Key Takeaways
- Money is just a tool, and you always want it working in your favor.
- Saving keeps you from making bad, hasty money decisions and gives you room to breathe and think.
- Be selective about your friends, embrace long-term planning, maintain positive cash flow and create a “money avatar” for yourself.
Remember the horrific scene at the end of the 1995 film Braveheart? That’s when William Wallace (Mel Gibson), the Scottish warrior leader who’s trying to free Scotland from England, is being tortured and quartered. With his final breaths, Wallace screams “Freedom!”
As Americans, we believe strongly in having freedom in all areas of our life—including money.
That’s why I want to share these five money freedoms that you should try to incorporate into your life over time. It’s very important to think of money as a tool and always have it work in your favor. You don’t want bad money decisions to trigger things or events that will have a negative impact on your life.
- Save money. This keeps you out of a reactive mode and gives you room to think and breathe. If you don’t have savings or emergency funds, you can end up making hasty, ill-informed decisions about money that you’ll later regret.
- Select friends wisely. Research shows that our personalities, decisions and values are often shaped by the five people we spend the most time with. As you get older, make sure you’re associating with friends who share your values about money, particularly saving and planning for the future.
- Plan everything. I know many of you find planning boring, but planning adds discipline to your thinking process and provides you with the freedom to switch to Plan B or Plan C if Plan A doesn’t work out. You can even do a complete pivot. If you have the who, what, when, where and why mapped out, boy, you can really move easily and effectively.
- Have access to money. We all need capital to buy cars and houses and to take advantage of business opportunities. We can’t do that unless we’re saving and we have positive cash flow. When you have capital on favorable terms, there are so many more opportunities in your life.
- Create your money avatar. You may be shy and introverted by nature, but when it comes to money, you need to be confident, outgoing and aggressive about taking advantage of the five money freedoms we’ve talked about here. They’re not easy to accomplish, but success never is.
Conclusion
Take your time and once you get these five freedoms working for you, you can do just about anything you want to do in life.
Until next time, enjoy.
Gary
