Chris and Tina<\/a> at San Sebastian in northern Spain, and this simple statement was a bombshell to me. Ideas are dangerously powerful things. Once an idea has reached your ears, it’s very difficult to forget it, especially if it promises to give you something you very much crave.<\/p>\nIn my case I craved freedom, and was on the look out for an idea which might help me achieve it. Freedom to experience life outside the office. Freedom from being forced to live with negativity. Freedom to think.\u00a0Freedom to travel. Sheer, unadulterated, freedom. This idea promised all of it.\u00a0This single sentence\u00a0embedded a\u00a0counter-intuitive idea in me: that it’s possible to not work, and still get richer.<\/p>\n
You can be unemployed, living a dream life of freedom, and get richer while doing it.<\/em><\/p>\nI’m writing this post not to brag, as I suspect the universe would crap on me from a great height if I did, but out of a simple desire to pass this idea on, like it was passed to me.<\/p>\n
Ju’s just completed our monthly budgets, and this month we got richer, having spent the whole month\u00a0travelling and doing no work (I don’t count writing this blog as work, it’s not work to me, it’s interesting, voluntary and fun). Last month we also got richer. On the occasional month when we have a big expense, we get poorer, but after a month or two we start getting richer again. It seems surreal, but the cold-hearted spreadsheet does not lie.<\/p>\n
We have more money coming in than we spend, but we do no work.\u00a0How on Earth is this possible?<\/em><\/p>\nI didn’t know it, but the underlying foundation for the idea is a simple one, and a very old one: investing. When we first set off travelling in 2011, we sustained ourselves on savings, which gradually depleted, with the predictable result that they ran out and so did the freedom I’d come to love. We now live on money generated by assets we own, and while they continue to perform to a reasonable standard, we’ll continue to get richer. Of course, we also adopt a minimalist view to spending, and over the years have aggressively inspected our outgoings. With the angry swing of a sharpened scythe, we’ve removed anything which simply wasn’t giving us what we wanted in life, **poof**, unnecessary expenditure, gone.<\/p>\n
To be honest, I’m being pretty conservative in the way I look at our accounts. I’m taking a fairly bleak view of things. If, for example, our trio of houses in the UK rises in value by 2% in a year we’d see our net worth increase by about an additional \u00a38,000 that\u00a0year. Of course, the housing market could equally fall, but as we don’t intend to sell in the short term, both of these scenarios are irrelevant to us. The main thing is we still have more money turning up each month, on average, than we spend.<\/p>\n
This means we can live this way for as long as we live, if we choose to.<\/em><\/p>\nOK, that’s the idea, and if you’ve not already been exposed to it, and it serves to excite you, I’ve achieved something today. If you want to read up more, these are a few of the best books I devoured and found very helpful in building my own financial education and confidence this whole madcap life of ours could work. If I had to pick a single one, I’d go with Rich Dad Poor Dad, it really altered the way I perceived money.<\/p>\n