Financial freedom should be fun!

In our quest for financial freedom, do we feel even more stressed to work on our jobs or businesses, save and invest and seek new ways to save money or to generate multiples sources of income?

Stop, pause, wait!

You may find the road towards financial freedom filled with challenges and obstacles, but it doesn't mean you cannot have fun and enjoy the journey!

Here is some of PanzerGrenadier's 3 ways to make financial freedom fun for you so that you will find it sustainable to commit to the various ways to grow your net worth to a sum where the passive income from it more than covers your living expenses.

1) Treat it as a game!

When you play video games or sports, don't you tally up the scores to see who is winning or losing? It is the same thing for financial freedom! When you set goals and targets, each month or year where you see your net worth growing and the gap between your targetted investible savings amount and your current amount narrowing, it gives you a certain feeling of satisfaction that you are moving ever closer to your goal!

Seeing it as a game also allows us to inject more humour and fun into it rather than seeing it as deadly serious. Some readers may disagree with me on this approach but I found that life is too short to be all serious all the time. Yes, we need to be serious about setting goals and targets and about taking the disciplined approach to do the necessary things such as spending within our means and saving as well as building up our investments prudently. But no-one said it has to be done WITHOUT humour, a sense of fun that it really is a game that we play to allow ourselves the option to retire earlier than the statutory retirement age set by the powers-that-are.

2) Learning and earning

As I learn about investments and ways to make my investible savings grow, I also embark on hobbies that generate some additional source of income. For me, AdSense has allowed me to explore my interest in writing and articulating my thoughts into something that has a tangible economic value as it helps to bring in some small kopi-money even as it is both fun and rewarding in many senses of the word. In addition, my public speaking endeavours are aimed at gearing me up with skills that help me in my current career but also prepare me for a second career when the time comes.

My blogging efforts also exposes me to a slew of new technologies relating to Web 2.0 that I would not have experimented with if I had just chosen a more traditional hobby such as vegetating in front of the television or xbox (or is it xbox 360 now!?) ;-)

3) Laugh at yourself once in a while

If I counted the number of mistakes or wrong paths I had taken in my journey towards financial freedom, I would run out of fingers and toes to count them. No-one is perfect and has fore-knowledge of what is to come. My adventures in this journey towards financial freedom has its ups and downs. I realise that you have to sometimes just laugh at yourself when your portfolio goes underwater due to sub-prime or risk of US recession and count your lucky stars that you have some of your investible savings in defensive assets such as bank deposits, treasury bills and fixed deposits. At the end of the day, all these efforts towards financial freedom mean whether we can retire earlier or later but not life and death. So I try not to frame things in terms of life and death unless they truly are e.g. driving safely IS a life and death issue.

I do hope that you will also consider the fun part of achieving financial freedom, as it gives you more options in life to explore it in its wonder, splendour and candour.

Be well and prosper!