There is virtually no day that passes that people are not seeking help to achieve financial freedom. You may ask yourself, why are so many people having a hard time achieving financial freedom? What is it about their investment efforts that is not working? And what do they need to do to produce the right results? Many valid questions but only a few valid responses. By the time most people get to us they have exhausted their investment efforts and are already at their wits end. Many of them blame their failure on a lack of financial education. But is financial education really the problem? How much financial education do you need? What truly is financial education? And what kind of financial education do you need to achieve financial freedom?
Financial education is the ability to use financial knowledge to gain financial freedom. This means that the only purpose for financial education is to gain financial freedom and not to become an expert trader or investor. But you still need to be empowered with certain financial knowledge to thrive in the investment market. But what financial knowledge do you need and why is the myriad of financial information out there not enough? Today I am going to show you why and I will distill out for you the most important information you need to achieve financial freedom.
There are three critical pieces of information that you need to achieve financial freedom. The first is You and how you affect the speed of your financial freedom. You are ultimately responsible for your financial freedom speed. The second is your Advisor- And the extent of success they can give you. Your advisor is responsible for how far you go on your financial freedom journey. And the third is your investment strategy and whether it makes you lose money or achieve financial freedom. Your investment strategy is responsible for how much money you lose and whether you achieve financial freedom.
Read Also: Here’s a strategy for achieving financial freedom in business
Let’s look at each of these information
You and How You Affect the Speed of Financial Freedom
You are ultimately responsible for the speed of your financial freedom, not the investment vehicle and not the investment market. The investment vehicle has a fixed speed and tenure. Take any investment that you know for example, there is a defined timeline and tenure of maturity. So, if an investment is to mature in 5 years there is nothing you can do to change 5years to 2 years without consequences. So, investment vehicles are fixed in speed. The investment market also has certain fixed characteristics. For example, the investment market will go up and down no matter what you do. And you have little control over when it goes up or down. The best you can do is navigate the tide or position for it. Thus, the only thing you can truly control is You. And you affect your financial freedom speed by what you bring into the market. There is only one thing you bring that will affect your speed-It is your savings. Your savings is the only thing that will differentiate your success and those of other investors that enter the market at the same day with the same product. Your savings is the speed of your financial freedom. Thus if you enter the investment market with an epileptic savings it may be said that you are investing but financial freedom will be far from you. You must never pursue financial freedom prematurely with an epileptic savings. The best thing to do is to begin your journey using what we call “Cash Reserve Investing”. Cash reserve investing is an investment strategy that focuses on building the right size of cash reserves suitable for financial freedom. Without this kind of cash reserve, you can’t win in the investment market.
Your Advisor- And the Extent of success they give you.
The truth is you have never achieved financial freedom before so if you are going to take investment action or currently taking one you are getting your lead from someone else. But who should you get a lead from and who is the best person to guide you? From our own experience investment advice comes from four sources. And each source will increase or reduce your odds of success.
Source one is your friends or Colleagues. You take advice from friends and colleagues when they have taken certain investment actions that seem successful in the short-term that you have not taken. This means that advice from friends and colleagues is based on certain investment decisions they have made and not a holistic picture of how you can achieve financial freedom. The effect of their decisions may be too premature for you to access it correctly. And research shows that most advice of this sort end up being bad investment decisions. And this is so because you and your friends or colleague all are still trying to figure things out. So, while they may know a few steps ahead of you. They are rarely the ones to show you how to reach your financial freedom goal. They haven’t achieved financial freedom before, and they cannot lead you to where they have not been.
The second source of advice comes from parents. Advice from parents is valid if they have achieved financial freedom themselves. If they ended up in a lower financial state at the end of their career life, then they will only give you advice based on what they did that did not work. If you follow this advice you will end up in the exact same place.
The third source of advice is advice from professional investment or financial advisors. Most of which work in large organizations as employees. People that achieve financial freedom do not remain as employees. So, if your advisor is still an employee, he or she is still trying to figure financial freedom out. Also, advice from these kinds of advisors is mostly product based. While they can show you how to buy their products and begin the financial freedom journey. They can’t show you how to achieve financial freedom because they have not achieved it themselves. The biggest challenge here is that your success ends where their investment product ends. You cannot go further beyond their products.
The fourth source of advice and the only advice that you should take is advice from a financial freedom expert. A financial freedom expert is a professional advisor who has taken the entire financial freedom journey. That is, they have achieved financial freedom using the same or a similar path as you and within the same country. They were once an employee like you, faced similar income and savings challenges, but were able to navigate their way to financial freedom. Advisors like this have a better current life than their active career life. Their life and journey are the evidence you need to know that they can help you, not some manufactured testimonials or something they say. If you follow this kind of Advisor, you will not only achieve financial freedom, but you will also know how to succeed in business world. There are not many of these kinds of advisor available. Thankfully the one writing to you is one.
Your investment strategy and the Safety of your Invested Capital
If most people were to sum up the money, they have lost in the investment market trying to achieve financial freedom compared to the money they have invested. The money they have lost will be more. Losing money through investing is a sign that you have the wrong investment strategy. To achieve financial freedom without fail you need to follow what we call the “financial freedom order of investing”. This is because it is the only order that can guarantee the safety of your invested capital and give you financial freedom.
So what is the financial freedom order of investing?
The first order is Cash Reserve Investing. You must first build solid cash reserves to win in the investment world. The quality of what you put in is the quality of what you get out. The second order is Passive income Investing. The only way to achieve financial freedom is to build solid passive income. Especially the size that is the equivalent of the income that currently sustains you. To build this kind of income you need to convert specific percentages of your salary to passive income. Our recommendation for conversion is to follow the order 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%. By the time you are done with our financial freedom program you would have built passive income that is worth 100% or more of your current income. The third order is Appreciation Investing. This is where you begin to build a solid Net Worth. Most times we recommend that you combine appreciation investing and passive income investing as time is of the essence. The fourth and final order is Return Investing. This is where you invest for returns and where you take the highest investment risk.
The problem is most people begin their journey with Return investing and end up losing money. Thus, putting the cart before the horse. If you, do it this way regrets are inevitable. If you want to achieve financial freedom with speed, certainty, safety you must follow the financial freedom order of investing.
Perhaps your financial freedom effort is not giving you the desired results. We can help you. To see if you qualify for our help send an email to [email protected]
About The Author.
Grace Omenyo Agada is the most sought-after Financial Freedom Expert in Nigeria. She is a renowned Author, Financial Freedom Advisor and Keynote Speaker. Grace is Popularly known as the Queen of Financial Freedom, the Breadwinner’s Advocate and the Middle-Class to Upper-Class Mentor. Her goal is to help working professionals and breadwinners move their success and livelihood from a paycheck to their own solid passive Income. Grace is the Author of three books and possibly the most widely read financial articles. Her articles are spread across seven national newspapers and four of the most popular Nigerian Blogs. Grace is also the Founder of the University of Wealth, The Rich Retirement Life Quarterly Publication, The Wealth Creator Quarterly Report, and the Wealthy Business Blueprint Program. Grace has been featured on BBC Africa. Business Day TV. Inspiration FM. and inside Naijatv. And she consults for Numerous Top Organizations, Company Directors, CEOs, C-Suite Executives, and High-Income Professionals. To connect with Grace, send an email to [email protected]
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