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What exactly does it feel like to be financially free? So many of us strive for financial freedom without actually knowing what it’s going to feel like when we get there. That was exactly my experience.
In this episode I want to share what it felt like for me achieving financial freedom, both the good and the bad (and yes there is bad). I share this in the hopes that I inspire to to seek financial freedom first, and extreme wealth second (if ever).
Resources Related To This Episode:
Struggling With Financial Freedom Episode @ 28 years old
Our “All In The Van” YouTube Channel
2 Properties To Financial Freedom
Transcription:
A lot of people invest in property with the goal of becoming financially free or with a goal of becoming extremely wealthy, but it’s actually really hard to experience what it’s like to be financially free unless you actually achieve it. And so in this episode I want to talk about what it feels like to be financially free. This episode is not to stroke my own ego or to do anything like that. The goal of this episode is to convince you that financial freedom is more important than riches and wealth. So I’m talking like a baseline level of financial freedom where you can pay for rent. You can have a roof over your head. You can live a decent life in not going to be a millionaire or it might be a millionaire, but you’re not going to be super wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but you’ve got your bases covered.
So then you can go out and explore who you really are, what you really want, and whether or not you actually want to become wealthy. Because one of the biggest things that happened for me was that once I became financially free, I discovered I don’t actually care about being extremely wealthy. I don’t care about the luxury or the cars or things like that. And so if I have striven striven, is that even a word? If I strived in order to achieve a high level of wealth and wasn’t financially free until I was super rich, then I wouldn’t have discovered that until a lot later and would have spent a lot of years of working that I didn’t have to. So the goal of this is to hopefully convince a few of you out there to aim for a lower level of financial freedom. And then when you achieve that and get to experience it, then you can decide from there whether you want to go for the Richard and you want to go for the extreme wealth or if you’re happy with your level of income and then you just get to experience life and go through all of these experiences.
So what does it feel like to be financially free? Hi, my name is Ryan Iran on property.com dot a view. I help people invest in property and achieved financial freedom and I achieved financial freedom through property investing, but through my businesses and more specifically through passive online income, I call it pseudo financial freedom because it’s not the longterm financial freedom that property delivers where you’re basically guaranteed to have financial freedom for life. This is financial freedom where a don’t need to work much and the money keeps coming in, but over the course of a number of years there are market changes that can happen that can affect that income. And so it’s not super long term, but it’s a version of financial freedom where I have a few years where I don’t really need to work, but I choose to work. So just wanted to clarify that. Um, so I have pseudo financial freedom and I achieved that at about the age of 28.
I think I have a video from about 18 months ago where I had achieved financial freedom, was really struggling with that. So I’ll leave the links to that in the description down below. But yeah. So what does it feel like to be financially free? Well, it’s not what I thought. I thought achieving financial freedom would be this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that I would achieve financial freedom. And when I didn’t click your fingers, I would be instantly happy. My life would be incredibly magical. I would have no issues at all. Everything would be great. And so I don’t know why I thought that because life obviously it doesn’t work like that. But yeah, there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In fact, I, when I achieved financial freedom, I went into a deep dark depression, which I’ll talk a little bit about, um, but basically achieve financial freedom.
And I had no goals set for after that because I thought I was going to be happy at the end of the day. So I had no goals, no direction for my life. And one of the big challenges of financial freedom is that you now have to make decisions about things you never even had to think about. And this sounds really weird, but the fact that you’re choosing to go to work now, if you choose to go to work is a really big decision if you’re choosing to go to work over spending time with your family, so over spending time with your spouse or over spending time with your kids, your now choosing to do that over spending time with them. And that’s like a really big deal because for most of us, that’s not a choice that we have to make. We go to work for our family, we go to work so we can provide for our spouse and so we can provide for our children.
And once you’re financially free and you don’t have to go to work anymore, you are now choosing to go to work instead of spending time with them. And so that’s like a really big deal. And then so there’s a couple of decisions like that that you just never really had to think about that you now actually have to consciously make that decision to work out, okay, do I need to work? How much to I need to work for my own sanity? And things like that. So that was, that was really interesting. You also now need to compliment, contemplate life. You need to think about your life. You need to think about what’s important to you. Is work important to you or is spending family time important to you and how much of each thing do you want to do? How important to you is surfing or your extra curricular activities and how you’re going to find purpose in your life?
Because previously you were focused on this goal. It’s kind of really easy when you’re aiming for it. You just focus on this goal, financial freedom, this is what I’m striving to achieve and I’m sacrificing for that. So I’m working in order to achieve that and sacrificing time with my friends and my family in order to achieve that. Um, and you’re not really thinking about your life purpose because you have this really clear goal, but once you achieve that goal and you now no longer have any goals, you need to contemplate life. Contemplate what’s important to you. Contemplate how you want to live your life. What impact do you want to have, if any, does that even matter? Who knows? And so there’s a lot of challenges to go through when you become financially free that I just didn’t expect. I did not expect to have to go through those challenges.
And that’s really what led me into the dark depression that I talked about was the fact that I had this direction. I had this goal and thing that I wanted to achieve and I had built my life around achieving that. So I was working long hours. I was striving to achieve that. Um, my wife was spending most of the time taking care of the kids because I was working for financial purposes. And then when we achieved that, it’s like, okay, you don’t have that goal anymore because you achieved it. You don’t have that direction in your life. But you’ve also built up this habit and this routine where you go to work and now it’s like, oh, well you’re choosing to go to work over spending time with your family. And it’s like that. That’s hard. That’s hard to do. And then to go from working full time to not working anymore, we moved into a van and did some traveling in a van and I was hardly working at all.
That was a really difficult transitional period for me. Um, and yeah, like I don’t want to be a wind job, but just want to make it clear that financial freedom, there’s a lot of challenges that come with it. Obviously you don’t have the financial challenges, which is absolutely awesome, but you do have these things that will, at least for me, that we had to think about. So enough of the negative, because obviously financial freedom is awesome. It’s not all negative. What are some of the positives of experiencing financial freedom and what does it feel like? Well, one of the awesome things is that you get to try a whole bunch of things that normal people don’t get to try it. So for me and my wife, we moved into a camper van with our three children and did some traveling up the east coast of Australia. We gave that a try.
We did it for two months. We thought it would be the lifestyle for us and we hated it. Okay. We did it. We didn’t like it. It was just too much work with the little ones. For us it was harder than being in a house because the places we would stay at would be on the roads and you know, you can’t even go to the toilet because your kid is right near the road and we had like an under three rolled at the time who doesn’t understand traffic and so there’s just like with so many issues with that. But we got to try that. And then when we moved up here to Noosa, I got to try spending full like six months basically playing this game called Super Smash Brothers Melee and focusing on training and becoming better at that game with the potential that I may want to be competitive at this game in the future.
May want to go to international tournaments and things like that. So I got to spend about six months while I was doing a bit of work. I’m actually practicing this game that I love to play and so I got to try that. The next thing that I’m looking at now is the potential of running an ultra marathon, so I am not a runner at all. I haven’t run in years, but I’m fascinated by this concept of the ultra marathon. Ultimately the hundred miles like, sounds awesome. I would love to do that, but probably start with about 50 k run or something like that, but that’s something that I’m thinking about something I’m going to try and may get into training and absolutely hate it and never do it, but it gets to try it and so there’s all of these things that you get to try once you’re financially free and you start to work out what you do, like what you don’t like, what’s important to you, what isn’t.
So that’s really cool. You also get to reimagine your schedule, so most people’s schedule is pretty set. They wake up in the morning, they go to work, they come home from work, they’re exhausted, they ate dinner, watch TV and do it all over again the next day. But when you’re financially free and you don’t need to work anymore, you get to reimagine your schedule. So for me and my wife before will financially free, we would go out on date nights about once a week or once a fortnight. But the problem we had on date nights and we were so tired when we went on these date nights that it just wasn’t an awesome experience. And we lived on the Gold Coast at the time and date nights in the middle of the week. Not much is actually open so it wasn’t awesome. But now we’ve discovered how much we love mornings together and so for us, we’ll drop the kids off at school, we’ll drop our youngest off at kindie and then we’ll spend the morning together.
So we’ll go out for a branch. We have our, a favorite coffee shop called Lada and baked. And so we’ll have our lot of dates, which is something about most special times and love it. Or we’ll go to the beach or we’ll go to a waterfall or whatever it may be. But yeah, we get to reimagine our schedule and we found the times that work best for us to hang out and so we’ll hang out in the morning and then I’ll work in the afternoon because I still do work and so yeah, we’re just, we’re, our schedule’s still kind of revolves around what we’re going to drop the kids off at school and pick them up so there’s still that standard for us, but we don’t need to work at that set time in the day. So we found out that day dates work really well for us and then the night I can work in the nights or we can do other stuff in the nights and go out with friends and things like that.
And so it’s really cool to get that time together. But when it suits us and then the nights and now freed up for different things, which is really cool. It’s just a very different schedule. And so when you’re financially free, you get to reimagine your schedule and that was probably one of the major positives that we’ve had in our life. Another really cool thing is that you get to work on the things that you’re passionate about, so you know how I talked about going through that dark depression where I was deciding to go to work. I went through a period where I decided to go to work, not because I needed to work. I was really passionate about work, but because I’ve worked to keep myself sane, I hadn’t built this life for myself and scheduled for myself where I needed to work and feel that sense of sense of accomplishment and so I did that just because I needed to and that made me feel sane and it took me like a period of 18 months to get over that and to be okay with not working, but that then had the side effect of releasing me to say, okay, what am I actually passionate about?
And I found things that I’m passionate about and it turns out on property is still one of those things which is really cool. But yeah, so I get to now work on things that I’m passionate about because I don’t have to work. It’s really liberating. You just get to work on the stuff that you love and so it means you get to try things. In my job or in my business, I have tried a whole bunch of different businesses over the last 18 months, different youtube channels and tried a few different things and so you get to try a bunch of things because there’s that. Not a huge risk of downside that if this doesn’t work, I can’t feed my family, but then when you find something you’re passionate about, you can really go at it and you don’t have to stress about the money a lot.
Obviously you want it to be successful venture. If you’re going to work, you want to make some money that way, but the pressure’s off and so you really do get to work about work on things that you’re passionate about. You can also set new goals as well. Once you achieve financial freedom, that’s not the end of the road. Once you achieve financial freedom, you can now go and you can set new goals, so that might be new financial goals. You might want a better life for yourself. You might achieve financial freedom and think that, okay, this isn’t enough. I want a better house. I want a better car. I want a better surf board. I want to spend more money on coffee and I want to make coffee at home. I want to buy it out three times a day every day and be able to afford that.
Like he might decide that like whatever it is, everyone has something different that they love and so once you achieve financial freedom, that’s not the end. And so that’s why I said at the start that I would love for this video to inspire people that being financially free. Once you achieve it, it’s a whole journey in and of itself and so that goal of financial freedom, that doesn’t actually make you happy because once you achieve financial freedom, you have to go through a whole process of discovering yourself and discovering what you want to do and rather than having this goal of extreme wealth and financial freedom and then it taking extra time in order to achieve it. You’re missing out on that discovery and missing out on learning about who you actually could be and so I want you to achieve that earlier and one way to achieve that earlier is to set a lower income goal and so I think achieving financial freedom where you just kind of covering your bases.
You don’t want to be poor because then you’re going to be stressing about money, budgeting and fighting with your spouse about money. Not Poor, but I’m not talking millions of dollars a year either and so I would love for some of you to be inspired by this inspired by my journey and what it feels like for me to be financially free. Now that I’ve gone through that wholesale discovery, gone through the depression, come out the other end and working on things that I’m passionate about. Loving my life, loving my wife, loving the friendships and the relationships that I have and that I get to reimagine my schedule and spend time with people when I want to spend time with people because I don’t have to be at work. Like I absolutely love all of that stuff and so I hope that you’re inspired by this inspired by what it feels like for me to be financially free and that you aim for that as well.
So rather than aiming for a Lamborghini rather than aiming for a mansion, rather than aiming to try and be this really wealthy person that people envy. Instead just aim for financial freedom so that you can then discover yourself and then discover what you want and remember, let’s say you achieve like baseline financial freedom life I did. Or even pseudo financial freedom. The journey doesn’t stop there. It’s like you achieve it and now that I’ve got this baseline level of financial freedom, that’s it. I’m never going to be rich. So you can get to this point, achieve financial freedom experience that hopefully that takes you on a journey where you can discover more about who you are and then once you get to the point where you’ve kind of gone through that and discovered it, then you know what you want for the future. And so then you can leap forward into that.
So obviously now I’m working on things that I’m passionate about. I have goals to become wealthier, not heaps wealthier, but I would like to be a bit more wealthy and so I’m financially free, but I’m working because I want to increase my financial freedom, it increased my wealth and I also want to build my longterm financial freedom as well. So I’ve got pseudo financial freedom. I want to build that longterm financial freedom that I don’t have to stress about and don’t have to worry about. Big. Shout out to Wolfie. This is my daughter’s favorite puppy dog who was featured in today’s episode.
Until next time, stay positive. I hope.
Interesting. I hope that you’ve enjoyed it. If you haven’t, please go ahead and check out my episode with Ben Everingham on two properties to financial freedom. So how you can achieve financial freedom through investing in just two properties. That’s right, just to go to on property.com dot EU for session five. Oh, eight. In order to watch that episode. Or you can go ahead and check it out here or in the links below. So go ahead and check out that video. I absolutely love that strategy. I think you’ll love it too. Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. We’ve got new episodes almost daily, and that’s it for me. Until next time, stay positive.