Freedom from Paper

The green paper. The money. Could we live in a world where we didn't need money ? Or have any currency ? We just exchanged things or bartered for things or luxuries and everyone had access to their basic necessities as they are abundant in the utopian world. It's almost like water, air, sand, fire, we will have our basic needs taken care of.

I always thought why do we need money ? why do we need to sacrifice our lives trying to earn the money ? Or trying to buy stuff with the money ? why do we need to create the inequalities with money ? Are we the only beings that deal with money ? Can we have all the human intelligence but operate more like social animals ? 

I came to peace with this man-made creation which lead me to seek freedom from it. Financial freedom.

I am personally lucky enough and thankful to come across few great books like

• "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki 
• the 7 steps by Dave Ramsey.

They were like a omen. Came to me at the right time of my career. I graduated and was trying to clear of my student loans and was also on a high to buy a brand new Audi car as I started to make my own money which is not an hourly pay but a monthly salary which is bigger than I ever earned until that point.

Luckily the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" book taught me about 

• Assets 
• Liabilities and 
• How to identify if something is an Asset or a Liability 

That changed my perspective and the most profound thing that had an impact on me was that 

• "Money should buy your luxuries, not your blood and sweat" and
• "Money should make you Money"

Rich Dad changed my thinking and inspired me to think differently. I loved the cash flow quadrant and the clear distinguish  of Employee, Self-employed, Investor, Business owner. Trying to move from one quadrant to the other.

and immediately after that  I found Dave Ramsey's 7 baby steps, it gave me direction on how to act differently.  It gave me goals to start with.

I cleared off my student loans and even paid for my sisters wedding which was as expensive as my student loans (Yes Indian weddings are huge and that's a topic for another post)

I am glad I diligently followed the 7 steps and kept checking one thing after the other.

Then I found Ramit Sethi's "I will teach you to be Rich".

Ramits style is more of an offensive player and his style comes across as cocky but he convinces you that there is a method to his madness. Not sure I followed much of his tips besides calling "Credit card companies and getting my fees waived"

He focused on making money through "pay raise" and "building online businesses"

Making peace with money and why we need it has helped a lot in my life. 

Somewhere I heard money is the life energy we trade in exchange for it. You get how much you put in. Other perspective of Money is - the value you created 

Essentially money is the value you created and the life energy you put into creating it.

Money is the value you created in this world. In an ideal world, if you create lot of value you should have lot of money may be not the other way around. It is also the life energy you exchange to create that value. The energy, be it physiological or psychological, you put  the energy to create more value in exchange for more money.

Anyways what this brought me to the conclusion is : I need to be adding and creative lot of value in this world and spend less life energy in exchange for it.

Less life energy exchanged while  creating tremendous value.

Money = Value Created / Life Energy Spent.

Create lot of value and save your life energy while creating tremendous value.

Financial freedom is when we DONT NEED to be in a soul sucking job where we spend all our life energy creating very or minimal value and get paid nominal salary or where we don't need to exist paycheck to paycheck.

We need the freedom from the paper to spend our life energy on things we love and are passionate about.