Top 10

If it appeared on the web in North America, is focused on Financial Independence, and involves a list of ten, we may present that blog or column here. For really good stuff, we may admit lists of 5, 7 and other numbers too!

5 fears you shouldn’t have about retirement

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This weekend piece from USA Today — 5 Fears you shouldn’t have about retirement — seems worth of inclusion in this section, even though it talks about Retirement instead of Financial Independence, and the list consists merely of five items rather than ten.

Here we’ll just list the five main fears: click on the red type above to go to the full link.

1.) I won’t get Social Security

2.) I won’t have enough money

3.) The transition will be difficult

4.) I’ll be lonely and bored

5.) I’ll become invisible.

I can’t resist adding a bit of comment here. Take a look at the other thread posted this morning about whether Financial Independence is a better term than Retirement. It seems to me that a “Findependent” lifestyle is much less subject to the above common fears than those who are shooting for a traditional “full-stop” retirement in their mid 60s.

Feel free to post any other fears in the Comment section below!

10 tips to simplify your way to Financial Independence

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life is simple but we insist on makingit complicatedIn many ways, financial independence is intimately linked with the related themes of voluntary simplicity, inconspicuous consumption and what we call (in the books and e-books) guerrilla frugality.

This blog from Midway Simplicity was published a couple of years ago but nicely picks up on all these themes.

Here at the Financial Independence Hub, we often cite the definition of Financial Independence found at Wikipedia.

But the author of today’s linked blog also has a nice definition:

“Becoming financially independent means having enough money, so that it doesn’t become the main concern or worry in your life. It means having enough money to freely live your life on your own terms. It means that the paycheck doesn’t have control over you anymore and that you can experience life freely and openly.”

Hard to argue with that definition.

So how to you achieve it? The secret is simplicity itself:

“… You achieve financial independence when your income is significantly higher than your needs. 

To achieve that you have to either:

  1. Reduce your needs.

  2. …or increase your income.”

The one-page guide to Findependence

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grs_titleConsidering that I once put an entire financial plan into a single tweet, it shouldn’t be too surprising that there exists a one-page guide to Financial Independence.

This one-page guide to Financial Independence is from J.D. Roth’s Get Rich Slowly site. (naturally, I would call it the one-page guide to Findependence!) Naturally, the strategy revolves around that most basic premise of personal finance: live below your means and spend less than you earn: much much less. So that you can save much much more. Not just the modest 10 to 20% that most people shoot for in their IRAs or RRSPs: Roth suggests saving at least 50% of your income, and preferably up to 70%.

Extreme? Indeed, Roth calls it Extreme Saving but that’s also the kind of savings levels that     Extreme Early Retirement gurus like Mr. Money Moustache and Jacob Lund Fisker advocate. The latter’s book can be found here.

As per the philosophy of this site, I would call this Extreme Early Findependence, not Extreme Early Retirement, which is why we call one of our soon-to-launch discussion forums Extreme Early Findependence.