I was once talking to a very very successful person I mean this person had all the money in the world did whatever he wanted with his time like called all the shots I asked him how he got so successful what he responded I will never forget it really stuck with me he said that from a very young age when he was working his first job just doing one of those typical teenager jobs making an hourly wage he had the realization that he was getting paid for his time because it was $16 an hour by trading
1 hour of his life he would get paid money just the concept that there could be a price on his life seemed like ridiculous and just so wrong to him so ever since that young age he has been living his life in that Paradigm of my time is my life and my life is priceless and there really isn't any price that is worth my life on a deep level I knew this was true but at the time I was working at a really great prestigious job making $100,000 it was on Wall Street it was everything
that my parents wanted for me everything that society would give me brownie points for but I was waking up at 6:00 a.m. sometimes 5:00 a.m. every day to get to work by 6:30 or 7: working 12-hour days leaving the office when it was dark really just giving my entire life to this job although it paid very well there was just something that didn't sit well with me the fact that every Monday I would come in all brighte eyed and excited and most of the people around me who had been there for a lot longer all
had this attitude of like H I hate Mondays and Friday comes around and it was like yay thank got it Friday and something about that just never sat right with me and then this company you know I'm not going to name any names but had a really terrible reputation for the way it treated its employees out of nowhere every couple of months there would be a round of layoffs and employees who had been loyal to the company for decades would just get laid off in a second so there was always this kind of Aura of
fear and stress and a lack of safety in the air and it was very clear to me that loyalty was not something that was valued at all a couple years passed by and every year we have an annual performance review one year my boss sat me down and told me that he could give me a 5% raise maybe it sounded like a lot to him and maybe somebody else would have been very happy with it but to me just because I was putting so much into my job like I really take pride in my work
and I always give it my all so something about that number really just didn't sit well with me and I could extrapolate this many many years ahead of always having to try and fight for my value that's when I knew I had to make a change I think up to that point i' been quite comfortable just depending on my paycheck yes I needed this job but from that moment on I got very gung-ho about starting to create something of my own and that's when the words of that successful person came back to me there is
no price that can be put on your time which is your life but just the basic concept of having a job is putting a price on your life and it's up to you to decide if you want to break out of that up till then I'd been kind of happy to spend whatever I made and didn't even know what was really going on with my spending but that's when I started getting really really conscious mind you I was also in a ton of debt at that time so I really just got determined to just get
my money together because I could not see myself being trapped by the need for a paycheck and just trapped all around because of financial needs for the rest of my life so long story short I created a little Financial cushion mainly from my annual bonus that I got paid I saved all of that up put in my 2 weeks notice cut my expenses down to the bone and entered into a pre-planned period of fun employment now I intentionally did not seek a new job I intentionally wanted to carve out this time to just just wake
up and not have to run to a job I just wanted to imagine what life would be like without a job even though it was living off of savings and not something I could sustain forever I wanted to just see what it would feel like to have freedom and control over my time and let me tell you that taste of Freedom was just absolutely Priceless like in this time I got to actually explore what I was even interested in I got to take classes dance classes explore some Hobbies even Explore some new career options and
in the back of my mind I knew that I could always go back to some sort of job like I was doing before so I knew there was no downside to this period of fun employment what was also even more valuable about that time was I actually had time to read and study it's so ironic that I have met so many people who have highlevel high-paying jobs like managing directors and they'll tell me that they don't have time to learn about investing yet they're making so much money and so they're just like in this constant
hamster wheel of working this high-paying job but never having the time to actually put things into place that would one day free themselves from that job because of this fun employment period I actually had the time so literally every day if I wasn't taking some class or hobby that interested me I would be reading and studying this is the time when I read the most finance and investing and money mindset books that I've ever gotten through we're talking like hundreds of books and the whole time I was searching for answers how do you create a
life in which you don't need the money from your job how do you actually Achieve Financial Freedom what can that actually look like and then I came across this life-changing mind-blowing concept which is the concept of the crossover point which I initially heard from Vicky Robin in her book your money or your life basically it's the point at which your living expenses can be completely covered by the income coming in passively from your Investments when I saw this chart something just clicked for me I always wondered how rich people don't need to work a job
and I never put the pieces together but this really made it concrete rich people don't have to work because they have Investments which then generate money it's almost like they built something that writes them a paycheck every week but they don't have to show up and do anything instead of putting everything they have towards a job they have actually focused on building a base of assets Investments that will then throw off income that pays their living expenses now going back to this crossover point chart how do you actually make passive investment income so it works
in two ways one is you can invest your money into income generating Investments and then live off of the income one example is dividends did you know that stocks are pieces of ownership in actual profitable cash flowing companies so if you buy the stock you're an owner in that company which means you get a share of the profits dividends another example of income generating Investments is for example bonds bonds will pay interest in exchange for you lending money there's a whole host of income generating Investments I actually talk more about that in this video here
passive income investment so check that out the idea is you can live purely off of the income for example let's say you find a dividend paying stock that pays 5% yield per year and I'm using big numbers here to help you dream bigger but let's say you have a million dollar invested in this then you're going to be getting $50,000 a year in passive dividends you can live off of that without ever touching the initial $1 million principle that's the first way to live off your Investments the second way is a combination of living off
of the income thrown off by the Investments and also selling off off of the Investments little by little the idea being that at the end of your retirement you actually end up with close to zero you like spend down the principal because think about it you don't need to keep the principal intact as long as you can sell off a little bit without actually ever running out of money while you're still alive it's okay to spend on the principal as well so a lot of people go by something called the 4% rule which is the
idea that giving all the market ups and downs as well as dividends as long as you withdraw only 4% from your overall nest egg every year you're not going to run out of money this 4% number has been backed by a ton of studies I think it's a good rule of thumb to start with so I love this idea of the crossover point because it gives you a clear idea of what it actually takes to live a life where you're not completely dependent and trapped by the need for a paycheck like if you've ever wondered
how people who don't have jobs do it this is it now if you're someone who wants to get on this journey to Financial Freedom and you want to start taking the steps to create a future in which you aren't 100% dependent on a paycheck then I definitely want you to download my Financial Freedom starter kit I created this guide where I break down the first three steps you need to take to start your journey to Financial Freedom because all it takes is for you to decide that you want it and then to start taking action
step by step and I know how intimidating and daunting it can be if you have no idea how to get started if everyone around you is also a 9-to-5 employee and doesn't have investments in assets and has no notion of Financial Freedom that's definitely how it was for me this is literally the exact Financial Freedom advice and step-by-step guide that I wish I'd had when I was starting out on this journey then it wouldn't have taken me so long to figure everything out anyway you're probably wondering what happened after that whole period of fun employment
so long story short after those 6 months I actually ended up getting a different job in a different field that paid less but had a lot more learning opportunity where I was learning entrepreneurial and investing skills and just things that I knew would actually create more Financial Freedom for me in the long run I started freelancing as a bookkeeper on upwork then I started my yoube YouTube channel it was a real zigzag Journey from here like I made a lot of mistakes along the way and I'm not going to lie there were times when I
felt really behind when compared to all my other colleagues that I'd left behind on Wall Street like people that I went to school with who were getting promotions making way more money and at the time I still hadn't really found my footing yet so I was making way less than all of them and then I was also trying to figure out my finances learn investing and options trading and all kinds of new things and there were so many times when I would be like who am I to try to be in these rooms but here's
the thing Financial Freedom is something that not everybody has in fact the vast majority of people don't have it which is why you need to do more than the average person to get there you need to believe in yourself more than the average person like you are bigger than the need for a paycheck you are bigger than your dependency on money to pay the bills like you are meant for more than to just work to pay the bills and then die as de pressing as that sounds and this deep knowing is really what kept me
going so you probably want to know how the story ends but about 8 years after since that day that I walked away from my $100,000 salary Wall Street job my net worth officially crossed the million doll Mark and I was generating about $5,000 in passive investment income and at the time my living expenses were right around $55,000 a month and so I had officially reached that crossover point now things have changed since then I've moved to an expensive city and my expenses are a little bit higher now and that's where Financial Freedom kind of becomes
a moving Target but the point is you can take the actions today to create a radically different Financial reality for yourself just never underestimate yourself you're bigger than your job you're bigger than your need for that job now I'm not saying everyone should quit their job like I did by any means for some people being really good at their job making good money in it and then taking that money and investing it and creating an asset base that will pay you income that is the best route for others it'll be the route that I took
which is going the entrepreneurial route bottom line is start think thinking about how you can create something separate from your paycheck something that will sustain you an asset base an Investment Portfolio that's going to turn into something that can actually pay you a paycheck whether you go to a job or not that is the ultimate goal otherwise you'll find yourself continuing to run this hamster wheel and being on the proverbial golden handcuffs of never really feeling free so if you're someone who wants to take the first few baby steps towards Financial Freedom then make sure
you download my Financial Freedom start kit it's really really good and also make sure to check out the other videos on my channel where I talk loads and loads about Financial Freedom thank you so much for watching I hope you got something out of this video and I'll see you in the next one bye [Music]
