The Path To Financial Independence!!

Let me start this post by telling you guys something that you might not know about me… I hate being forced to study something! I can spend hours on top of hours studying something, but if someone forces me to study a subject I usually get sick of it after a couple of minutes, sometimes seconds… This is what is wrong, in my honest opinion, with our education system, but I’ll talk about it in another post, this post will be about investing!

When I joined college I wasn’t used to studying, I got in without making any effort, I’m one of those guys that in high school I was able to pass everything with good grades without making much effort, it was mainly because I had tutors outside of school, a place where we were only 5 or 6 and the teacher could pay attention to us… but regardless of that… I got in college and I wasn’t able to study because I wasn’t used to, and I had no drive for it! But that all changed 2 years ago when I finally decided to start working hard!
Now, this isn’t a post about that either, this is a post about investing!

Back in January we normally have a 1 month marathon of exams, they are all on top of each other, this provides great stress, and I started to see that I hated being forced to do something, and I decided to set a path for myself where sooner or later I won’t have to be forced to do anything, I won’t have to be forced to do anything just to fit in our society.

I don’t want to be a slave to societies standards, where we need to grow up, study, work, live our life, and die… This is what ants do, I’m no ANT! I’m a human, I have dreams and hopes, and if I keep being a slave to societies norms, I won’t ever be able to achieve this, so I decided to set a path!

While I was studying for my exams in January I sometimes had study breaks to rest my brain, we humans should only study for about 30 minute -1hour max before resting, it has something to do with short-term memory and long-term memory, etc… but that doesn’t matter for this post. Every time I had a study break I went online and started searching for ways to have FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE, and so my path led me to investing!

Now...what is investing?

When normal people think of investing they think of a weird wall street necktie guy in front of a phone and computer yelling “SELL THAT” “BUY THAT”, that’s one way of investing, yes… But there are more:

• Knowledge investing:

  Investing in your own knowledge, this could be everything from reading a book, going through Wikipedia, watching a good documentary, watching a 10-minute YouTube (dtube would be better) video about finance, etc…
  I invested in my own knowledge a lot these last months. First and foremost, I decided to invest more in my own college degree. I was only going at it at 50% now I’m going at it with 110% dedication. Secondly, I decided to reduce the number of TV shows I watched, especially the bad ones which provide 0 knowledge and increase the number of documentaries I watch. Thirdly I decided to read more books. For months I had a book called “The Alchemist” that I wanted to finish, finally did it. Fourthly I decided to increase my own crypto knowledge, finance knowledge and wall street knowledge, which are the bases for any successful investor and so I did it!
  Knowledge investing is the best thing anyone can do to secure his future, it provides knowledge growth, and not only that, but from a scientifically view when we use our brain it gets better, faster and healthier which can postpone or even prevent some of the old age diseases like Alzheimer, and make us better thinkers, which is something that investors need.

  

  • Time management:

    Yes, I know the phrase “time management” has no investment in it, but stick with me and you will understand what I mean by that.
    I was a guy that loved procrastination, I loved sitting on the computer and watching tv shows, and I did nothing good with my time.

    

    Time is the most precious thing you will have in the world! As soon as your mother pumps you out of her womb the countdown starts, for some it can be 20 years, while others have 90 years, but it doesn’t matter, every second you spend procrastinating is a second wasted! So you need to invest your time better!
    In this last months, I started getting a sleep schedule going, which provides me with a much-needed stability in my life.
    All the successful people woke up early and went to bed early. While the rest of the world was still sleeping they were already working without any of life's distractions!
    Of course, you can sometimes rest, no one wants you to burn out, but be careful with how much time you rest! I’ve seen people that take one week off from the gym and that week turns into years.

    • Setting goals and investing in them:

    

    This can be anything you want to achieve!
    You write them down on a piece of paper, or on the internet like I did, and every day, every week you visualize what you have to do in order to achieve those goals! You set a time limit for them, even if you don’t complete them in that time limit you don’t get discouraged and keep going at it!

    • Health investing:

    

    Now this one is the most important thing you guys should do, yes, you can have huge amounts of money like Trump, but if you don’t have the health to spend it or the health to stick around a couple more years than why do you need all that money?
    Health investing means you try to workout at least 2 to 3 times a week, you eat healthily, so no McDonalds, no BurgerKing, no PizzaHut. You also sleep at least 6 hours, max 10 hours, I already told you guys in this post the dangers of not sleeping well enough.

    • Real investing:

    

    Now this is the fun part, this is what is going to make you have financial freedom, every month you get some money out of your paycheck and you put it into investing, where should you put it you ask?

    Well, first and foremost I should say, I’m no investing expert, what I know is because I studied online (Knowledge investing), the best investments I know that can secure your future are the ones that provide passive income.

    Passive income is, like the name says, money that keeps coming passively, you don’t have to do anything to earn it, you can be sitting on the toilet playing angry birds and getting this said money passively!
    Getting right to it, in my honest opinion, the best passive investments to secure your future are:

    

    1. Rentals: buy a house, even if you don’t buy 100% of it you can keep paying it for 3 or 4 years with the money you get out of the rent and after some years, when it’s finally paid for, you start getting passive income out of it, you can even hire “a guy” to take care of it for you.

    2. Dividend Kings: list of stocks that have been giving out dividends for a long LONG time, more years than I’ve been alive, companies like coca cola and Johnson and Johnson.

    3. Index funds: this are funds made from hundreds of stocks, some of them provide dividends, and let’s be real, yes! the market can come crashing down, but it won’t go to 0, if hundreds of companies go to 0 the whole world would go to “sh**”.

    

    4.Cryptocurrencies: especially the ones that provide dividends: Most of the cryptos I have, provide dividends or are going to provide dividends, VET is going to give out Thor, NEO gives out GAS, Stellar I can stake and get like some stellar because of inflation, STEEM not only provides dividends we can upvote our own content and get more dividends out of it, etc… but of course, ALWAYS DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH BEFORE BUYING ANYTHING (knowledge investing)

    Now, I’m just starting out this path, this is just the first part, I need to keep pumping money into the system to get a good passive income, making my own money work for me, after a while I have enough passive income to not work a job, but of course I won’t do that, that would be procrastination, it would be throwing my limited time on this earth away…

    • Lowering your own expenses:

    

    I don’t know about your houses but in my house when I have one tap open the other ones lose pressure, the more taps we have open the less pressure we have in all of them. By closing some of those taps we can get more pressure to fill a bathtub.
    In this case, our bathtub is our investment portfolio and the other taps are our other expenses.
    Try to lower the rest of your expenses to fill the bathtub quicker.

    I lowered all my expenses by decreasing the number of gym supplements I took, reducing my driving time or by driving better, reducing my night expenses (no more alcohol or water in the bar), I invested into 2 metal bottles that I can take everywhere and fill up with water at home, etc…
    Other stuff that an investor could do to lower the expenses is getting some solar panels (only if you are going to live in that house for a while), getting wind power, getting some food production out of the garden, there are even interior gardens that let you grow your own fruits and vegetables inside the house, etc…

    

    There are also many people with debts, in my opinion, there is only one investment that we should ask the bank for money and that is to buy a house! Anything else we should buy with cash! And any debt we have we should pay as fast as we can, we don't want to end up paying interest to the bank right!?

    Now, I should tell you guys, I’m still learning a lot about this topic, I’ve learned a lot of it because of Reddit and because of guides online, but one of the best tutors I like to follow on steemit is a guy named @getonthetrain, I tried to explain it as well as I could, but if you require more knowledge about all of this you should go and read some of his posts, I learned a lot out of them, and I’m still learning. If he happens to read this post, thanks for teaching me with your posts.

    

    Question of the day: What kind of investments are you doing?

    

    Get More and Higher Upvotes: Steemfollower
    Convert your Bitcoin to EUR/USD : Coinbase
    Buy all kinds of Cryptocurrency: Binance
    Buy a Ledger to Secure Your Cryptos: Ledger