Financial Freedom Fairy

‘Every strategy starts with a goal, every plan starts with a list’ – Saint Triple F of the Sacred Order of Good God Set Us Free Please We Will Do Anything Including This List.

Mine goes like this:

1. Come up with a grand goal
2. Get a job without getting a job UNLESS it is THE job
3. Edu-ma-cate yourself financially
4. Understand the meaning of ‘passive income’ and pick a few potential options for your own repertoire
5. Identify things you’re interested in that might also make you money
6. Become the expert you need

This list is just that: a list.. it’s not a plan yet, it’s just the first step meant to get you thinking and help you set some real life tasks down… you will want to explore these areas as you solidify and formulate an actual plan. That brings us to the first up: the grand goal.

My grand goal for my spoilt dog and myself is to build a real estate empire as my base money-maker. I don’t expect it to be easy or super cheap. How did I come up with it? I worked backward for this one and you should too:

• I calculated how much post-tax cash I’d need per month and then
• I thought of the kinds of investments (of money or time) I’d be comfortable making. The top 4 that came to mind: real estate, stocks/funds etc, content creation, bitcoin, and gold/silver.
  • Since I’m not a pirate, I scratched off gold/silver (for now).
  • I’m also risk averse, so I scratched off bitcoin (for now).
  • Stocks or trading of any sort requires a lot of study so I’m putting it aside for when I’m old and moldy. JK I’m already old and moldy and this option actually does have legs, so we will come back to this in a bit.
  • Content creation also requires a fair bit of investigation but it is an interesting concept given ChatGPT and similar tools we can use so I will also come back to it in a bit.
  • That leaves me with real estate.
• Then I took my post-tax cash goal (let’s say $100,000/year) and divided it by the average yearly rental income of a one-bedroom apartment ($2000/month * 12 months = $24,000) in a state I have family and some roots in. That got me to 4 one-bedroom apartments.

So in summary, I believe I need 4 one-bedroom apartments to support my basic needs fully.

I think this might be a good time to emphasize the ‘support my BASIC needs fully’ bit. That translates to food, water, shelter or in current day speak: rent, utilities, healthcare, groceries, transportation. That means I will need some other side-gigs or investments to supplement the good life: eating out like the expert food critic I’m not, traveling in style with my pup like the influencer I’m not, and saving a little for the eventual rainy day.

And finally, I cannot stress this enough: this is meant to be a back-of-the-napkin calculation to get us excited and started towards our financial freedom journey. We will evaluate how real and achievable these numbers are as we explore all the passive money-making paths in detail together!

So shake that burnout-imposter-syndrome funk off and sing it with me (and Nas) now: ♫ I know I can… be what I wanna be ♫

And Triple F says I wanna be free!