Golden Handcuffs

When you work at a place, you are given a salary that sustains your life or perhaps even paid handsomely to let you buy all the fancy things as well. Working 40 hours a week getting 2-3 weeks vacation is a significant time sink on your LIFE ENERGY. I like to say LIFE rather than 'time' because that is what it is.

Lets estimate the life that you (or I as well) are trading for your current salary.

(8 hrs + 2 hrs commute estimated) * 5 days a week * (52 weeks - 2 weeks vacation) = 2500 hours

Assuming you sleep 8 hours a day you have a total of (24-8)*(365 days a year) = 5840 hours awake to spend per year.

Thus work is 2500/5840 = 42.8% of YOUR LIFE ENERGY

In fact, I'm guessing that it consumes more than that because you are likely too tired to do 'your own thing' during the weekday because the workday tired you out. You spend much of your weekday nights recuperating from work. I myself knock myself out of it from time-to-time using MUCH will power and make my best effort to pursue my ambitions on weekday nights even though I am crazy tired from work and commute.

Lets add in the time needed to recuperate from actually working.

(16 hours a day * 5 * 50) = 68.5% of YOUR LIFE ENERGY

Yes you may have done something worthwhile on a weekday or perhaps Friday night could be considered your time, but you get my point here. Working for a salary SUCKS ASS. You are basically consumed from head to toe and chained from pursuing your ambitions.

Now, if you are able to do something you love then you are set because you enjoy the work and you are being compensated. My beef with this is that the compensation may not be proportional to your contribution. You could do 200-300% more work and yet obtain perhaps 25-50% more in the form of bonus or salary increase. The rest? It goes to the pockets of shareholders.

Most people work for someone for a salary. Even the CEO works for the shareholders. A blogger works for their readers. The question lies in if you HAVE to do it or not. If you are financially independent, then you have the OPTION to not do it at all hence freeing you to only do the things that brings you joy. Having the OPTION means everything. Having the OPTION to just take off for a week or 3 to vacation in Italy is probably the dreams of many.

I have been working for 10 years already and I'm pretty much ready to call it quits. However, it is completely not currently possible because I have golden handcuffs around my wrists. I have grown accustomed to receiving my salary while spending only a small fraction of it. In order to call it quits, I would have to generate enough passive and semi-passive income in order to replace my current salary. Or at least enough to sustain my living costs.

As you may have guessed, I have protected my identity in this blog for obvious reasons. I will most likely reveal who I am after I am actually financially independent. At that point it wouldn't matter even if I did reveal it right?

One final thing I want to say is that I am not making this blog just to complain about my life. I made this to document my journey to financial independence for which I am certain will happen soon. I have taken many steps to secure MANY streams of passive and semi-passive income streams which I plan to share with you on this blog.  Today, I just increased my stream from dividends socks. Slowly but surely I am getting there.

A very rough guess is that I am already generating 10-20% of my yearly expenses. Hitting 100% does not mean I'll quit my day job immediately because I enjoy the high savings rate. Quitting then would mean I am spending everything I make passively. I am actively thinking about when I should pull the trigger.