My own daughter continues to teach me as she grows up how important a child-like curiosity about the world is to becoming financially free.

At two years plus, she has the energy to explore the entire home and to play with all types of objects ranging from common house furniture to her daddy’s old gadgets and CDs in addition to her zoo of stuffed toys, masak-masak and other books and flashcards.

How does she remind me about maintaining curiosity towards financial freedom?

Experimentation

Children are born naturally curious. Their early explorations of the world around them through play and pushing at mental and physical boundaries reminds us that in order to learn and grow, we should not forget to exercise our curious nature and continue to learn more about our world.

One of the large parts of our world is finances and for me to be aware of what it takes to be financially free, I continually read and expand my mental models on what is achieveable and what I can try to do to gain this objective.

My own experimentation with investing directly in stocks and shares on the SGX as well as blog monetisation were born out of a mixture of curiosity as well as interest in trying to achieve my goal of having $1,000,000 investible capital by age 45.

It was (and still is) this drive that gets me to learn more about my career and to continually build skills relevant for today’s work processes as well as tomorrow’s potentially new areas. For instance, I just attended an internal presentation in my organisation that was about adopting Google Docs within one of our departments.

While the topic is not directly a day-to-day item in my work, the implications of them adopting this solution has an impact on the IT security and data risks as now they are starting to move applications into the cloud. As an internal auditor, we need to be aware and on top of how the business moves into new areas and what business and other risks it brings to the enterprise.

Learning Tangentially

This opportunity to learn tangentially has been a great feature of working in my current organisation and I realise it will help me understand the various business activities going on which I would need to understand in order to assess risks appropriately and identify potential gaps (if any).

Looking back at my own journey towards financial freedom, if I had not exercised my curiosity to get myself interested to find out more about equities, foreign-currency fixed deposits, return on investments as well as risk/return trade-offs, I would still be stuck in my comfortable well of investing in fixed depsoits and seeing my money lose value to inflation.

My recent attendance at the DBS Annual General Meeting also opened up my eyes to what happens at a shareholders meeting and also to allow me to see what board members did during an AGM.

It is upon these building blocks of knowledge and experience about growing my means through prudent investments and some level of risk taking as well as understanding what I need to develop my career over time that will help me closer to my target of being financially free by age 45.

The process itself has been interesting and has enriched my life a lot not just from the pure returns on investment but in being a more learned person in practical ways towards being financially free.

Do you still have that child-like curiosity to learn about being financially free?

What are you doing now to help yourself grow that curiosity?

Share with Panzer.

Be well and prosper.

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