One of the key premises of being financially free is unconventional thinking.

Just as making money on the stock market sometimes requires being a contrarian to buy when people are selling and to sell when people are buying, achieving financial freedom may require a departure from traditional scenarios of lifestyle choices.

What does it mean to be unconventional?

Being unconventional means different things to different people. Some of you may think being unconventional is to throw away the principles of living within your means, saving and investing and growing while protecting your means. It may be to bet it all on one asset class, hope to ride it near or at the peak and exit with enough cash to pay for your living expenses for the rest of your life.

Others may think unconventional thinking is to look beyond traditional asset classes such as equities, property, unit trusts (mutual funds), bonds.

My own idea of unconventional thinking is to decide for yourself the lifestyle you truly want and being happy with that level of earned and passive income that can support it. The more I experiment with different ways of earning passive income, the more I realise true massive income is not easy and typically requires a large amount of capital or investible savings to begin with.

My own passive income is mostly from equity dividends and interest from fixed deposits, treasury bills and savings. But because returns from these are low, it requires a huge capital for such income streams to generate sufficient to cover my family and mine living expenses.

Other forms of income, capital gains from buying/selling equities and blogging income can make significant returns but at significant risks as well.

The Unconventional Life

Re-defining lifestyle expenses. One of the insights I’ve gained from reading about Lifestyle design from the likes of Tim Ferris’ “The Four Hour Workweek” and Chris Guillebeau’s “The Art of Non-Conformity” is that you and no-one else decides on what you your lifestyle expenses will be like.

The problem with many of us who live in Singapore is that we allow the environment to define what they should be. What do I mean by this?

What I mean is we allow our lives and lifestyles to be defined by what we consume, the house we stay in, the clothes we wear and the stuff in our lives rather than to examine what our values are and what do we stand for.

The Dream of Financial Freedom

The more I go into exploring how to be financially free, the more I realise it is first about changing yourself. To design a lifestyle that truly is inline with your values and principles rather than to follow a lifestyle because that is the fashion of what our peers, friends and colleagues are doing.

I came across a Singaporean who stays in Singapore only for a few days a month and spends most of his time in Malaysia and Thailand because the cost of living is lower in those places. He has income sources from the region to diversify his risk geographically.

More and more people realise that the cost of living in Singapore for certain things are high e.g. cost of a home and private transportation. There are still countrysides and true suburbs in our regional neighbouring countries and opportunities are still possible for growing income streams outside of Singapore.

The older I get, the more I realise that now is the time to explore alternate scenarios for financial freedom.

Be well and prosper.