Exploring Financial Freedom

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In this random update I share how I recently achieved my long term goal of financial freedom and the difficulties that come with that.

Ryan:    Hey, guys. Ryan here from onproperty.com.au helping you find positive cash flow property.

This is one of the first solo episodes that I’ve done in quite a while, where I’m not actually going to be teaching you a specific property technique or principal or anything like that. This is going to be more free-flowing, talking about financial freedom, goals, and things like that, because this year has been very interesting for me. This year I achieved a certain level of financial freedom. I actually call it pseudo-financial freedom, because I’m financially free now, but if I completely stopped, then in the short to mid future, then I wouldn’t be financially free.

I didn’t actually achieve my financial freedom through property investing, but I achieved it through businesses and more specifically the web sites that I have. I run a big network of web sites, each which generates different levels of income, some more than others, and I’m basically at the point now where I can generate enough income without actually working. So I’ve achieved a level of financial freedom; however, these web sites are making money now.

In a couple of years, if I don’t touch them, if I don’t update them, then they probably won’t be making as much money.

So I call it pseudo-financial freedom because I have achieved it, but also there’s some work required in order to maintain it or to increase it or keep it going in the future, but I’m at a point now where I can choose what I want to work on. I can choose whether I want to work at all or not. I could spend the entire day at the beach. I could spend the entire week at the beach, and it wouldn’t really matter. So I’m in this new phase of my life.

I’m in a very interesting position now where I get to experience things that most people don’t get to experience because they never actually achieve financial freedom or they don’t experience them until they’re 65 and I’m 28 at the moment.

I always thought that when you would achieve financial freedom that it would be super happy days, that you would just click your fingers, quit your job, and then live happily ever after because you could do whatever you want, but what I’m finding is that it’s actually very different to that, at least for me. I’m a very driven person. I like to be creative. I like to teach people and share things.

I really like to challenge myself, and achieving financial freedom and not working doesn’t really accomplish those things for me. So, I’m in an interesting position where I’ve achieved the goal I set out to achieve, or at least a version of it, but I’m not in a position where I’m completely in sync with that or completely stoked to that.

You can hear kids in the background. It is happy hour here, bath time, and my son has just had his immunizations. He’s a little bit cranky.

Anyway, I am going on this journey of exploring what this is going to be like to share with you guys. I’m not at the point now where I can really talk about it in like a super succinct way and get across to you the feelings that I have or solutions that I have. I do believe that this is going to have an impact on the content that I create for onproperty as well as the way I approach teaching people, the way I approach goal-setting and things like that, because I got to the point that I achieved a goal that I have been trying to achieve for years and realized that, well, maybe it was the wrong goal.

Like financial freedom has been the goal for so long, but you achieve financial freedom and that’s not the end of it. Like you don’t just give up on life once you achieve it.

I know there’s so many people out there working really hard in jobs they don’t like, to invest in property to achieve financial freedom down the track. My worry is that you’ll get down the track, achieve your financial freedom, and not know what to do with yourselves and not be happy. So I really want to explore this idea in more detail about how we can create a happy life while we’re investing, how we can do it before we’ve achieved financial freedom.

So I’m not really sure how that’s going to go. It’s been so long since I created content. I wish I had something that was, you know, more to the point and more practical for you guys to use, but I just felt like I need to start saying something because if I don’t, I’ll never get started. It’s just something so new for me.

So at the moment, what we’re doing, me and my wife, we are … Actually, we’ve purchased a camper van and we’re doing that up in order to convert it so we can take ourselves and our three children traveling around Australia, more specifically traveling around Queensland during winter next year. So as I record this, it’s December 2016. We plan to head off in early March 2017, so we have about two and half months until we leave.

We’ve had the van for about three months so far and we should get the build finished on time. A lot is moving forward and happening at the moment. We’ll probably get most of it done by the end of December, but there’ll be lots of little things to do and things to purchase.

We’ve decided that we’ve achieved the goals that we set financially, so we achieved the financial freedom that we set out to achieve, and neither of us were really happy with our lives. So, you know, life was good enough. We’re enjoying it, but we weren’t completely stoked on our situation.

We have an awesome house that we rent and that we live in. We’re actually going to let that go and put our stuff in storage. Not because we don’t love the house, but because it’s not making us completely happy, so we’re now going on this journey of traveling as well as trying to work out what is going to make us happy in the long-term future.

I’m extremely confident in our long-term financial situation. The skills that I have developed as an online entrepreneur, the things that I can do, and the marketing skills that I have could be applied broadly across my own businesses or could easily be applied at a high value to someone else’s business. I’m not really worried about my financial future given that, you know, my web sites are doing pretty well or I could get a job in the future. Money’s not a huge stress for us right now, but we’re not completely happy. So we’re going to explore what we can do. That’s going to start with traveling in the van.

We’re then looking at doing some travel oversees in 2018, going to the U.S., maybe even over to London and things like that, but that’s not really fleshed out. You know, we’re spur of the moment people in terms of our plan. We bought the camper van. We’re doing it up. We’re going traveling, but we have no set places that we want to go. We kind of want to head for Cairns, go to Port Douglas, go to the Daintree rain forest out there, but we don’t have like particular things that we want to see or places we want to stop. We just want to go on an adventure and go exploring.

So I will try and create more content now than I have over the last year, because I haven’t needed to make much, truthfully, for onproperty. I’ve made a lot of stuff with Ben, which has been really great, but I would like to bring onproperty back to its roots, which was just me really sharing things that I knew, things that I could teach you guys. I would like to do that in 2017 and see how it goes.

So I’m on this new journey. I hope that you’re excited about not just achieving financial freedom for yourself, but achieving happiness or fulfillment or whatever it is that you’re seeking, and I hope that as I go on this new journey, as I continue to learn things, that I can share it with you guys and help you as well.

So that’s it for this kind of random update. Until next time, stay positive.