Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is financial independence?
• What are my financial goals?
• What’s my time line?
• What are the steps needed to get me there?
• How do I monitor my progress?
• How do I achieve this financial independence?

Financial independence happens when you’ve saved enough money to support you for the rest of your life without needing to work.  We all want to be prosperous and financially stable.  Living a comfortable lifestyle allows you to spend quality time with family and friends, chase those dreams, focus on hobbies, travel the world, write a book/novel, and maybe someday start a business.  Free yourself from that special brand of anxiety that money troubles can elicit.

A good financial advisor will help you determine if you’re saving enough , build an asset allocation , understand college tuition planning , and plan for retirement success .  Rather than advise you on risky schemes to boost your capital, they’ll steer your investments toward reliable prospects to grow your nest egg.

Most of what you learned growing up about money, income, and wealth are not true. This is understandable – think about whom you first learned them from (odds are good, it was from those who were not rich themselves). From confusing high incomes with wealth to not knowing the importance of tax asset placement when choosing your investments. How it is that some professional athletes making $20 million a year quickly go bankrupt, while a bus driver can retire a multi-millionaire and have no financial worries.

Income Is Not Wealth:  Most people believe the key to wealth is a high-paying job. Yes, it’s easier to amass assets if you have more money coming in each month, but the true secret to increasing your net worth is to spend less than you make. It is a cliche; but it is the fundamental, absolute, non-negotiable reality of money. To escape this trap, you need to understand that income is not wealth.

What is wealth? Wealth is the part of your net worth (assets minus liabilities) that generates capital gains, income, and dividends without your labor. If you are a Doctor or Lawyer, you need to put in long hours after years of specialty training and higher education to get a paycheck. On the other hand, if you have a portfolio of private businesses, car washes, parking garages, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, patents, trademarks, and other cash generators, you could sit by the pool. The real value, of course, is that you could maintain your lifestyle even if you were disabled or unable to continue working at your primary occupation. Better yet, unlike a salaried employee, wealth can’t fire you – you have to squander it. It’s far easier to lose a job that wipe out a well-constructed portfolio.

The level of your wealth should be measured by the length of time you could maintain your standard of living without an additional paycheck. In other words, if you had to stop working right now, how long could you keep up your purchasing pattern for cars, clothing, music lessons, college tuition, video games, etc.? The average person isn’t educated in this truth, which is why the more and more they earn, they are left wondering why financial independence and security continue to allude them, always seemingly just out of grasp.

You Must Have Surplus Funds to Invest:  The only way to take advantage of investment opportunities is to have the money to invest. The reality of successful investing is that there is a certain point where you reach critical mass and the returns generated on your assets can change your life; e.g., earning a 10% return on $10,000 is only going to net you $1,000 before taxes – hardly earth shattering, but the same return on a $1,000,000 portfolio is $100,000, which has far utility despite requiring the same effort and research.
Amassing wealth and becoming financially independent is a slow process that takes time. You do small things every day such as cut your expenses, generate extra income, and put the money into brokerage and tax-deferred retirement accounts. With time, it begins to amount to something. As each new opportunity appears, you can react on a larger scale than your previous investments. That’s called compounding. It’s when the interest, dividends, and capital gains your money has earned begin to generate their own interest, dividends, and capital gains, and on and on in a virtuous cycle. It’s how $10,000 can grow to $2,890,000 over 50 years at 12%.

Profits are nothing more than margins times revenue. The only way you can have more money left over at the end of the month is to either increase revenue (your paycheck, business sales, billable hours, or whatever it is that provides funds to cover your bills) or decrease costs. It’s that simple. Your choices are to increase revenue, cut costs, or both.

Taxes Matter:  All income is not equal. The idea that where and how you hold your assets can mean the difference between being somewhat well off and obscenely rich was so important.  The basic premise is that those with little or no wealth generate a lot of taxable income, while those who end up financially independent generate large unrealized gains in the form of real estate appreciation, unrealized capital gains, and profits made through tax-advantaged or tax-free accounts such as a Roth IRA or 401(k). An illustration is in order. A physician earning $250,000 per year is going to get taxed heavily, probably paying $95,000 in taxes for a net income of $155,000. Yet, if he had earned the same amount from within a pension plan or IRA, he wouldn’t pay a single penny in taxes. That’s an extra $95,000 per year compounding for him. At 12%, over 30 years, that’s an extra $23 million in wealth. Simply because the money is earned within a tax-advantaged account instead of regular labor. This is why you should do everything you can, within reason, to fully fund your retirement plans, as well as to focus on how your seemingly small decisions help or hurt tax planning. No decision is too small

True Wealth Is Control Over Your Time:   How do you know when you are truly wealthy? When you have complete control over how you spend your day. So few people understand that basic truth. No matter how much money you make, unless your days are spent doing the things that really make you happy – the things that you enjoy so much that you would pay to do them – and you have control over your time, you aren’t wealthy. Each morning, when you show up to the office, or the job site, or the practice field, or studio, it should feel like you are unwrapping a Christmas gift when you turn the key. If you find the profession that gives you that feeling, and you are disciplined in your management of the business side of it by controlling costs, you have a huge advantage over your competition because you will continue to work ten, fifteen hours a day not because you need to or because you want another car in the driveway, but because you love the process and product itself. You cannot compete with passion.

Grades Have No Correlation with Wealth & Financial Independence:  According to decades of extensive research by Thomas J. Stanley, Ph.D., author of The Millionaire Next Door, the grades one earns in school have no correlation with the economic wealth and success other than in the medical and legal professions. That’s not to say education isn’t important – it is! More than 90% of American millionaires did, in fact, graduate with an undergraduate degree.

Why, then, do parents, teachers, and councilors continue to tell children that they won’t be successful if they have a C- grade point average? Statistically speaking, according to Stanley, it’s because these people are themselves not financially successful. Therefore, they have no idea what it takes to achieve financial independence and buy into the great myth that good students go further in life. They analytically measure intelligence only and not the creative intelligence that is responsible for sparking innovations, societal advancements, and the opportunity to craft solutions in niche markets that everyone else misses. They also fail to realize that most millionaires wear blue jeans, overalls, or work shirts, not a suit and tie. They live in ordinary, well-established neighborhoods. Most own their own business.

Statistically, if you want to guess who is going to be wealthy and financial independent, you’d be more likely finding a self-sufficient student in wood shop class who paid for his own car, gets decent grades, has a job, and enjoys what he does than selecting someone from the honor roll. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s true.

Financial Independence Takes a Complimentary Spouse: No matter how successful you are, unless your spouse is equally disciplined, frugal, and investment-oriented, your efforts toward a better, financially independent life are going to be like struggling in quicksand. Marry the wrong person and the emotional, financial, and social toll it can take on your life will overwhelm almost any progress you can make in your career or pocketbook. As you try to build a life, he or she will be out spending your money on status symbols, making it nearly impossible for you to achieve financial independence.