Financial Freedom – The Dream

This blog post was originally written for our sister website – The Money Muppet. We set that site up in January 2014 as we embarked on our journey to financial freedom. The Money Muppet site no loner exists, so we’ve incorporated our financial journey into our travel blog.

The dream: to be financially free by age 50. How we’ll do it: by working hard, tracking our money and learning how to invest it, to make it work for us, in return for us working for it. This blog will chart our successes and failures, as we thrust our finances under a harsh light, and pick up the books and blogs to suss out all this incomprehensible financial stuff.

The story to date…

In 2011, at the age of 39, my wife and I quit our jobs in the UK and, living on savings, went off to travel for a year in an ageing but sturdy motorhome with our pooch Charlie. Two years later we finally came home, having made two tours of Europe, plus a couple of winter forays into North Africa, getting as far as the northern edge of the Sahara on each occasion. We wrote about the whole thing here, every day, hundreds of posts which remain a delight for us to read: www.ourtour.co.uk.

The journey took us down paths we never expected to travel. One, for me, was an eye opening, almost shocking experience, like being dropped into a freezing ocean. It was the sensation of freedom, of massive amounts of freedom, of being under no-one’s control, of being able to go where I wanted, when I wanted, of answering to no man (I did of course continue to answer to my wife, Julie!). Having had this laughable level of independence, running slowly out of cash and having to go back to work for a living’s an inevitable thing. Do I want to be commuting to the office for the next 26 years though, until I can officially retire on a state pension? No thanks.

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.” – Martin Buber

We met people in the warm and wonderful places in Europe who weren’t retired, but were financially independent, and who could travel or work as they saw fit. They’d accumulated enough wealth that their lifestyles were fully funded through that money working for them. If they didn’t want to, they no longer had to work. Most folks had reached this position through the traditional route: work for 40 or 50 years and retire in your mid to late 60s. Others were younger, much younger, and had found another way, another method to be completely free. It didn’t involve winning the lottery, starting up some perfect business or placing the mortgage on a 100 to 1 outsider at the Grand National. It was far simpler, far more possible, maybe within even the reach of a muppet like me.

I should point out here I don’t see myself as a complete fool…! I’ve a first class Physics degree and some 20 years back I won a scholarship to study for a PhD at a nuclear facility in the French Alps. Although I flunked out of that last one for some daft personal reason, I have acquired some degree of mathematical knowledge in my time. I’m now an IT consultant, and have successfully designed and managed a whole bunch of rather expensive projects in multi-national companies. I can happily manage a multi-million € budget, but I’m clueless when it comes to my own finances, a total muppet. Being honest, until we took this trip I had zero interest in personal finances; we had more than enough money to live on, and I’d no clue what I’d do if I wasn’t working. I’ve got more than a clue now, I can think of a million things, my bucket list floweth over.

Financial independence means this: having enough cash consistently coming in each month, without having to work, to cover all of your expenses. Once you have hit this magical position, you’re a free man, you can retire, quit, throw the towel in, wander the world, take up a voluntary job, learn to be a plumber, write books, become a photographer, do whatever the hell you please. Of course, although it seems to be magic, it’s not, it’s completely achievable through discipline, hard work, and above all, understanding money.

So, it’s already decades past my time to get started, to financially educate myself, to understand my personal finances and take my first tentative steps on the winding road to freedom. By the time we’re 50, we’ll be free. I’d love it if you want to link up with me, share ideas and experiences. Either comment below, or drop me an email – julieandjason@ourtour.co.uk.

Cheers, Jason

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