The Financial Freedom Mindset

I have always been good at spending money. Who isn’t? As I mentioned in previous posts, this habit of being a ‘spendoholic’ didn’t end until brainwashing myself with Rich Dad material. I stopped spending and for the first time in my life started saving and also giving to charity.

After I got out of that financial hole I was in during our time in London we spent the next two years in Paris where I saved a lot of money. I was very very frugal during that time, so much that I saved enough from my online earnings (which was much less back then but I didn’t have a team to pay) for the down-payment on one of those cash-draining properties that we now own.

I made a big transformation in that time from the spending mindset and also from getting paid for my time to a financial freedom mindset of saving to invest and earn money from my assets.

I must admit though that it is hard to keep disciplined and stay on course with the new mindset when you discover that it is not fast or easy to become financially independent.

Nevertheless, if you do manage to stay on course, re-invest your money instead of spending it, you’ll get ahead faster. Sometimes it’s really tough to give up having nice things, this is the case now with me and Sally.

We had started saving money for own house. But seeing that after 2 years of ‘crisis’ and a dead real estate market prices are barely moving downward we feel that even for our own home it won’t be worth making a purchase for a long time. We are quite happy renting and pay much less than we would if we owned it (and have less headaches). So we were at the beach a few weeks ago and we got to talking about getting a new car. Now we have an old Saxo, its 10 years old, but in decent shape. We decided we would just use our house money for the car to buy it in cash. So we were all happy with the idea.

But then we started thinking. Each one on his/her own. On my end I was thinking was now really a good time to spend all that money on a car? Taking consideration that the economy is in turmoil and maybe good opportunities to invest in something may arise?

Also, as mentioned in a previous post, Sally is quitting her work for IBM France at the end of the year. She has already started a Website related to her field of work and we talked it over and decided that she would officially join my company as an equal partner. So the sooner we can generate more cash flow from our Internet business to replace the money she will no longer receive, the better. Ultimately, this is our short term goal, for both of us to be free of working for anyone or being paid by the hour, up until now it was just me.

So instead of spending the money on the car we decided that we’re going to reinvest it in our business. We considered other possibilities but there is clearly nothing that could make the same impact now.

We thought over the different sites we are currently running and where that money could make the biggest impact, based on experience of what works and what doesn’t and what we know. I don’t want to get into the exact detail but we decided to employ the money on a good amount of labor (3-4 workers per month) on a particular site that experienced major traffic growth last year but is sputtering this year in search engine traffic growth, but continues to grow in participation. I believe the slowdown is partially due to the number of competitors and copy-cats.

The financial freedom mindset kept us from enjoying the luxury of a new car for the moment but will continue to move us towards more money and more freedom in less time. Around Christmas time we’ll see how our decision went.