Financial freedom eludes most of us. It shouldn't be so.
Freedom is exciting. Everyone wants to be more free. So why do most of us do so little to win our financial freedom?
It's because most of us save to pursue a boring saving goal--an age 65 retirement. That sort of saving--I call it Sacrifice Saving--does not work. This site is about a different kind of saving, Passion Saving. This site is about an approach to saving that works.
A Saving Goal That Excites You
To save well, you need to be saving for a goal of intense personal concern, something that excites you as much as the benefits you obtain from spending. You should be saving to pursue one of the New Luxuries--having more time for your friends or your family or to pursue cultural interests or to be able to spend the hours of the day doing the work you truly love. This site tells you how to put financial freedom to use enhancing your enjoyment of life now and in the near future as well as in those far-off days to come after you turn 65.
This is not a site that pushes get-rich-quick schemes. That stuff is for aimless dreamers. This is a site for practical and realistic people, people who want more out of life, who know that it takes work to get it, and who are willing to do the work that it takes to make a dream come true. We are dreamers here. But we are practical dreamers. That makes all the difference.
This is also not a place where you are going to find uncritical acceptance of the conventional wisdom on money management. You cannot expect to win financial freedom early in life by relying on the conventional saving wisdom or the conventional investing wisdom or the conventional wisdom about how to advance in your career. Much of the conventional money management advice just does not work. Our quest is a quest to discover what does work. That often means going against the grain of generally accepted viewpoints.
What Makes Me An Expert?
Let me tell you a little bit about myself and how I have discovered the money management strategies that I explore at this site. My name is Rob Bennett. I was a corporate journalist in earlier days. I wrote about tax legislative developments for several newsletters. I enjoyed my work. When I lost a job that I loved in the recession of the early 1990s, I hated the feeling of vulnerability that followed. I made a vow to do all that I could to avoid ever again experiencing that feeling. That vow led me to the discovery of the Passion Saving approach to money management, an approach far more effective than the conventional Sacrifice Saving approach.
How did I go about the task of learning what really works? First, I read and studied and analyzed and thought about everything in the personal finance literature that related to the subject that I could get my hands on. I've been doing that since October 1991, and I have over 40 thick binders of research materials that I work from in preparing my writings. I have so much stuff that I had to have additional bookshelves put in to store it all. But the research I have done is the least important of three things I have done to learn how to help you realize your financial freedom goals.
What taught me more than all the research I did were the experiences I went through in crafting my own Passion Saving plan. I haven't just read about this stuff. I have lived it. If you get serious about pursuing financial freedom early in life, you are going to be wondering whether it is a good idea to pay off the mortage or not. I've been there. You are going to be wondering whether it is better to aim for early retirement in the conventional sense or to instead seek to shift to doing a different sort of work, work that pays less but which really turns you on. I've been there. You are going to be wondering how you can be sure that your investments will throw off enough income for you to live on after you hand in a resignation from your corporate job. I've been there. You are going to be wondering how to put together your budget, how flexible you should be in implementing it, and how often you should update it. I've been there.
The Financial Freedom Discussion-Board Community
What taught me even more than the personal experiences I've been through seeking financial freedom is what I learned from thousands of other ordinary middle-class workers seeking similar goals. In December 1999, I founded The Financial Freedom Discussion-Board Community. This community has become in the six years since the most important resource for learning what it takes to save and invest effectively that exists on Planet Earth. The people who populate these boards are the greatest savers in the world; they have either already done or are in the process of doing what you were thinking you might want to learn more about when you clicked onto this web page. There is material in the post archives of the ten discussion boards that comprise our community that cannot be found in the most extensive personal finance libraries in the world. I'll be reporting on what we have learned together on all sorts of important money mangement questions, including all sorts of questions that I could never hope to be able to answer solely through my own research and experience.
The benefit of the community is that it allows us to tap into the knowledge of people from all sorts of backgrounds pursuing all sorts of saving goals. We have high-income workers and moderate-income workers. We have young people and not-so-young people. We have women and men. We have workers in white-collar jobs and workers in blue-collar jobs. We have people who want to win their financial freedom so that they will be able never to work another day in their lives, and we have people whose primary purpose in seeking financial freedom is not to escape from work but to escape to a more exciting type of work. The true experts on financial freedom are those who have gone about the business of winning it for themselves and who have achieved the goal. One of my primary goals for this web site is to make the hundreds of insights that we have developed available to a far larger group of people than those who read about them on the discussion boards at which they were first put forward.
Our community has come up with money management strategies that I believe will revolutionize the field of personal finance. We've shown that by integrating life, work and money goals, middle-class workers can achieve financial freedom many years sooner than most now think possible. That's a big deal. It doesn't mean that people won't continue to work so long as they possess the strength and desire to do so. It does mean that over time more and more ordinary people will be working not primarily for money, but because they see important work that needs to be done and want to make a contribution.
How is Passion Saving Different?
Passion Saving is saving to enhance your enjoyment of life in the years that come before you turn 65 as well as in those that come after. It's viewing saving as a means to "buy" the true luxuries of today--plentiful free time and soul-satisfying work. It's the financing of a different sort of retirement, one you achieve in stages as you acquire over time a gradually enhanced ability to call the hours of the day your own.
That's a fundamental change. The problem that most of us have saving is not that we don't understand on an intellectual level that saving is important. We all get that. The problem is that there are hundreds of things that we want to spend money on, and all those things are important too. Money management is about making choices as to whether to spend or save. When you are saving for a goal that will not enhance your enjoyment of life for 20 or 30 or 40 years, spending almost always appears to be the more appealing money choice. To feel a motivation to save strong enough to cause you to really do much of it, you need to experience the benefits of saving in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s as well as in your 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. With the Passion Saving approach, you do.
Today's worker earns far more than did his counterpart from 70 or 50 or even 30 years back. He saves less. The old rules don't work. Please click on one of the site section titles below to begin finding out what does.
From passionsaving.com
