You Can Achieve Financial Independence

Have you dreamed about living a life where you are financially independent, where you control your financial destiny and no one has claim to your financial resources? Achieving a life where you are the master of your financial future and you are able to live off the proceeds of your investments, without the necessity to work another day in your life, is a great place to aspire to reach. It is a place where you no longer need to work every day because you have to; everything you choose to do, you do because you want to. There is a whole new spectrum of opportunities, which open up to you.
Achieving financial independence is simply a case of consistently ensuring that your income exceeds your expenditure, over a long enough period, until you accumulate sufficient assets, which will generate sufficient income on their own, to cover all your expected future expenditure. It really is simple, if you are disciplined and you avoid raising your lifestyle, every time you generate more income. The reason so few people ever achieve financial independence, is that they are driven by instant gratification and so as they earn more, they simply raise their lifestyle and waste any opportunity to invest and grow their assets.
I want to offer you a few simple pieces of advice to allow you to start moving down the path towards financial independence. The advice I am going to offer is not earth shattering or something you are going to see for the first time in your life. All of the advice is common sense and something you have always known about, but is most certainly not something you have made common practice.
Action Idea: Eliminate all the debt you have, excluding debt that you have leveraged to purchase investment properties, as a matter of urgency. If you are carrying huge credit card debt, you need to make eliminating this a top priority. Explore all the expenditure you have and slash every one as ruthlessly as possible. You must put yourself on a spending freeze, until your credit card debt is eliminated. You can never create financial independence if you are constantly trying to catch up on debt. You need to first bring yourself back to zero and then start building from there.
Once you have brought yourself into a position where you are no longer working to finance a lifestyle that is beyond your current level of affordability. The next and obvious step is to create a plan for moving towards financial independence. No plan can ever be effective unless you are clear on what you are attempting to achieve. First decide what type of lifestyle you want to live. This will tell you how much money will you need to earn from your investments to thrive each year?
Example:
If you feel that you would like to live off an annual income of $ 100 000, then you would need to accumulate about $ 2 500 000 in income earning assets, to cover inflation and to finance your chosen lifestyle for the rest of your life. I have experimented with a number of complicated formulas for performing this calculation, but after much trial and error, I have realised that a safe and realistic number is found by merely multiplying your annual income needs by a factor of 25.
Once you have clarity about exactly how much money you need, the next step is to go about the business of accumulating sufficient, income earning assets to achieve your goal. The most obvious place to start is with your income, you need to increase your income, WITHOUT increasing your lifestyle in equal proportion. The simple lesso
I want you to take; is work to increase your income, but do not increase your expenditure, until you have achieved financial independence.
As soon as you have eliminated all debt, start to invest a minimum of 10 % of your annual income towards creating financial independence. Fortune magazine stated in an article that millionaires save on average 20 % of their income every year.
Action Idea: Set up an automated system where the proportion of funds you have chosen to invest is automatically diverted into your investments each month. This money must not even enter your normal bank account.
Make the decision today to be wealthy, start to act responsibly and completely believe that you can create the level of wealth you desire. Now all that is required is for you to take action daily to turn your dreams into reality. Your mind set, attitude and thoughts determine how your future will turn out; choose all three very wisely from this moment on.
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