Five Cents Ten Cents

Posted: 21 Jan 2009 04:14 AM CST

Everyone loves fairy-tales. Princesses being rescued by dashing princes on white horses. Kisses from the one true love bringing to live those that have been bewitched by evil curses. Slaying the dragon and finding the pot of gold at the end of the tunnel.

Isn’t that what financial freedom is to many of us?

To be able to live the idyllic lifestyle, free of work and worries? Free of bosses and bullies at work? Free of having to deal with the cold harsh reality that is LIFE INCORPORATED?!!

Creating your own real-life financial freedom fairy-tale

Unlike fairy-tales told by the Brothers Grimm or those Harry Potter novels that made a millionnaire out of J.K. Rowling, your personal fairy-tale may not always be of sugar and spice with everything nice. The current financial crisis resembles more a horror story than fairy tale as economic slowdown and threats to jobs, careers and investment values threaten to make it scarier than he-who-shall-not-be-named villain we read in popular magical stories.

So how can we create our own real-life financial freedom fairy-tale? By first developing the plot. The plot or storyline is the central part of any fairy-tale. It moves the narrative forward and tells us what happened, and then, and then… A plot without characters would be as interesting as watching paint dry on the wall (i.e. NOT VERY INTERESTING) Hence, another element in making our own financial freedom fairy-tale is the character. It is about YOU my dear reader. Yes, look into the mirror. Prince Charming/Financial Freedom Candidate/Princess Beautiful is staring at you in the face. There is no-one else.

You are the hero/heroine of your fairy-tale. You move the plot along. I’ve talked about how you can create goals towards financial freedom in an earlier post. Now I’ll focus on the emotions and intensity that you need to inject into your goal so that your financial freedom plot is so captivating that you’ll want to live that life!

Visualise your financially free lifestyle

In order for you to be financially free, you need to work out a goal and a plan to achieve it. Many times, we are just not motivated enough by our goals and plan to live within our means. “Aiyah, that one little gadget won’t blow my budget too much”. “Splurging on this Coach bag is something I DESERVE”. Yes, by all means enjoy the present a little while working towards financial freedom. But too much enjoyment of today will affect your ability to enjoy tomorrow nearer to your date of financial freedom.

How do we maintain that discipline each day today towards living within our means to enable us to save and invest for a better future? By making our dreams of financial freedom become more clear in our minds.

Napolean Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” teaches us to see “thoughts as things”. Our motivations towards financial freedom will be energised through visualing our ideal financially free lifestyle. For me, I’ve tasted a bit of how it is to wake up and do what you WANT to do for the day versus what you NEED to do when I took a mini-sabbatical that was like a mini-retirement discussed by Tim Ferris of the Four Hour Workweek.

Having tasted what it felt like, I can visualise it so clear because I was actually living certain aspects of it in the full rich colours and flavours of my senses.

Visualise what your ideal day would be! Do it now.

How does it look to you? Picture it in your mind’s eye.

How does it smell to you? Touch the fabrics of the places you go and the things you want to do. How do you feel as you are living your ideal life?

Create your own fairy-tale financially free day and go through it in your mind, over and over again. With colour, intensity, smells, taste, touch, sight, sounds. All making you love that ideal day! Imagine that you are the hero/heroine. You do what you LOVE and not what you NEED to do as a wage slave or earned income earner. That is when you have attained your financially free lifestyle.

Write it down. Visit it now and then. Sketch it out. Breathe and live it in your mind and with the consistent application of the principles of living within your means, saving and investing, growing your means

Your life is your story to be written by YOU

Your life is in your hands. To take a quote from Randy Pausch, you cannot determine the deck of cards that you are dealt with but you can decide how to play your hand. So it is for financial freedom. Each of us are born into circumstances that are favourable or unfavourable towards financial freedom. We can whine and groan about it or we can get creative and write our own fairy-tale financially free life.

My personal life has undergone tremendous changes in the last year or so but I’ve learnt many things about myself. Financially, I’ve created my own fairy-tale goal and am working diligently towards it. Like Frodo who goes up to Mount Doom in Mordor to cast the One Ring into the fires, I too meet many adventures and obstacles. My own personal emotional wraiths stalk me in the form of personal relationships that have gotten severely strained due to personality conflicts and stresses brought about by the growth of my family.

But I plod on like Frodo. We all need a Sam to help us navigate the treacherous terrain and the dangerous lurking to take us away from our fairy-tale goal towards being financially free.

How will you live your own fairy-tale?

Be well and prosper.