How to Find Financial Freedom

Financial freedom starts with understanding where you currently work. Your current financial picture is. Yeah, that was the statement on this paper. I'm Steve Valentine. I'm a real estate strategist. I've done a lot of things in my life. I'm not a financial expert, but I am an expert in screwing things up, learning from them, and then applying them. So let's just talk about a few things that you can apply in your finances as a baseline. And they're things that I started with after I screwed things up first. Asking questions. Not just asking questions, but are you asking questions to the right people? You see, I grew up in a household where there wasn't a lot of financial wisdom. It really came from church and other people around. And I also watched where there wasn't a lot of wisdom being asked for by the right people. You don't ask broke people for financial advice. And that's a lot of what I saw. So one of the pieces of advice that I would give you is ask questions based on where you want to be and that person's experience in it. So, same thing, don't ask somebody that doesn't own a house if it's a good idea to buy a house. You ask somebody that's bought a house or bought multiple homes and what their pain points were, what they were excited about, what the benefits were in order to get that advice. And you might want to ask multiple people for their opinion. Now, you're not seeking approval. You're not looking for somebody to tell you yes or no. You're collecting data so that you can make an educated, informed decision. You see, when we first start buying a house, we get excited about the thought of owning a home. And that's called uninformed excitement. Now we have to get informed excited, which means going through the process and asking people questions. Same thing goes for financial advice. Too many people in their younger years advised to go talk to a financial advisor about their financial plan, yet they don't have any finances to plan for. And so they go in a meeting with a financial advisor and they do a risk assessment of, you know, are you a low to moderate risk? Well, in your 20s, you don't know. So let's just do some practical, tactical things. So let's start with a dripping faucet, fills a bucket. Very simple to apply. It's something that I guess I tweaked from the Dave Ramsey days that I learned. And by the way, Dave Ramsey, if you're looking for solid baseline financial advice, start with Dave Ramsey and his financial Peace University. It will give you a great baseline. It gives you great steps to accomplish debt reduction. Buying a house. Now, there are things that I don't always agree with Dave Ramsey on. One of them is putting 20% down on a house when you're trying to buy your first home. And we can talk about that later. But I do agree with his plan to get from point A to point B with a plan to financially eliminate your debt. And it really is a dripping faucet that fills a bucket. Because what Dave advises is you take the smallest debt, you take as much money as you can, you whack away at it, right? So your drip, you turn that faucet on, whatever extra money you have is whacking away. Well, that dripping faucet is filling up because you're whacking away at the debt. One thing I would add to that, which we learned the hard way early on in life, is when Wendy and I lost everything in 2008, we were not prepared and we didn't have anything in savings. And what happens when you don't have things in savings is you are obligated to keep the job you have and you don't have the freedom to make the choice of, I don't want to stay at this job anymore. A toxic, I have some savings, I can move, I'm okay. If you don't have any savings, you don't have a reserve, you are constantly obligated, and obligation creates resentment. So when you feel obligated because you have no way out, or you don't have another job lined up, or, or you don't have safety, you're obligated to stay put in that job because you don't know what's next. We can avoid that obligation if we start with something small, say your paycheck. We're going to divide it up in percentages, but we're only going to start with one right now. I would encourage you to just take 5% of your paycheck and your direct deposit and deposit it into a bank that you don't normally use. So go find a bank, you know, maybe a credit union, something that's a little smaller, whatever you want to do, and just start having a direct deposit of 5% put in that and don't look at it. The reason being is that, that you're going to go through, you're going to turn that drip on, that faucet on and it's going to start to drip in that bucket, and over time, it's going to start filling up and the purpose of this is that it's delayed gratification, and you're creating something that is going to rock your world over time, which is the financial habit of taking a percentage of your income and putting it aside for something that you really want, whether it's vacation, whether it's savings, whether it's security, whether it's an investment, whether it's a party, whatever that is, you can designate for it. But right now, we just want to create the small financial habit and the mental capacity of a dripping faucet fills a bucket. Now, how did we apply that, and what was the purpose of it? Well, when we had so much debt that we were trying to get out of that 5% after a year, equated to $27,000 in savings, well, we needed 15 in reserves for three months of security, which meant we could pay our bills. We took a portion of that and we started settling debts. So if any of you are behind on things such as debt, credit cards, you have creditors, you now have a portion that you can start settling debt with by having that bucket. So here's the purpose in where we start. First, we want to ask questions of the right people to get that advice. Second, we want to start setting up that dripping faucet that fills a bucket. And here's why. It's very similar to health, right? And health means we got to go on a diet. But what happens when we go on a diet? We feel we're depriving ourselves. So this isn't a diet. We're creating muscle memory, and we're creating things that are going to make a difference in our financial future. Because if you can create this small habit, you start to realize the bigger habits, and it creates a win that gets you excited about what's happening in your financial future. The third and most important piece of this is where you're going now. Most of you will look at or talk to, and we start talking about retirement. And if that might be 30, 40, 50 years down the road and people like, we'll focus on retirement, I want to change the word. Can we word play for a second? Retirement is freedom. That's all it is. Most of us still think of retirement. 65 years old, you stop working, and then you go try to live the next 30 years of your life based on the money that you saved in the first 50. That doesn't sound like freedom. Freedom is when you have the ultimate choice based on the wealth that you've built, the money you've earned, to choose to work with who you choose to and what you choose to do. That is truly what retirement is. It's freedom to make those choices. Now, how do we get there? Well, we can't focus or I would invite you to focus on who you want to become financially over the next three to five years. So no matter where you're at, that's the focus the next three to five years. If you're 20 years old, you have $30,000 in debt and over the next three years you want to be debt free, you want to buy a house and you want to have X amount of money in savings. Now you want to plan that out because you know what your current income is, you know what your current debt is and you can start to plan, well, I either need to increase my income with side jobs or whatever the case may be, or I need to do a different career. Or you need to start decreasing debt. Well, decreasing debt is also focusing on decreasing the things that you spend frivolously on. One of those things is subscriptions in your phone, right? How many credit card subscriptions do you have that are just wasteful, that you don't use? That's where we want to focus on that piece of not so much your expenses, but the things that you're not using. That's just wasteful money that you can cut out in order to get to your goal. So if you're focusing on small chunks, you are going to be a different person in three years. You are not going to be overwhelmed with a thought process of what you're doing in 50. Because by the way, when you're 20, you're just trying to make it and you're 30, you got a little bit more resources to work for. But if you have these financial habits, you are going to be so much further ahead when you get into your 30s. I wish I had had the same advice in my twenties. I Because now you can make a run at it in your 30s and 40s and start looking at the freedom that you're trying to build for your future. And by the way, based on these financial habits, you could build freedom now, you can build it down the road. It all depends on what you want to accomplish in that next three years based on that financial plan. So let's break this down real quick. One, seek advice from people that have done it so that you can get both opinions of good and bad so that you're informed, excited about what you're doing or you have the information not to do it or to wait to do it. The second a dripping faucet fills a bucket, which means your small financial habits create full buckets down the road which eventually that plan, if you break it down in three to five year increments of who you want to be in your financial state the next three to five years gives you the path to ultimate freedom which is considered retirement, which is the choice to work with who you want to and how you want to do it with what you want to do. Those are the three things that I would absolutely apply no matter where you are in life. Those are the things that I've learned through my experiences, my failures. I wanted to share those with you as we kind of kick off this month with some financial wisdom, some guidance. I'm Steve Valentine. I am a real estate strategist in Phoenix, Arizona and this is my goal is to share these things with you practical tactical wisdom through my experiences so that you can share these with your friends and family. So subscribe, like, comment and let's keep going.