A different way of life

Today, I would like to give you an insight into the life of Fred and Sally. Most of the posts we write deal with our hands-on experience so I think it’s interesting for our audience to know a bit more about our daily life.

Fred used to be a freelancer in the world of the Internet and web design. In 5 years he was able to give a different turn to his activities in such a way that he now doesn’t have to work for money anymore. He created his own Internet-based company, provides several persons around the globe with work, generates income through mainly advertising and re-invests most of the earnings in his company in order to make them grow and to put to good use money that would otherwise be taxed. I am not saying that Fred doesn’t work anymore but his income doesn’t depend on him doing some paid work for clients or for an employer. Instead, Fred works to grow his business’ earnings, i.e passive income: he coordinates his collaborators’ work, he spends a lot of time envisioning how to keep developing his business and his activities, he studies about being a successful entrepreneur, etc.

I, on the other hand, am still a beginner! I am a freelancer and work directly for clients from home, which means I still work for money. But the good thing is that I make enough money for my living working only half of the time. This enables me to employ the other half to develop my own projects in order to generate passive income too. My goal is to build and run my own company, like Fred is doing, within a couple of years. I’ll keep you posted about my progression.

Fred is very passionate and dedicated to his company and his vision. I learned a lot from him. His behavior and mindset influenced me a great deal. Now, I too have ideas that I want to implement. You would think that entrepreneurs are obsessed with making money. Well, it’s not entirely true. While working on one big project of mine, I realized that I had invested a lot of money and energy and I am not even making money with it yet since it’s still in development. It doesn’t bother me at all. Of course the point is to develop an asset that will end up generating passive income, but what I am saying is that I am spending time and effort on this project no matter what and I want the final result to be useful, professional and close to perfect, not for the sake of money, but just for the pleasure of creating something valuable. So, I think that what makes a successful entrepreneur is, on top of entrepreneurship skills, a deep passion to provide a valuable product or service that meets a need.

Fred and I are married but we don’t have children. We want to have children some day, not quite yet though! We are citizens of two different countries and, on top of it, I particularly love languages. That’s how we ended up staying several months or years in different European cities like Madrid, London, Paris and Berlin. Since we are constantly moving around and the real estate prices are really high, we took the decision to keep renting for the moment. Now that the real estate crisis started, we want to wait until prices are reasonable again before we buy our own home.

This is why every month we save up money in order to have a decent down payment when the time comes. This is not the only thing we put money aside for. For those of you who are familiar with Robert Kiyosaki’s principles, this is going to ring a bell:

• savings (just in case, you never know when an emergency or a hardship comes up),
• investment (it’s money we don’t care to lose if our investment is not sound – I’ll come back to it in later posts),
• charity (I personally chose to give to charities related to genetic diseases).

In the following post, I will explain what are, in my opinion, the advantages and disadvantages of our lifestyle. Although sometimes it induces short-term frustrations, I love my life and I think in the long-run I will be happy to have followed this path.