Financial Freedom to me is spending lavishly without bothering about income. If I have to attain my Financial Freedom then I need to work smart to become wealthy and not rich. There is considerable amount of difference between wealth and riches. (You can always google it).
This is the path that I have decided to follow in order to be wealthy. This is a slow process and I don’t believe in overnight things. Everything goes on in it own pace.
1. Increase your income.
2. Decrease your expenditure.
3. Save regularly.
4. Invest wisely.
1. Increase your Income:
This is very very tough when compared to the other three options that I have mentioned. I tried various methods to increase the income and I was successful also but it was not a regular income, it would just come every now and then. Some of the ways I tried to increase the income was, working as a freelance developer (php, c, c++). This was very effective till the work pressure from my full time job made it impossible for me to accept simple projects. I have worked in projects that fetched me somewhere between $10 to $50. I used to make in a month atleast $50 and I was happy about it. I tried various advertising programs also and made some money but not a very descent amount. I tried my hands in share trading.. This was the biggest blunder in my life till date, I burnt my fingers badly :-(. Then I realised I was not doing which I was supposed to do. I will explain in detail in later posts regarding investing and trading.
2. Decrease your Expenditure:
This is also a very tough job in hand but can be handled comparatively in a easy manner than increasing the income. I know its very tough since I myself found it very hard to decrease it but I have made up my mind to do so and I consciously keep a check on my expenditure. Why this is as important as increasing the income cause if we don’t spend much money then we start accumulating and this increases the cash and in turn this increases the wealth.
3. Save Regularly:
We generally don’t have the habit of saving. If at all we save we just save for something we plan to spend for. For example: We plan to save for buying a Television or Laptop or something that we think its useful for us. This is not a good approach at all. But still we manage to save for the thing that we love. But if we make a habit to save regularly then we will be free financially in a short span of time. I always felt that we should invest and not save due to various reasons. But now after making blunders I realized that we should save money and keep some in Emergency fund.
4. Invest Wisely:
This is one department where I am working hard to gain knowledge. I will try to enlighten you with the little knowledge that I have. But I feel if we invest wisely we can shorten the time line for our dream to reach financial freedom by half.
Do you have any better thoughts to reach Financial Freedom?? Just let me know…
Engineer's Finance 