The Dream – Financial Freedom!

This blog post was originally written on 8 February 2014 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, is simply, to be free.

It’s not a dream in itself of course. Unlimited, unconstrained freedom is meaningless, if you do nothing with it. No, the dream itself isn’t to be free, it’s to do all the things one can do, when one is really free, financially free and in good enough health to do it.

One of my two much-loved brother-in-laws loaned me a copy of The 4-Hour Work Week a few years ago. I only managed the first chapter or two, before it freaked the hell out of me. The gist of it: what would you do, if you were free to do whatever you pleased? I put the book down and pondered, confused, worried.

What would I do?

I’d never even considered the question before, since it’s such a stupid question? I’ve a university education and a career. I’m earning more than my father did at my age, and without need to spend every waking moment in the dank bottom of a coal mine, with dust gradually clogging my lungs, in continual danger. I’m up at 7am, in work by 8am and back home about 6pm, a steady course plotted through Monday to Friday. I spend my evenings and weekends studying, or pretty much zoned out, drinking beer and watching TV. Every week or two I find myself on 7am flight to mainland Europe, meeting colleagues from the multi-national I work for. The meetings are often without much point, eight hours of travel for two hours of non-agenda’d rambling. I’m expecting this will be the way of it until, I hope, I get to retire early, maybe even before I’m 60. I’ve not really thought about it.

So what would I do, if this need to be commuting and working didn’t account for 50 or 60 hours of my waking life? I’d no idea. Until one day some years later we (my wife and I) simply quit.

Having watched a TV programme called Pay Off Your Mortgage in Two Years, a fire was lit under us. Although it took us longer than two years, the final payment finally, finally went in, and we were free. Well, free-er! The feeling was extra-ordinary. We were 38 and mortgage-free. We even had a second place – a small bungalow I’d owned when we met, but struggled to sell and decided without much thought to rent. Sure, we still had a hefty mortgage on that place, but the rent covered it as I’d bought it (again by accident) before the ballistic UK property rise in the 2000’s.

The monthly payments which we’d seen eaten by the building society were redirected into cash ISAs (again by my wife, as I was, and still am, a money muppet). Within a period of two years, we’d enough to take the radical step of jacking it in for a year, renting out the main house, buying an old motorhome and steering it south for Europe. The year turned out to be two. During those two years we travelled Europe and North Africa (the blog is here), and came back changed.

For two years we tracked every single penny (well, every cent, santim, lipa, stotinki, ban, kopiyok and milim that is). We carried our own water and hunted out drains to release it from a tank slung under the van when it had been used. We used a chemical loo, and carried it to emptying points hundreds and hundreds of times. We slept in car parks, along side the road, in camp sites, in hotel parking areas, you name it. We lived in our motorhome, 5.5 by 2.2 meters wide, with a small snoring furry dog, and everything we needed we carried. We met people who lived with far less, next to nothing, in the rocky deserts of Morocco. We travelled, albeit quickly and nervously, through Ukraine, eyes-wide at the endemic corruption and mistreatment the population continue to endure. We did a fair bit, saw a fair bit, learned a fair bit, earned almost nothing and changed a fair bit.

On the way back we ended a two-year old debate. We would come back to live in the UK. Why? Two things: Family and Money.

The latter reason may sound mercenary, because it is. The potential to earn money in this country is, it turns out, staggering compared with much of the world we travelled through. France and Germany are the same, but my French isn’t great and my German practically non-existent. Speaking English, coupled with our already hard-won practical skills, sets up both up well for work here. We both found and started  jobs, albeit on temporary contracts, within two months of returning home, mine started after four weeks.

We’re both 41 now, and our next dream’s alive. We want to earn enough money, placed into long term investments to provide sufficient passive income to support a frugal, but varied and vivid lifestyle of freedom. We’ve an aim to be retired by 50, hopefully sooner, although by retirement we don’t mean stopping working. We mean we want to be free to not work when we don’t want to. I imagine I will work in one form or another until I die, I enjoy the sense of achievement as much as the sight of a positive bank balance. Stopping work isn’t the dream, stopping having to work, full time, for the next 26 years is.

Only problem is, I’ve not much of a clue about which investments to choose. My financial education starts here.

Cheers, Jason

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