Money IS Freedom
Why your Money Isn’t Just Pieces of Paper with Dead Presidents
One of my friends said recently that the only reason to have money was to buy “stuff”. I just looked at her, totally shocked. Money is so much more than “stuff” to me. Money equals freedom. Freedom from working in a dead end job that I hate, freedom to have the time to do things I enjoy. Freedom to find ways to contribute to the greater good of all.
Money is freedom because having money makes it easier for me to have the time to travel, learn and grow. This is why learning about money and personal finance means so much to me. It represents a much larger goal, and that is the ability to spend my time in the way I want.
If I trade my time for money and work at XYZ widget factory, I am trading my time to contribute to the bottom line of XYZ widgets while I make it possible to eat in the meantime. I have “bought” my weekends and evenings with my day of work, unless XYZ widgets decides to force everyone to work 7 days a week.
I am not contributing to the greater good of all unless those widgets help people. Even then, there has got to be a better way to create value that is more efficient than simply my job at XYZ widgets.
If I trade my time for money and try to get wealthy that way, when I stop trading my time for money, my wealth also becomes stagnant. I also sacrifice my life for that wealth, having bought into society’s notion that everyone should get a job, go to work for 40 years until they get a gold watch and “retire” where they are supposed to spend every day playing golf. I would much rather use my youth and vitality now then wait to see whether I’ll make it to the gold watch at the end of the 9-5 grind tunnel.
Enter 2008, November. The stock market is in total panic, after some of the worst months ever. Real estate market values across the nation have plummeted. People are opening their 401k statements all over the nation to see that the years they spent building their retirement accounts are for naught. This means more working. Great, strap on the feed bag and get to it, the gold watch can wait because you don’t have enough to afford even a month’s worth of your current lifestyle. Scary?
Terrifying. This is you should try to find ways to utilize your money in the most efficient ways possible. Personally, I would rather spend my time consciously plugged into ways to make my life interesting and fulfilling than spend another second watching tv on the couch.
What would you like to choose? You get one chance to stand out and share your gifts with other people. Regardless of your feelings about money or level of interest in the more complicated aspects of money, your personal finances play an integral part in what you get to do with your time. Your personal finances are going to be there running in the background of whatever you choose to do with your time, so if you learn to do them better, every area of your life will benefit.
If you are going to that grindstone job every day, there are lots of things you can learn to do with your money through investing and better money management that can make it possible to quit that grindstone sooner rather than later. If you build a safety net that will take you to your next destination, then it doesn’t matter what happens with your job at XYZ widget. If you want to quit your job at XYZ widget, then keep doing things to improve your situation so that you can confidently fire your boss without thinking twice.
If you make the financial part of your life less stressful, you gain power over your situation regardless of whether you do work you like or not.
Stress causes so many problems with relationships and health. Most people divorce over fights about money. Would you rather spend some time learning about money and how to make it grow, or would you rather spend your life beating your head against the wall because you don’t know about money?
This is why I was so surprised when my friend said that the only reason to have money was to buy stuff. Money can change the course of your life if you harness it correctly. Why not spend time learning how to do that?
