What Have You Done to Achieve Financial Freedom?

I think most people may have a same dream in their life – to achieve financial freedom. I am having the same dream too.

Financial freedom means that you are in control of your money, rather than it controlling everything you do. It’s a long journey to achieve freedom: learn, fail, learn and fail… the only success.

What have you done to achieve financial freedom?

I have my own plan which I believe it is a long learning road and may take some time to achieve.

• I’m now consider self-employed. So saving my income is a must and is the most straight forward way to increase asset.
• I invest in stock market, 80% on fundamental analysis and 20% on technical analysis. I know I will still need to learn a lot in stock market. To me, investing in stock market is the simplest way own a company and as a shareholder for the company and you can share the company profit without actually doing anything in the company.
• I invest in unit-trust (mutual funds). My unit-trust account is just like my saving account where I will try to use any money in that account. When stock market is bearing, I switch most of my unit trust funds’ money to unit trusts with low risk profile (which have lower return but most of the time get better return than a fixed deposit account). When stock market is bulling, I switch most of my unit trust funds’ money to unit trusts with higher risk profile (which hopefully to get higher return).
• Internet Business – I’m not taking very serious on this but it does help in contribute me some pocket money every month. Some of the types of Internet business I will try is blogging (earn from advertising revenue and selling affiliate products) and online stores (as long as the operation cost is less that RM1k per year).

Currently stock markets and mutual funds are the most comfortable zone for me to make most of my investment. I’m not investing in any real estate because it is not suitable for me now. Investing real estate will require a lot of money, time and efforts. If I make a wrong step in real estate investment, it could turn a good debt into a really bad debt.

What about you? What you have done to make your way to financial freedom? Share your thoughts or stories here.