Financial Independence is like.....

.....watching paint dry.

Do you enjoy watching paint dry?

If you don't, you may get bored during your Financial Independence (FI) journey, especially at the middle to later stage. This is more for the majority of us who are employees. 

The experience and challenges for those of us who are self-employed or business owners are probably different. 

The Initial Phase

It may start off with alot of budgeting, tracking and monitoring, rebudgeting and the cycle repeats like a habit or system. And repeats till we hit our comfort zone. 

For myself, it started off with budgeting. I tried to track and monitor but it wasn't just in me to do so. I was okay as long as I have a rough gauge on the buckets that the expenses were flowing into. From this, I always wonder if I am more of macro person than a micro person. You know, the 'Big Picture'? Or perhaps I was just simply lazy. 

Admittedly, a mixture of sacrifices and delayed gratification were made. Isn't sacrifice same as delayed gratification? We may hear sacrifices being packaged as delayed gratification but if we think deeper into it, they may not be exactly the same. 

The Stabilisation

Once every thing is in place by having automate the systems and processes, and finalising the budget, there's really nothing much for us to do but to go with the flow and live our life. 

During this period, even if we check our accounts everyday, nothing much will change. Unless one of the items on our budget changes, for example paying of our education/ housing/ credit card loan, getting a reasonable pay raise alongside a promotion or a new job etc. The funds allocated to or earned from these items can then be redeployed elsewhere. 

However, if we want to accelerate the speed of our FI journey during this period, we can explore side hustles. The trade-off is that we will burn more of our personal time that could have been scheduled for self wellness, such as exercising and decompressing, and social activities, such as spending time with families and friends. Basically, side hustles are mainly second or third jobs. 

Then again, this fully depends on our individual energy level. You hear me right. Each individual has different energy level unique to them, especially at different life stages and age. So know ourselves and don't get burn out.

The Maturing

We may start to 'see the light' and realise that our greatest returns come from our human capital. Without this return, we are not able to make use of the spread that will super turbo our journey. We may also start to question which is more important - investing in the financial markets or ourselves and career? Time is always limited.

We may even question if investing in the markets is necessary. Back to basics -  why do many of us even consider investing in the first place? I think most of us would say that's because we may to make more money. That's as good as saying capital growth/ gains. Hence, the strategy should be looking out for capital growth stocks and not investing for dividend income. A fair number of respected, established financial bloggers went into dividend income investing and many followed suit, albeit some blindly. We should always pause and ask ourselves what are objectives and current circumstances. The bloggers' circumstances may be different from ours. YMMV.

At the beginning of this journey, I realised that no matter how I optimise my expenses, there is always a floor. This explains for my earlier challenge to you in the article Revenue Growth or Cost Cutting?? I began investing more into my human capital in hopes of getting a higher return so that my spread will increase. This is similar to investing in growth stock just that in this case I am the stock and the inputs are time, energy and labour. In the financial markets, we need all three - time, energy, labour and capital. Are you shocked by this realisation?

The Thoughts

I believe that there's a time and place for everything. At different stages, we probably are seeking different objectives and there's no one-size-fits-all. Reading from financial bloggers helps in broadening our views and learning from their experiences to save our time and perhaps avoid potentially the same oversights.

I suspect a fair number of us on this FI journey may have adopted an all-or-nothing aka 'chiong ah' mentality where the objective is to reach FI in the shortest fastest possible time. Along the way, some may burn/ tire out and adopt a coasting mentality (is this considered coasting FI?).

Ultimately, life must go on while waiting for the paint to dry. Since that's the case, why not pace ourselves and develop our desired lifestyles and live our best life right now? It's the journey, not the destination that matters right?

Does the above situation sound familiar to you?

Let's not wait until the paint dried and question what's next.