What interests you about the concept of freedom? No matter what our money goals, those of us fortunate enough to earn more than is required to satisfy our basic needs are generally aiming for some kind of freedom. Freedom from working as much, or at all, the freedom of your next holiday, of finishing your study, of whatever.
For me, it was the millions of little things.
In the last two posts, I asked how much is enough, and what it means to be financially independent.
Now that you know how much you need, and where you sit on the financial independence scale, let’s combine the two: how much is enough to be financially independent? Continue reading “How much is enough to be financially independent?”
Most of us think we’re financially independent when we’re no longer relying on our parents for income. But as employees, we’re still relying on our employers – to stay in business, to keep us employed, to pay us on time.
‘How much is enough?’ is something we ask ourselves in relation to lots of things – how much money do we need? How much free time? How much should we eat or drink? These are the sorts of questions I ponder a lot, so it was with great excitement that I encountered Arun Abey and Andrew Ford’s book How Much is Enough.
One of the first reflection questions in the book is ‘How much money is enough? Why? And how do you know?’
This is a question I could not have answered when I first started reading the book over five years ago, but now is one I feel I can do some justice to – ironically, thanks to yet another book.
Recently, I filled in the shortest form that I ever saw over the course of my career. A single page. And yet it was more difficult to complete than any of the 30+ page forms I’ve filled out before. It was a resignation form. Quitting doesn’t come to many of us easily. No one wants to be a ‘quitter’. But does having quit something necessarily make you a quitter?
The final chapter of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s excellent book Think Like A Freak, following on from their (Super)Freakanomics fame, is aptly titled ‘The upside of quitting’. They identify three important forces that bias us against quitting:
