JP via RSS
The American Dream: Conquering Deflation with Financial Independence
4th of July 2009
Google gave us 14,700,000 hits for Financial Independence today.
The first was Mark Gallagher’s Ten Tips for Financial Independence, which we amended as follows:
1. Keep our life as simple as possible.
How do we do that? We make and take a lot of time on the Three Big Decisions – Who we marry, Where we live, and Where we work. The biggest obstacles to the good life are complications from divorce, jobs we hate, a house or things we can’t sell without talking a crippling hit.
Vocation means our calling. What calls to us here and now? There is no time like the present to start doing and living what we love.
The #1 decision in our life is who we marry. The divorce industry perhaps destroyed more lives than the compulsive consumer industry. Neither one made us happy.
2. Learning what is most valuable. What brings happiness?
What do we most like doing? Most of us don’t learn this until we are 65 years old, often because we envy someone else’s life. If we figure out how to live our own best life by the time we are 30, and cut down on TV, our good life is guaranteed.
If we do what we really love, the money is there.
Ok, this is it – the most valuable and enjoyable things in life are our health, time with family and friends, with work we enjoy. God, fun, family, friends, job, money and things in that order make a person happy, healthy and wealthy.
Buying expensive things brings little lasting satisfaction. Buying an expensive boat, car, plane, vacation home, or the latest large-screen TV computer gadget brings fleeting moments of joy putting people into lasting compounding debt purgatory or hell. Skipping the expensive stuff when we are young to build our savings provides the financial freedom to spend time with our friends, family and business, job or life we enjoy.
Related point: we keep our life and our possessions in balance. Here is how:
Every time we acquire something new, we take the time to give something away. Buying a new car, we selling our old car (at below market price) to a relative or neighbor that needs a good used car at a low price. Buying a new TV or computer, we give our old one away for free through web sites like freecycle.
