How Does Financial Freedom Affect Your Rich Life?

Financial freedom. It’s a phrase that is common to most everyone. You’ve certainly heard it many times. Perhaps you’ve even used it yourself. But what does it mean? And most specifically, what does financial freedom mean to you? How you view this concept could very well affect how you live your entire life.
Perhaps you’ve never even considered the matter before. It’s rather like the subconscious thought, “I’d like to be rich,” and yet never really getting specific about what it means to be rich.
How do you define financial freedom? And how did you come up with your method of calculation? Is it what someone else designed for you? Or is it what fits with your life, your lifestyle and your purpose in life?
If you think these are hard questions to answer, you’re right. And yet without thoroughly examining your answers, you’ll be destined to live a life that is dictated by another person, or another entity.
The sad fact is that as a nation, we’ve succumbed to the idea that we are “entitled” to be taken care of. Because of this mindset, we’ve abdicated control of our finances to entities such as retirement plans, corporations, or the government. None of these can offer any type of financial freedom. All they can offer is a false sense of security.
What exactly are we entitled to? You are entitled to the fruit of your labor, and what your creativity and ingenuity can devise.
In my work as a financial planner, I encourage my clients to spend quality time seeking to learn their own purpose in life. I’ve never seen it to fail that when an individual knows his or her own purpose, they become productive and they add value to the world around them.
People who know, and then pursue, their life purpose are people who are on a mission. They are focused and single-minded. Not much can distract them from the quest they are on. They are not as prone to listen to all the many voices around them. (Some of those voices are the naysayers telling them they will never achieve their dreams.)
There are those who think they have financial freedom, and yet they have no real freedom at all. They are chained to wrong mindsets, limited belief systems, and the plans of others. If you are living each day in fear of not having enough for retirement; and if your future is tied to some vague monetary figure that some other person pulled out of the air for you, do you consider that financial freedom?
Only when you take full responsibility for your money and your life will you ever begin to experience financial freedom in the full sense of the term.
Perhaps it’s time for you to redefine what being financially free truly means for you. And then live your life to align with that definition. Only then will you begin to live a Rich Life.