10 Tips For Achieving Baseline Financial Freedom

both me and simon are on our ways to achieving financial freedom and we're going about it in very different ways to each other with me i'm focusing on online passive income growing my income streams through there getting what i call pseudo financial freedom first and simon is focusing on building up his property portfolio and he's working for someone else or working with his brother and part owner in the business over there so we thought we would share some of our best tips on how to become financially free and things that we've learned on our journey along the way so hey simon thanks for coming on and sharing today yeah yeah really excited about this one one of my favorite topics as we all know yeah both you and i have been very passionate about financial freedom i think your rich dad poor dad and those books really started it for me what about you what got you passionate about financial freedom over other investment goals the funny thing is it wasn't something that was really talked about in our family until sort of recent years so i never really knew what financial freedom was and every single person in my life was still working and nobody actually had any level of financial freedom that i was aware of um so it was only really when i started to kind of actually start taking action and start creating my plan where i realized oh financial freedom is something that we can all achieve yeah and so just so people know as we get into this each of our stories simon has purchased three investment properties in the last 18 months massive achievement congrats on that two of those being investment properties one being is own home so that's kind of his plan is i guess working in a job using that money to invest in properties and achieve financial freedom that way i've achieved what i call pseudo-financial freedom through my businesses so had businesses that kind of just worked for themselves and i didn't really have to work much i then ended up in a bunch of debt and wasn't financially free anymore and i'm pretty happy to say that i've worked myself out of that situation and i think if i stopped working today my businesses would again run themselves for multiple years and i wouldn't have to work so i'm not financially free yet but i've kind of built up that passive income stream online and then eventually i want to invest that into property as well so i've achieved it lost it and then kind of achieved it again and now i want that long term so we've both been on the journey we're not completely there yet but we've learnt a lot along the way and we want to share that and so do you want to go first simon with one of your tips for achieving financial freedom and moving towards that yeah definitely 1: Have a Clear Plan i think this is you know on both of our lists no doubt about it so maybe i can share my thoughts on um on this and then you can talk a little bit but it's having a plan and having a clear plan at that as well so that is the number one way to achieve financial freedom because the reality is there is so many different ways that we can do it you know you're going through the business avenue i'm going through the investing avenue there's so many different ways to achieve the same thing so rather than trying to pull lots of different pieces from all of these these different places um you know honing in on one and creating a plan with that one in order to to get to where it is that you want to be so for me it's kind of thinking all right well where do i want to be in the future or where am i going to be happy in the future and there are then reverse engineering and back from there so right now for me it's kind of replacing the average australian household income somewhere between 80 to 100 000 because that's going to give me options that's going to give me choices to do what i want when i want and all i need to do is reverse engineer that back utilizing my plan which is focusing on investing in properties paying off the debt from those properties and then living off the passive income for life but without a plan it's impossible to you know continue moving forward because you're gonna chip and change and you're gonna you know focus on all these different things and when i have strategy sessions with clients i i hear this all the time with people jumping from strategy to strategy plan to plan and you're just never going to get there with that you need to be super specific with your plan and you need to you know have an understand the big picture goal as the plan where you want to be then reverse engineer focus on each step at a time and just you know get the best possible results at each step yeah that was one of my tips as well is to have a plan and then work the plan and i think as you said it's really important set your goal up front for financial freedom i want this amount of income per year if you don't know how much that is we generally just say well look at what you're earning through your job right now you're probably living a pretty good life set that as your goal your first goal to replace your job income and then go from there and then reverse engineering it back using data using quantitative data i think to work out okay how many properties do i need to own or for me in my business it was looking at okay how much does this article earn that i write or the videos i put out earn and then actually creating a number from there how many do i need to have and then working that plan is super important so then saying okay how much work do i need to do each month or whether it's buying properties saving those deposits and actually buying the properties a lot of people when it comes to financial freedom are just like oh i want to be financially free as quickly as possible and they go on these like highfaluting ideas of you know get rich quick schemes and we're not about that sort of life we're about the okay this is a concrete plan yes it's going to take time but it actually financially makes sense and we've got the data to back it up so for simon when his properties are paid off he knows how much rental income he's going to be having in so he knows how many properties he needs to own and so getting as specific as that is really good 2: Create Passive Income Streams for me my tip number two would be to actually look at creating passive income streams and so for me this was actually creating income streams from scratch online creating websites adding youtube videos all of that sort of stuff but actually looking at the world in different in a different way and saying okay how can i actually create an income stream whether it be from scratch or how can i actually maybe purchase an income screen income stream and then achieve it that way for sure i i love that as well and you know there's going to be multiple income streams throughout the journey you know i look at it and i follow the rich dad poor dad method which is just acquire income producing assets that's why i'm focusing on property because you know i get paid rent rental income from those properties i if for my particular strategy i can get depreciation benefits another income stream i also get capital growth from that property so a few different there and then i've got my job as well where i get paid a salary but then i've also negotiated to become a part owner in the business as well so i get profit share from the business as well which you know can really help with that saving and fortunately now i've also got a partner as well and she's on a full-time income and we can couple all of those together and basically our plan is to until we're where we need to be continue reinvesting all of that income no matter where it's coming from to get to where we want to be as soon as possible yeah and so for me with creating those passive income streams in the business i rather than looking at a business and designing a business to make a lot of money up front i was very specific in the way i made money so rather than like taking on clients for example where they pay you an upfront fee to do work i always focus on my business okay how can i do work up front that is then going to continually pay me which is how i ended up with the business that i had and it's a complicated business because you earn nothing in the beginning but as you do more and more work the passive income starts to build up so yeah i think creating those passive income streams whether it be through the work that you do or as simon said you know purchasing income producing assets and then also reinvesting and continually investing and reinvesting the profits of that as well to build up that asset base that's continually generating you more and more passive income yeah i guess that's sort of a a pseudo tip if if that makes sense because yeah you definitely to get to financial freedom you need to continually reinvest that that's those earnings um so that's a good one there um 3: Be Realistic