a sensible approach in these confused times.

By taking control of your income you can free yourself from wage slavery and be much more secure knowing intimately whats coming in.

In another post I talked about creating “assets“, which is what the very rich have always done…ok I used a little bit of poetic license there, the very rich sometimes steal their assets rather than create them. Brute force and ignorance/apathy went a long way to making many of the bums on the seats in the upper house as rich as they are today.

From communicating with friends and readers of this blog I have seen that money is the greatest of hurdles for almost everyone that seeks to live a free life, so I have decided to make money a subject to focus on more closely over the coming weeks, as I believe that it is just a hurdle and can be gotten over leaving you free to live the life you want, before its too late.

So the getting of money being the tyrant that it is, needs a very special approach and a change in mindset to make it less imposing and more enjoyable and natural.

To start with it must be a priority to start building assets, as these are the things…tangible or intangible that once started or created can become what a friend of mine describes as “dripping roasts”, once they are set up and running, they need very little tweaking or input to continue dripping out cash to you in the future. Of course most assets will have a natural life span and so we need to constantly be on the look out for opportunities to make new assets.

If you want to be truly free to make up your own days, doing things you love, then you have to completely flip the polarity on your thinking from “making your work your life” to “making your life your work”. So whatever it is you most like to do can become at least part of your income producing activity.

So, to get off the treadmill and still live in the modern world we need to create work for ourselves that allows us to do what we want, where we want and when we want.

We need to build (preferably multiple) income streams for ourselves and, at least in the early days of our new life, we need to squeeze the maximum value from the money we have. This might mean some or all of the following:

1. finding a way to work from home or a single preferred location
2. reducing expenditure on travel, daily subsistence and household bills
3. marketing ourselves, maybe for the first time and learning to market and sell our products or services effectively
4. having an eye on building assets rather than one off jobs
5. spending time doing the stuff you love to do and not getting bogged down in admin and or anxiety about money

Over the next few weeks I will takes these sub topics apart a bit to see if I can share any useful learning from my own experience.

Meantime, why not share your experiences by commenting on this post?

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