This post arises from the gentle prodding of La Papillion (aka Bullythebear) on the state of my personal finance and financial freedom blog posts of late. He commented that I seemed to be busy and the frequency of my posts had gone down.

The reasons for me posting less are several. The most obvious one is that some of my spare time is spent looking after my daughter at home as well as handling a couple of admininstrative issues relating to buying my new place.

Another is that I’ve started to think and reflect more about what it means to be financially free and how I’m starting to fundamentally relook at whether investments and a superior rate of return is the way to achieve financial freedom or to build up my income generating skills and abilities to get the maximum salary and bonuses in my career to build up investible capital.

Developing Lenses and Frameworks

I’ve attended a three day workshop on strategy and from my discussion with the trainer, I’ve realised that the models and frameworks to review and develop strategy really are lens in which we perceive the world around us.

The conceptual frameworks and models allow us to slice and dice the issues and concerns of what’s happening around and within organisations  so as to come to a common way of looking at things.

The journey towards financial freedom is also a strategy encompassing the following formula or framework:

Financial freedom = passive income > living expenses.

And the way we achieve financial freedom is from:

• Living within our means
• Saving and investing
• Growing our means
• Protecting our means

Growing Our Means

My salary from being an employee will still be the main driver of savings for the next 20 years of my working life. Using my financial freedom framework, I realise that continuing to focus on building up my skills and abilities to do my current job better and bringing more value to the organisation by doing more with less (i.e. planning for more audit projects in the financial year), leveraging on technology (computer assisted audit tools and techniques) so that my small audit team can carry out audit procedures on more transactions in lesser time and obtain greater assurance is the way to go.

Developing Skills and Abilities by Doing

One of the things I’ll be embarking on this year is to conduct training courses for my fellow colleagues in the areas related to what I’m doing in internal audit. This is a win-win as the organisation gains a training programme to help gear up its staff in internal controls and fraud knowledge whilst I build up my skills in public speaking, training and conducting workshops.

This is over and above my existing audit workplan workload and thus I’ll have to squeeze out more efficiencies from using computer assisted audit tools and techniques to complete the audit assignments and also deliver on the training.

I’m amazed at what people can do if they put their minds to it. One of the bloggers I follow is internet entrepreneur Danny Choo. I enjoy reading his Tokyo photo walk series where he writes about life and images of Tokyo while sharing his own life stories on his entreneurship journey.

He drives himself pretty hard and work is play and play is work. Thus, he really spends most of his time working unlike salaryman who clock in at 8.30 am to 6.00 p.m.  Increasingly, I realise if your work is a passion, then it doesn’t seem like work.

While I do go home after office hours and am fortunate that my organisation is able to allow me to achieve some form of work-life balance. I’ll still jot down ideas relating to work issues and allow my brain to just think about new things I can do in my workplace.

My previous job was the reverse in that I wasn’t engaged in the organisation. It was partly my fault but also the fault of the organisation. A working relationship between organisation and employee is a two-way street.

It’s interesting to note in today’s Straits Times article “Education for Productivity” that the Government is now advocating students building up a portfolio of skills and abilities and to adopt a lifelong approach to learning, i.e. learning new skills and abilities never stops throughout one’s adult life.

A Path Less Trodden

I count myself fortunate that my interests and opportunity coincide to lead me to where I am today. Someone who is able to straddle the world of internal audit and controls as well as the world of IT from both the enterprise and personal perspectives. I didn’t start out this way but looking back, I can connect the dots with the benefit of hindsight and more grey hairs.

Have you tried connecting the dots by reflecting on the significant milestones and choices in your own life?

How have they led you nearer or further away from financial freedom?

Be well and prosper.

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