Freedom to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, and with whom you want to do it. That means, if you love what you are doing – you love your craft, trade, or profession – and you still want to do it on some basis, then it’s your prerogative. That’s freedom.

But, if you don’t want to do it, and you feel tied to a chair, then that is not freedom.

There is a sacrifice period that we all go through in life, no question about it. We have to trade time for dollars, which is called generating our active income. That provides for our lifestyle, and producing that active income is put on our shoulders. We went to school, we trained, and we studied hard to go into a profession where we could make money and have a reasonably secure lifestyle for our families. 

But at what ongoing cost, and for how many years? 

The sacrifice period I am talking about should not last longer than five years at most. Too many people get into a cycle where they believe what society says about working tirelessly all of your life, always shooting for a retirement goal someday… someday out there in the future.

But someday rarely ever comes. The problem of why freedom is so elusive to reach early in life is because there is no definition of what that looks like – there is no goal.

Reaching freedom is when your passive income (income that comes from passive investments like capital assets) becomes equal to or greater than your active income needs. That means your lifestyle burn rate – what it takes to fund your lifestyle. If you don’t know what that number is, then you are shooting for a goal out there somewhere that is mystical, and you’ll never know when or if you will hit it.

That is why so many hard-working business owners have to keep working, and have a lot of fear. They have fear because they have never learned how to orchestrate sustainable and predictable cash flow.

It’s all a gamble. They throw their money in the market and hope for the best. They hope the market continues to rise… but, we know the market does not always continue to rise. In cycles, it comes crashing down again.

Not learning how to orchestrate cash flow is a big problem in any market. Especially when you go into your retirement years, when you no longer have active income to make up for losses, deficits, inflation, or for other issues that come up.

In Freedom Founders, our members learn how to determine what that end goal looks like, what freedom looks like, and then determine where they are today. They figure out the gap, which is the difference between where they are now and where they want to go. The gap matters. 

Then they learn how to reverse engineer that gap, so that they can make plans and reach that goal in 5 years or less. Even if you are in debt, I bet you can still reach your goal within 10 years. But you need to have a good goal, you need to know where you are starting from, and you need to know how to multiply and leverage all of your current assets and skill sets, while mitigating your liabilities. That is the key to having freedom.