Money freedom is the process of choosing more and more where your money goes. Money is a mechanism by which transactions are made. The old line says, “More money more problems.” But that is not always true. It wholly depends on where your heart motivation is. More money is only a problem if you do not have self control and are not able to create a plan and by doing so, choose where it should go.
Two Principles for More Money Freedom
Two principles in starting to choose money freedom are:
- Tell your money where to go by creating a budget plan and sticking to it. The most important part of a budget plan is tracking your spending in a given month. No matter what your financial situation is, this is where you must begin.
- You will have more opportunity and freedom to choose where your money goes when you get rid of personal debt or mortgage debt on your primary home.
When these two things are true of you, money can turbocharge anything you want. You have made a plan for what you want to do with your money and remained faithful. Then you can look at other means of exponentially increasing your impact on the world directly through the use of money. This can include your ability to earn more money, aka your earning power, and/or your ability to save more and the compounding nature of saving.
Resources Available for More Money Freedom
You have three resources available to you to choose from in how to turbocharge anything you want:
- Money
- Time
- Work
Money, or ‘money freedom’, is the first of the three because it allows you to focus your work results more on what matters to you. Sticking with the two “money” principles above will allow you to over time get to a place where you can increase your earning power. As you work to pay off all debt, you are learning to be consistent with your budget plan which will allow you to continue to be responsible once you have paid off all debt.
Once you practice the two money principles habitually to achieve more and more money freedom, you are no longer indebted to employers to earn money. With more cash available to you and no debt to distract you, focus continues to get easier. You can now begin to think smarter and not harder and more and more allow your money to work for you.
Ability to Earn More
Consider areas where you can pay an hourly rate or small fee to someone else that is less than the amount you can earn per hour. For example, if you like mowing your lawn, then you can keep doing it. But if you don’t like mowing the lawn and you have other projects that would bring a greater return, you can hire someone else to mow and use that time to focus on something more important. I did this with DIYing our 1950’s home. When you employ other people to do work, you also get the benefit employing other people for their services at the same time as removing something from your to do list. This is the second part, your time. It might be small as a starting point to making your money and time go further, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
There were certain times in my adult life where I could make more money per hour in the off-hours than I ever did in my day job by the hour. Things like guitar teaching and adjunct teaching at a local university. The more you get out from under the obligations of time for money, you gain more control over both time and money.
Save More
You can find some of your own conventional or unconventional ways to gain more earning power and the ability to save more which will allow you to benefit from more of the compounding effect. Max out any fully vested company 401k matching programs and then you can also put the maximum contributions for personal 401k or Roth IRA accounts. Put more toward kids college in an ESA or 529. Using a combination of money freedom and time freedom allows you to customize a plan that gives you more enjoyment and increases the value of your time just like I did with my home renovation projects. This allowed me to expand my skills while also upping the game as far as savings on these bigger projects.
There are lots of ways to turbocharge anything you want. When you are responsible with your money, you can gain more earning power and benefit from the compounding nature of money as well as maximize your money, time, and work opportunities. And as you learn and grow managing your money and your time more efficiently, you will find that you can make real money by finding creative ideas and exploiting them. This is what entrepreneurial and resourceful people do to grow their money and decrease their time dependent income. They develop passive income opportunities that either make more money and cash now with less time invested, or develop a plan to create more future money. You have seen above some of the ideas I have had early on. You don’t have to have lots of money to begin finding ways to improve your money, time, and work prospects. Begin by being responsible with your money and follow the two money principles: tell your money where to go and knock out personal debt and your primary mortgage debt. There are lots of ways to increase your earning power and benefit from the nature of money compounding. It just takes brainstorming, planning, and executing and being patient with yourself in the process. Your ability to focus and find good ideas to exploit will be enhanced once the first two principles are second nature.
Begin With A Vision For Your Future
In the beginning, you’ll want to consider a vision for your future. What do you want your life to look like now, 2 years from now, 5 years, 10, 20, and 30 years from now? As you do, your brain will start to work on ideas for how to fill in those gaps through learning and growing.
No matter what your vision is, you need to begin putting the two principles for more money freedom into practice. Start with a repeatable plan for personal investing and savings and pursue debt freedom. You will come back to your vision when you write it down and review it regularly. This allows your vision to become a goal. As you learn what is working and what isn’t by taking action, you can adjust your timeline as to when you want to accomplish the goal and actualize the vision.
As you become consistent implementing the two money principles, you will notice a lot of personal benefits including more self control. As you stay consistent, your mind will begin to think about how to close the gap between where you are now and where you want to go. You can find ways to increase your earning power. It may take time to brainstorm what works for you. But if you follow this process of creating and implementing a plan for where your money goes today and pursue debt freedom, as you do, you will be learning the skills of patience, focus, and self control to help you in the future for when you have more money freedom.