This Is What My Friends Who Have More Freedom than Me Do with Their Money
Freedom is time to spend or waste however you want.
I still have a long way to go when it comes to money.
As you earn more money, it’s easy for your expenses to magically increase. In my case, it’s not my expenses that are the problem — it’s my discipline.
In the old days, I would move heaven and earth to avoid paying for parking. Ask my friends. They’ll tell you how I’d walk for 60 minutes to gain access to free parking. The added benefit when you walk so far is you get a nice dose of daily exercise, along with your free rectangle of cement to park your pile of metal and four wheels on.
Yesterday, I noticed a change. I paid $14 for parking without blinking an eye. This is what I mean about financial discipline. If I stay on this path then any growth I have in financial assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum will be pointless. Why does all of this matter?
Money buys you freedom. Freedom is gaining your time back. When you have your time back, you become a secret billionaire (without the Lambo).
I have many friends who have bought their time back — who haven’t worked a traditional job or been forced to join a Zoom call to pay their mortgage for years. Some of these friends even goof off and waste their time.
I’m learning from these friends how they live, so I can buy back more of my time to read, be with family, and write more. These lessons will help you think about what freedom, time, and money mean for you.
They aren’t tight arses towards humanity.
A tight arse is an ugly human character.
My friends who have bought back their freedom aren’t noble warriors holding a Seneca book on stoicism. They bizarrely look at another person’s situation as not too different from their own. They remember when they endured hardship or fell flat on their face. It’s this way of life that leads them not to become Mother Teresa, but to do this: regular, silent, good deeds.
See, people get knocked down. They lose what they have. They face an unexpected tragedy. This doesn’t make them stupid. This makes them human. And when you’ve hit rock bottom and you don’t know what to do with your life, a tiny good deed changes everything.
It happened to me. I got fired publicly from a job I loved. I walked out of the office for the last time. I couldn’t hold back the tears. I started crying like an infant. People thought of me as some sort of LinkedIn influencer. They had it all wrong. One fateful day I had to admit the truth publicly. I told the truth on LinkedIn. After I hit publish on the story, I hid from the world for over a week. I didn’t show my face. I felt like a disgrace.
Once I finally got back up again and started looking for another job, I faced a brick wall of rejection. The people I thought would help me, ignored me. Not everybody, though. One colleague I worked with heard the story. He rang me up to check in. He invited me to his office.
This is the odd part.
When I arrived at his office, he had a desk set up for me.
“You’re working at our office from now on until you get back on your feet.”
He figured out that psychologically I was ruined. He figured if I came to his company’s office and had a place to work from, that my mind would be tricked into thinking I had a job. His co-workers became my pretend co-workers until I could find another job.
This story is a tiny good deed. It took no real effort or kindness. It didn’t cost a single dollar to do. It’s a tiny good deed I will remember for the rest of my life.
This former colleague and friend did a silent good deed. They could have been a tight arse with their time (time is more expensive than money). They weren’t a tight arse at all. My situation became theirs.
A little generosity goes a long way. One tiny deed can change the course of someone’s life. Having the freedom to enable that reality is real wealth.
They are slow to react to new trends.
NFTs and crypto are two big trends. My friends who have more freedom than me are slow to react. Why? They spend a stupid amount of time doing research. They don’t listen to gurus. They read books on the subject. They consume Twitter threads containing charts and financial data.
Trends will rob you of your freedom — a trend is an experiment. The lab mice investors of an experiment typically lose.
Research and data will buy back your freedom and give you more time.
They hold a surprising amount of cash, despite poor interest rates.
I’ve written plenty of times about how leaving money in your bank account destroys your purchasing power, thanks to inflation.
My friends who have bought back their time hold surprising amounts of money in savings accounts. The current rate of interest on my Australian savings account is down to 0.1%. Their reality challenged my thinking.
Leaving money in your savings account costs you interest, eats away your purchasing power, and benefits the bank you bank with.
Leaving money in your savings account has these counterintuitive benefits:
- You have money to take advantage of opportunities that could pay you more in the long run than the savings account interest you lost. For example, stocks could face a huge correction and you could finally own Amazon at a discount if you chose.
- Lifestyle designer Tim Ferriss says he has typically kept a large amount of money in the bank and not put it to work in the stock market. The reason is that it helps him sleep at night. You can get a financial return on your money. But money can buy you stress-relief too. This insight challenged my thinking on savings accounts.
- You can go high-risk. If all of your money is in a savings account, then you are going backward financially. The benefit is you can deploy a high-risk strategy. A friend of mine owns a large amount of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has risen a tremendous amount since they bought it. To protect them from any risks of cryptocurrency, they have chosen to have an equal amount of money in cash, earning almost zero interest. Bitcoin gives them the growth they want financially, and money in the bank gives them a way to counteract the growth. I hadn’t thought of a savings account like this.
Maybe a savings account is a way to counteract higher-risk assets. That’s an idea a few friends introduced me to.
I’m also toying with the idea of a blockchain-enabled savings account through an app like BlockFi. I haven’t made a decision yet, as I want to understand the risks and the legal side more.
Consider a savings account from multiple angles. Factor in risk to your thinking.
They each own a small slice of the future.
They don’t own $1 million Bitcoin. They didn’t become friends with Vitalik and buy 1000 Ethereum tokens. They invested a small slice of their money in the now-obvious future.
The future is a decentralized internet where ownership is no longer broken. Where access is equal despite financial status. Where anybody in the world can be part of the social network that is money. They bought a slice in the future as a vote for where we can head to. Typically, they put 1–5% of their money into either Ethereum or Bitcoin.
It’s not their investment that is fascinating.
It’s their open-mindedness.
Keeping an open mind about the future, with a touch of optimism, changes how you live your life and who you spend time with. Those who think they have all the answers, live a poor life. Those who predict disastrous consequences for humanity (daily), live in a prison of the mind.
People who have an open mind, accidentally discover opportunities that are in plain sight. These opportunities make them seem lucky. Really, it’s not luck at all. It’s the discipline to see the world slightly better than it is. That’s what real financial freedom can do.
They have worked tirelessly on their character.
The person you are has a lot to do with what you’ll achieve in life. A good character is a magnet for opportunities.
Each of these friends, on the surface, looks as though they were born with a decent character. Behind the scenes is totally different. They have spent money working on their character. These are non-Instagramable moments.
Do you know what working on your character means for them? Seeing a psychologist when something bad happens. Getting couples counseling when there is nothing wrong with their romantic relationship. Getting critical evaluations from people they respect. Asking their critics for feedback
They pay people to tell them the truth about themselves. That’s pretty powerful when you think about it. Most people lie to you about who you are. How many bosses out there think they’re awesome and have no idea that their direct reports think they’re an idiot of the highest caliber? Lots.
If you want the freedom to do what you want with your time, you’ve got to become the sort of character who deserves that reward. I’m a long way off from developing that sort of character. I still have many scars to self-heal from. But paying to improve my character is a new concept I’m toying with.
Perhaps character improvement is the huge opportunity you’ve been missing.
They question the stock market.
This doesn’t mean they have exited all stocks. This doesn’t mean they sit entirely in cash. What I’ve noticed is, they question the stock market. They question why the stock market hasn’t faced any real challenges after a global pandemic.
They question why asset prices keep going up, while at the grassroots something doesn’t feel right. If you go down to your local shopping center, you’ll experience this feeling. Stocks are loosely based on the future. But stocks have a history of realigning to the present too. When that happens, what does that mean for investors? This is the question on their lips. Hype in stocks is dangerous to them.
“Buy the index fund” is great advice if you worship the US dollar.
If you measure the value of stocks in anything but the US dollar, well, your view of everything in the financial world changes. You start to question the stock market. And when you question reality, you learn things you didn’t know. When you learn, you experience breakthroughs.
Breakthroughs eventually lead to differences in how you spend your money, and therefore, your time.
The freedom to spend your time how you wish is a fascinating concept that will boggle your mind.
Your boss or a mortgage can tell you what you have to do with your time. What if you could say goodbye to both of them? Or you could live with both of them, knowing at any stage you could politely let them go?
Those who have the freedom to spend their time however they want have made subtle changes. They choose to see the world as a collective place we exist in for a limited amount of time before we pass the baton on to future generations. When you look at it like that, why wouldn’t you change what you do with your money and how you think about your finances?
Having control of what you do with your time is the greatest freedom of all. When you control your time, you experience life differently. You see life as a together event rather than an individual experience.
