Financial Freedom Fairy

Everyone has a reason they can’t quit. The simplest: money.

I hate to admit it, but yes, money does in fact make the world go round. If you’re anything like me you like living comfortably. You like not having to worry about eating out, grabbing drinks, or having enough money to travel without having to see the inside of a hostel. I don’t have any ambitions to own a yacht but I want to be able to say I’ve jumped off one in Sicily. JK. Real talk, I’m more than happy to settle for a group catamaran cruise around any island. But even that requires a decent chunk of change. And so begins the job addiction.

It’s important to understand and make peace with who you are and plan accordingly. Who are you at your core? What is important to you? What are you willing to do to enable your financial freedom? What are you not willing to sacrifice?

I am a bit of an idealist who was raised to believe that I could be whoever and have whatever I wanted as long as I was willing to put in the work. You should know its been a decade since my quarter-life crisis. My initial idea of making my sabbatical dreams come true was that I’d suffer through my normal corporate life 2-3 years at a time (depending on my salary), save a ton of money, and then take a year off with half of my savings. And repeat.

By my calculations back then this would have also allowed me to save enough for building my real estate empire on the side. And by empire I meant a couple of one-bedroom apartments in the mid west. Why the mid-west? Because I’m a single girl who likes to travel so this is the only area I can afford an apartment. Anyway, these apartments would be the key to my holy grail: financial freedom. The idea was I’d put my savings towards the down payment for affordable apartments every few years and let the renters pay off the mortgage in 10 years and eventually have the rental income I got from my ’empire’ fund my life. And I would do this in about 15 years. Which meant I’d be on the hook to have a corporate existence till then.

If the plan above wasn’t aggressive enough, I also refused to sacrifice my present for the future (sabbatical). So I moved to a place I thought would feel more me and allow me to enjoy my forced corporate existence as well. A few blocks from the ocean, year-round great weather, in a metropolitan city surrounded by other creatives: I picked LA.

How’d my insane plan go? I’ll be happy to report that in the last decade I have, by some miracle, managed to live this dream for the most part. As in I moved to Santa Monica, got a job (or many over the years), and have taken 3.5 sabbaticals in the last decade. Unfortunately the parts that didn’t pan out were due to the fact that I hadn’t taken into account a core part of my values – I do not believe in sacrificing my present for my future and I do not settle for jobs that don’t feel like a fit. So thanks to that the building of the real estate empire suffered tremendously AND I spent at least half my sabbatical time searching for my next job. Bottomline is that I’m still no where close to my holy grail, which means I’m stuck relying on my next job for the same exact reasons as 10 years ago.

Well you know what? Triple F says F U to that.

It’s 2023 and if we can survive a goddamn pandemic, we can get financially free. And we’re going to do it in the next 5 years. Watch and learn!