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The Greatest Thing Money Can Buy
Money can buy a lot of things. But one thing clearly stands above the rest…
Money can buy lots of things, but the greatest thing it can buy is freedom.
Most people today spend their lives in what can only be called financial slavery:
- The bank owns their house.
- The dealership owns their car.
- The credit card companies and student loan providers own a sizable chunk of their future income.
- Their boss owns every hour between 9 am and 5 pm five days a week.
Perhaps the most clever and insightful observation of the futility of the rat race comes from Ellen Goodman:
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.
Is this all life has to offer?
Running out the clock five days a week as you try to stay ahead of your mounting financial obligations and try to scrape together a couple of vacations a year?
Slaving away to be able to afford things that you mostly don’t use?
There has to be something better out there.
Financial Freedom
What if you owned all your possessions free and clear? What if you had enough money coming in from outside your job to not need your job? What if you had enough coming in to not need to work at all?
In the online world, this is sometimes called FI (Financial Independence) or FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early).
In my book I preferred the term Financial Freedom which I think is a better fit.
This may sound like a pipe dream, but it is something that you can achieve if you set your mind to it.
