I wanted to tell you something. I wanted to share a little bit of news with you today. I am financially

Independent. That's right. I'm retired. I can essentially sustain myself

Indefinitely within this sort of living environment. I have everything that I need here

I can live like this for as long as I want. I have water. I have coffee here. I have shelter and

I have cut down my living expenses so much that essentially this is my lifestyle now. I just live here. I don't do anything.

I don't partake in any activities. I don't travel. I've gotten rid of my family. I've gotten rid of my

Responsibilities of my family. I haven't gotten rid of my family

They're still there, but I'm just not taking responsibility for them anymore. And with this sort of revolutionary mindset

I have freed myself from the rat race. I am free from the 9 - 5.

I don't have to work, if I don't want to. I can just be here and relax chill.

My time is my own. I am my own boss.

and as long as I can free my mind of any

Materialism and stay a minimalist. Then this is all I will ever need and I can just live like this

Indefinitely. I am financially independent. I am retired you could say. I've made it

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So I wanted to talk to you today a little bit more about financial independence and what I've learned about it

Having lived through it. And the first thing to realize is that actually all of us are in the way fine

Independent already. Financial independence is essentially when you're able to sustain yourself sustain the lifestyle

Indefinitely, you don't have to work. You don't have to work the nine-to-five or the rat race

You can just relax chill read a book play some computer games, whatever you want sit on the beach and the fact

Is that everybody has had this at some point in your life.

It was when you were a kid. All children in the sense are financially independent. They don't have to worry about money

They don't have to worry about working or a job or any of that

for at least say eighteen years while they're being raised by their parents their parents are providing everything for them and as a child you

Were financially independent until you got so sick of it and you wanted something more for yourself

You wanted to see what more you could do with your life. You wanted to move out

You wanted your own living conditions you wanted to win the respect of people you wanted to attract a partner for your life

You wanted a career you want it to be successful you wanted to see what you could make of yourself

and so it's funny that for many people they've sort of come full circle and they want to go back to being

Financially independent once more and find ways to downgrade their lifestyle. Well, I've got news for you

It's very easy to be financially independent. Just go move back in with your parents

You will cut down your costs so much

rent usually takes up the bulk of your

expenses. Food doesn't really cost all that much and if you were to cut down on your activities and remove all of your

Vacations, you can essentially live with very little basic income. You would essentially be financially independent

You could go live on the beach

In fact, if you don't really want to move in with your parents

The other thing you could do is just go live on the streets. That's right

You could be homeless you could go live on the beaches of Santa Monica. You can sleep in all day

you don't have to work and that's financial independence too.

Even my dog is financially independent financial independence at first sounds really good

It sounds like a very creative revolutionary idea where you essentially just can sustain yourself indefinitely

one easy way to do

This is if you have say a million bucks and could make four percent off of that on the interest

stock investment returns every year. That's like a 40k income and you could just keep that going for as long as you want and you

Never run out as long as you don't spend above say 40k a year. Now, inflation may eat away at that.

So in reality, you may need more than that. A while ago when I had come into some sum of money

I had thought to myself

Well, I could just retire on this, you know

If I choose to just lower my living expenses, lower my expectations,

I could probably live forever on this amount of money and I thought, "Well, where would I live?"

I wouldn't live in Silicon Valley, because it's just way too expensive.

Maybe I could go to Nevada or something like that. And then thought about, "Do I really want to go live in the deserts of

Nevada?"

No offense to the people who actually live there

I'm sure you're having a great time there being financially independent and all. But I thought,

Well,

I could just go to Southeast Asia to where expenses are even lower and I could have an even better life

I could live like a king over there. I'm sure that there are many backpackers and Instagram influencers

Who have chosen a life over there and say Bangkok, Thailand or Bali in Indonesia

Somewhere like that

I'm going to take a look at this picture of this fishing village that I saw and when I first saw it

I thought well that just looks

Amazing! Like, what a great life living a carefree life in this smaller though unknown fishing village

Enjoying a rustic Idol life.

I mean that really sounds great. It's all I could ever want really, you know, I don't need money if I can have that

lifestyle.

Sometimes I wonder to myself if

Given that choice would I just go out there go

find a small little village to live in sipping coconuts and sitting on the beach all day and

That's one. I realize anyone can do it

Really you just go to somewhere cheap somewhere in Southeast Asia or somewhere?

and you know

You can get that lifestyle. Funny thing is a lot of people choose to not go after that and I think that's where financial independence

Really starts to show its flaws

Imagine that you could get a million bucks and you were making four percent off of that

You have a 40K annual income and that all sounds good until you realize that

There's still a lot that you don't get with that

Your health insurance is one thing to think about like if you have to provide health insurance for your spouse

Two to three kids plus yourself. That's like four to five people already right there and you need to pay for each person individually.

A career, a job will get you that automatically. Otherwise,

You're gonna have to pay for yourself and it's not even going to be very good

there's gonna be pretty weak insurance and people are gonna be afraid to go to the hospital and everyone's going to be wondering

Yeah, maybe I should just sit this one out. Maybe I just shouldn't skip the hospital on this one

It's gonna be expensive. It would be great

If people can just go get themselves taken care of if they need to. You might also be missing out on career path

Which I think a lot of people think about. You know, it's not so big of a deal now

But over the long run you might find that as you get older as you get into your thirties, forties, fifties.

You find your classmates your peers they keep rising in status and level and you know

some of these people are getting into like director positions, vice-president positions, their salaries going up. And meanwhile,

You don't have that career path. You're just sitting on the beach, maybe with your financial independence.

You've got some amount of income that's coming in

Maybe that amount looked good when you're in your 20's.

But over time it didn't really keep up with the career progression, because there was no career progression there.

You also don't have social status, which I think a lot of people care about. I think financial independence usually sounds good for single people.

When they don't have to think about their family when they don't have to think about whether

their kids are going to respect them if their wife or husband is going to respect them.

If their friends will respect them so much. I remember when I would go around trying to date people

I would just say, "Oh, yeah me. I'm - I don't work.

I'm financially independent." And then people weren't really impressed by that. They were just saying that's weird. You know, I don't believe it.

I think everyone wants to hear at least something more solid than that.

Like, an actual career path something that you're passionate about something that you're at least working on. Not just life

We're just gonna sit around, because, I think the fact is that financial independence

Itself is not so sustainable, right?

It's sustainable with a steady velocity

But in reality, most people don't have a steady velocity that velocity is

slowly accelerating over time as their career goes up and even if you could sustain

Income that is not translatable necessarily to sustaining friendships or relationships

With people your friends are going to be wondering. What are you up to? What are you doing? Why don't you do anything?

Why do you all you once you just sit around on the beach?

Dinner conversations are always going to be weird when people ask, "Well, what do you do?" and you just say, "Well,

I don't do anything, really. I just sit around." So, I think my realization has been that

financial independence gets you a very bare-bones lifestyle. Very basic stuff and

Most people already had that and it's really more about realizing. Well, maybe we're all financially independent

Maybe we're all good. Anyways, now what's next? What do you want after that?

It may really be more about seeing what you can do

How far can you go how much more luxury do you want? And how much are you willing to work for it?

I think it's really about creating more options for yourself, you know at the most basic level

Maybe we can all afford to go live in Nevada in the desert in a very sparse bare-bones lifestyle with our parents.

But maybe we want a little bit more than that and you may visualize to yourself

Well, what sort of life would you be content with?

When I think about it, I might want something like the ability to live in a pretty nice city.

You know like New York City, San Francisco, Seattle

with at least a nice apartment, good view and

I would want to be able to support a family if I wanted like a bigger family and I would want to provide everyone with

Health insurance. I don't want to go out to nice dinners

Anytime I want to and it would be nice if I could take say two to four nice vacations a year

Maybe go out to movies and theaters, if I would like to, and on top of it all it would be really great

if I wouldn't have to worry about being

Stingy or cheap about any of this stuff?

Like I don't want to feel the burn of money leaving my pockets every time I go to a nice restaurant

it would be nice if I could just go there and not even think or worry too much about it and just feel good and

Have a nice dinner without having like a stomachache after that

Worrying about how much that dinner just cost me thinking about the trend to justify it to myself

It would be great. If I could just say what that was delicious wasn't it? Yeah, that was good

It's not something where I have to think about whether it was worth it or not

and it would be great if I could have

Even some respect from people around me, from my family, from my friends. Who would say, "Well, this guy seems pretty cool

He's kind of a role model.

He's not just like a deadbeat guy, but he seems actually like he's a productive functioning member of society." That would be great.

Now you may not need any of these things and I don't either.

Nobody needs any of this stuff as I told you

The only thing we really need is basic food water and shelter and we've already got all of that.

Most of us already have it.

It's really about what you want and to what degree you're willing to work together. You know, like when I was "financially independent"

So to speak. Where I just simply wasn't working for a period of time. I would say to myself,

Well, there's a nice camera over here and I would like it

But I know it's a bit of a splurge and personally I would not buy that not with my own money. Not with my

financially independent money.

I'm not gonna waste money on that, but I'm willing to do a little bit of additional work to get that

So this camera costs 500 bucks

So I'm willing Craigslist, looked for jobs and found the job paying 500 bucks for me to create an app for them.

So, that's what I did.

I just built-in that for them got my 500 bucks on PayPal and then use that to go buy this camera piece. And

That's pretty much like a job, isn't it?

Now, I could have easily said to myself that I don't really need to get this camera thing

500 bucks. Not gonna work for. I'm just gonna go sit on the beach and relax and chill. And

You know we can all do that, right?

So if all you want to do is go sit on the beach then go ahead go down the beach

I hope you have a great time.

But I think it's just important to remember that all of us can go sit on the beach.

That's an option that anybody really has we've all had that option ever since we were kids

It was an option that most of us decided that was not sufficient enough

Plenty of people do choose to go sit on the beach