As a real estate investor who is just getting started, it’s easy to be consumed by the idea of financial freedom.
The first deal you do is absolutely terrifying. The whole process is filled with fear, doubt, and anxiety. But, once you get proof of concept and start to receive the almighty cash flow all of that begins to subside.
Those emotions never disappear, they are always lapping against the shore of our mind like a gentle wave even in the best of times. Eventually, you will do whatever it takes to get that next deal under contract. There is a definitive psychological as well as physiological response from closing that deal and getting closer to the goals that you have set.
Curating your life Path
Most people begin the journey for financial independence for the right reasons. They want to take back control of their time and experience life to the fullest with those they hold most dear. During the journey, these can become competing demands. I have often times found myself trying to decide whether or not to spend time or money on a trip or a purchase and contemplating how it will impact my ability to move forward on the path.
It’s safe to say that I have become so focused on achieving my goals as an investor that I have forsaken the very reason why I started the process in the first place. At these moments I have to ask myself who is in control. Am I allowing myself to be driven by the impulse of achieving my goals? There are certainly worse things in life, but that is not how I want to live.
Speed of Hitting Your Goal vs Quality of Life Getting There
We recently made the decision to have my wife stay home with our two kids and we would not have had the courage to do this without the income we have created through real estate investing. It was a difficult decision and we certainly sacrificed the speed of accomplishing our goals in order to do this. If she had stayed at work our path to financial freedom could have potentially been faster. However, we know that it was the right decision for us at the time and we don’t regret it at all.
When we decided that she would stay home we knew that we would have to be very intentional about how we spent our money. Up to this point, we were not consuming any of the profits from our investments, rather we were using those funds exclusively to acquire more property. Last week we were discussing trips that we wanted to take and I knew that we couldn’t do everything based off of the income from my salary. My wife suggested we use some of the income from our investments in order to pay for the trips. I immediately balked at the idea because it would slow down our journey, but told her I would think about it. I came back to the same question “Who is in control?”
Financial Freedom means creating a LIFE you LOVE
Ultimately, we will not do everything. We discussed the trips and decided which ones were truly important to us and then made the decision to use some of the cash flow to plan those trips. Even though there is a slight tinge of disappointment at the prospect of pushing back the date of achieving our ultimate goal of financial freedom, I know deep down that this is the right decision. These have been the hardest decisions to make on my path to financial freedom, but I know that I will never regret creating lasting memories with my family and friends, even if it does extend the timeline of that path.
It would be easy to stop at this point and realize that you will need to have the difficult conversations to decide what is most important to you and your family. The less obvious path is to figure out how you can create more value and thus increase your income to minimize these discussions. The ultimate goal is to be able to freely pursue all of your passions without the hindrance of monetary concerns. It will not be an easy path and you will constantly have to ask yourself who is in control.
There are infinite ways to create value for others and dollars will follow that value. This is the path less traveled and it will also be the most rewarding if you are doing it for the right reasons and you can maintain your underlying reasons for pursuing this path in the first place.
You can find more of Chad’s articles at https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-peyton-51412961/detail/recent-activity/posts/
