Damn financial freedom — Issue #10
Financial freedom means having a job that is actively contributing at improving your life and at achieving your goals.
It means meeting three conditions: appreciating your work, having time and energy devoted to your non-working life, earning enough to maintain the very lifestyle you thrive for.
The new entrepreneurs mentioned by Tim Ferriss do not measure their wealth as the amount of money they have in their current bank account but as the amount of passive, automated business revenue month after month.
If the desired living standard or lifestyle is reachable with a monthly income of $ 10,000, the new businessman will have reached his financial freedom when he has a passive monthly income of $ 10,000 disconnected from the time dedicated to mantain such revenue.
Rethink your work, your profession, your financial structure by trying to create income — income that will help you manage your time and allow you to have passive income without having to spend your time, hours a day, days a week to produce money.
Over time, the skills needed to produce an income change.
After the industrial revolution, but even before, it was enough to read and write; over time, the need to study and to strive for prestigious work has deemed necessary to have a University Degree and, to enhance possibilities, a Master\Postgraduate Degree.
Now those skills are, in a sense, given for assimilation and are no longer closely related and necessary to produce money.
In the upcoming years the new skills to produce money will outline the ability to sell, the ability to communicate and ultimately the ability to create traffic of people intended to buy their own products or services — “Lead Generation” in jargon.
The lifestyle we have learnt from our parents, who want graduated employees with a stable job position, starting working day from 8.00 am and ending it at 5.00 pm, 5 days per week, does not cling well to some individuals — in particular it does not fit well with new entrepreneurs.
There are some new rules imposed by the advent of technology and the evolution of social life.
It often happens that you become acquainted with teenagers or 20’s who create their own business, their successful startup.
Other people, however, spend years building their own companies through traditional logic but without optimizing their strategies and adapting them to quietly outdated market laws, which as we have said require more elasticity and a steep change, as previous market laws inexorably and mostly fail as of today.
Relocation is a word that we hear very often, through media (mostly radio and TV), always referring to physical, corporate or employee headquarters, yet we are witnessing a phenomenon of intellectual delocalisation: more and more jobs are replaced and some people who, for example, have the objective of wanting to become a bank employee, may be at some point in their life where the work of a bank employee will be obsoleted by software or remotely shifted to employees from other countries.
On the other hand, there are those people who want to put themselves in, who want to start up their own business, the ones on whom this study is particularly careful to focus on.
Becoming the CEO of a large company and leading a successful startup allows you to reach, in most cases, great economic results. This is not automatically correlated, or at least not usually, to the financial freedom that new entrepreneurs aspire to.
Mostly your business — your startup — will grow but more will be the commitments, the meetings, the obligations to the stakeholders and the investors; therefore, the increase in the profit will have to correspond to an increase in your workload and some cases to a non-automatic, but probable, increased stress at work.
As far as you can enrich yourself, do you really believe that this will make you a free person?
The strategy that distinguishes the business of new entrepreneurs is precisely the structuring, planning and management of passive incomes.
What is meant by passive incomes?
Passive income corresponds to recurring profits due to activities that, when initiated, do not require major maintenance efforts.
When you are able to structure such a business and you can count on this source of income, you can search for new activities that can make more revenue.
Every new business will thus contribute to a steady increase in income without the need for more time and work — it’s not about a zero effort method but some degree of automatization of such activity can be possible.
Photos by Klemen Vrankar, Nathan Dumlao, Anne Niuniu.
