How to Achieve True Freedom

But that’s not freedom. True freedom is having real choices, real options, and real control over how you live your life right now, not decades down the road.

We’ve been conditioned by a system that dates back to the Industrial Age—a system designed to keep people in a cycle of working for decades, only to retire on whatever savings or pension remains. That’s an outdated model. The world has changed. The economy is dynamic, and the old guarantees of pensions and stable, lifelong careers have disappeared.

So, if the old system isn’t the answer, what is? How do you create freedom now, rather than waiting for some arbitrary retirement age?

Trading Time for Money: The Trap of the High-Income Professional

For high-earning professionals—doctors, dentists, engineers, lawyers—the traditional path has always been clear: get the degrees, build a career, and trade time for money at increasingly higher rates. It’s a rewarding path in many ways, but it’s also a trap.

You may make $500, $1,000, or even $1,500 an hour. But as long as your lifestyle expenses rise alongside your income, you’re not free—you’re simply running on a more expensive treadmill.

Society has its own metrics for success: the big house, the luxury car, the country club membership, the private school tuition. While there’s nothing wrong with those things, they often come at the cost of financial dependency.

If your lifestyle is completely tied to the income you actively earn, you’re never truly free. You’re just one unexpected event—an illness, an economic downturn, a personal crisis—away from financial instability.

The Key to Freedom: Understanding Your Freedom Number

So what’s the solution? You must separate your ability to generate income from the hours you work. This means shifting from active income—where you trade time for money—to passive income, where your assets generate cash flow without your daily involvement.

The starting point? You need to know your freedom number—the amount of monthly income required to sustain your lifestyle without working.

Most people have no idea what their real number is. When asked, they estimate. Some say $20,000 a month. Others guess $50,000, $80,000, or even $120,000. But without running the actual numbers, they’re flying blind.

If you’re serious about financial freedom, you need to sit down—with your spouse, your bookkeeper, or a financial expert—and map out your true monthly burn rate. What does it actually cost to live the life you want? Once you have that number, you can reverse-engineer a plan to replace it with passive income.

The Path to True Wealth: Assets That Work for You

There’s a big difference between being rich and being wealthy.

• Rich people make a lot of money. They live well but often require constant active income to sustain their lifestyle.
• Wealthy people have assets that generate income. Their lifestyle is funded by investments, not by trading time for money.

To achieve true wealth, you must own assets that produce reliable, recurring income. These could be:

• Real estate investments that provide rental income, interest, or distribution payments without requiring you to manage properties yourself.
• Equity in businesses where you’re not actively involved in daily operations.
• Dividend-paying stocks or other cash-flowing investments that pay you simply for owning them.

The goal is to create enough income from these assets to cover your freedom number. When that happens, you’re free. Not just financially but in every sense of the word.

The Financial Literacy Gap: A Barrier to Freedom

A significant obstacle to achieving financial freedom is the widespread lack of financial literacy. According to the 2023 TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index, U.S. adults correctly answered only 48% of financial literacy questions.

This deficiency in personal finance principles makes it challenging for individuals to make informed decisions about saving, investing, and managing debt.

Without this knowledge, the path to financial independence becomes obscured, leaving many reliant on traditional employment far longer than necessary.

Play the “Day One” Game

Want a reality check? Try this exercise:

Imagine today is Day One of your retirement. You’ve sold your business. You can’t work for active income anymore. Now what?

• What assets do you actually have?
• How much income do they generate?
• Does that income meet or exceed your lifestyle burn rate?

Most people who do this exercise realize they’re nowhere near financial freedom. But the good news? The earlier you recognize the gap, the sooner you can take action to close it.

The Cost of Waiting

Too many professionals push off this kind of planning. They assume that as long as they keep working and saving, things will “just work out.” But I’ve had far too many conversations with people in their 50s and 60s who suddenly realize they don’t have enough.

If you’re in your 30s or 40s, now is the time to start building assets that generate income. If you’re already in your 50s or 60s, you must take control of your financial situation rather than blindly trusting that traditional retirement planning will be enough.

Take Ownership of Your Financial Future

At the end of the day, financial advisors, investment firms, and Wall Street don’t have your best interests in mind. Their job is to keep you playing the accumulation game—keeping your money in the system, feeding you financial products, and hoping the market delivers results over time.

But financial freedom isn’t about hope—it’s about control.

When you build a portfolio of assets that pays you without requiring your daily effort, you have the power to live life on your terms. Whether you choose to keep working, scale back, or retire entirely—it’s your choice.

And that is true freedom.

So, the real question is: Are you building a future of choices, or are you just running on a treadmill?