*note this article is focused solely on simplifying life and enhancing freedom, we do NOT recommend selling your house and YOLO’ing, nor do we recommend buying or selling any personal investments. We do recommend to up your knowledge, create a vision and seek a trusted professional before making any investment decisions. This article is however to inspire you to dream and go out and live those dreams as time is precious.
So often when people are on holiday for a few weeks the mind tends to wander a little. That little voice pops up: I love this country, I would love to live here.
Very quickly that voice get shut down by the reality of returning to life back home.
The reality of a 9 to 5 is just a construct put together. It is an idea. But it is an idea that once entrenched is very difficult to deviate from. And so this way of life becomes normal for the best part of 40 years. This scenario is fine for those who enjoy it. But people who desire the variation and freedom of experiencing different it can be a nightmare.
So for those of you reading that have that desire to change it up, to shake that routine and free the wings but have absolutely no idea how to start, never mind… I’ve got you in this article. Grab a cuppa. Let’s go.
We will start with the concept of the golden handcuffs. You’ve probably heard of it. But what is it? Golden handcuffs was termed based on companies giving high performing employees incentives such as bonuses, stocks in the company or a deferred promise to de-incentivise a person to leave their company for another one.
But what if golden handcuffs were simplified even further, what if golden handcuffs were simply defined as YOUR WAGE keeping you from your freedom. Let’s focus here.
A great equation to explore is how long can you survive if your wage stopped today before you ran out of all your savings and had no money left? Most people could survive between 4-12 weeks. Some for 6-12 months, a tiny portion for longer. However, alarmingly, many could hardly last a week. This is a term commonly known as living pay check to pay check.
So why can most people live very little time without a pay check?
The pay check creates a psychological trap of magically matching your expenses with your income. And the higher your income goes the higher your expenses seem to be.
How does this happen?
Well, most people go to the bank to get a mortgage and the bank tells them the absolute maximum they can afford. So therefore they go looking for a house at that price. This causes a big expense for the next 15-30 years!
Next, they get a car loan that they can afford based on what the bank will lend.
They spend leftover money on food, fashion etc based on the fact that they’ll get another pay check next week, so why not right?
And when they’ve worked hard and got a pay rise what is the first thing they do?
Go and upgrade the couch and the television, or the car. And so expenses rise to meet the pay check.
First tip for the key to unlock the golden handcuffs: Minimise your life possessions, maximise your life fulfilment and lower your expenses.
It is amazing how many people begin their freedom journey by focusing on a health kick.
Instead of buying things to feel better, they sweat to feel better. Confidence grows and it costs much less.
If your goal is freedom from the 9-5, then your very first focus is to lower your expenses and give yourself some breathing room. Get creative with this. Have fun. And stop wasting the money you received from trading your precious time.
Once I stopped spending money on things that take money from me I started spending money on things that gave me more money. This is called investing.
In simple terms, investing is designed to give you more money in the future.
“But I don’t want to lower my expenses to live cheaply forever, I want a great life” you say?
That is the beauty of this. Your goal is to get your time back that the 9-5 is taking away from you. Then with that time you can use it to learn new skills and also learn how to make money work for you, rather than the trap of working harder and harder for money.
A guy I love listening to on YouTube is the late Jim Rohn, he said the worst way to become wealthy is to trade your time for money. And he educates in a very engaging way on understanding profits over wages. This paragraph i’ve just written alone gives you so much content to go and research and learn new ways. Good luck, and i’d love to hear from you if this article inspired you to have a starting point with looking at your expenses.
If you’re enjoying my work, consider re-allocating $7 you saved for the month and become a subscriber here. It will help me to continue to put my focus into this substack to write informative and valuable articles that drop into your inbox. From the 9-5 cycle to freedom, you’ve got this!
BowTiedTassieDevil
The Medival Astronomical Old Town Prague clock is ticking, and so is your time to go and see it.
Great post and very true. Lifestyle inflation creeps on you slowly. Were you able to replace your 9 to 5 completely? That’s the only thing holding me back to quit.
Lovee