Five Cents Ten Cents

Flickr! image "Otter Cliffs" by climbnh2003

I was inspired by Chris Guillebeau’s post “How to write a life list” on his blog “The Art of Non-Conformity“. For those who have never heard of Chris, he describes his blog as:

The Art of Nonconformity (AONC) project chronicles my writing on how to change the world by achieving significant, personal goals while helping others at the same time. In the battle against conventional beliefs, I focus on three areas: Life, Work, and Travel.

Who is Chris Guillebeau?

He is someone who is living the unconventional life by most yardsticks, especially if benchmarked against the materialism of Singapore Inc. He has travelled to many countries as part of his plan to travel every country in the world (literally!)

As I’m writing my second eBook, “Panzer’s Road Map to Financial Freedom”, I find that the WHY is as important as the HOW. The reason why I’m pursuing financial freedom is because I want to live an unconventional life. The typical life in Singapore is to study up to University or Polytechnic, get a good job, work for next 30-40 years, pay off your home (asset rich) but retire on your CPF balances and CPF Life annuity. It is to forever work and work and not truly living the life that you want. It has been for too long about following the script of the “Singapore Dream” also know as “Get Rich or Die Trying Singapore Style”.

How has living unconventionally helped me

My unconventional thinking has resulted in my achieving the following:

• paid off my housing loan (in full) by age 35
• being able to work in a less stressed and more relaxed manner
• being able to focus on my health and family
• having time to think seriously on accelerating my efforts towards financial freedom
• understanding that financial freedom is about generating passive income or alternate sources of income to free up time

Developing my life list

I’ve decided to come up with my life list and to put on it the list of things I’ve always wanted to do. Now it doesn’t mean that I need to be financially free to achieve them but the process has freed up more of my financial resources to consider them as part of the realm of possibilities:

Here goes Panzer’s life list (in no particular order):

1. Travel business class on flight of at least 10 hours for business/pleasure
2. Eat black ink squid rice in Korea
3. Visit two of the places featured in Japan Hour
4. Work for a local non-profit organisation full-time for 1 year at minimal pay
5. Become the audit committee chairman of a listed company
6. Run the half-marathon successfully and recover from it without injury
7. See my daughter living an independent,  healthy, happy and productive life
8. Obtain a class 2B licence
9. Complete a triathlon safely
10. Generate $50,000 passive income in 7 years’ time
11. Take a train ride from one end of Australia to another
12. Be a published author with sales of 20,000 copies of my personal finance book
13. Be the champion of table-topics contest for toastmasters at district level
14. Speak conversational Japanese
15. Improve my mandarin to be able to blog in Mandarin

I’ll be revisiting this list now and then to refresh and refine it and goals and targets are meant to be reviewed periodically to see if they are in line with our life’s mission and values.

Have you considered developing your own life list?

Be well and prosper.