Being ‘financially free’

[Freetodowhatiwant]

This might be a little bit niche but I was wondering if there was a call for fellow financially free/wannabe financially free people? I have decided that after 20 years in a freelance career which looks good on the surface (public recognition etc) ia really badly paid I am going to become an entrepreneur! I am finding divorce and being left with about 85% child custody and 10% of the money (don’t ask, I was an idiot but I just wanted out) very motivating. I haven’t had a job for a long long time but instead am investing in property by releasing equity to by another (I have never had any actual savings) and have started a small travel business by buying a cheap franchise. In 3 years time I would like to be a multimillionaire. I know this sounds crazy but I am putting it out there. Anyone else joining me, whether that’s just to make a few extra quid on top of your day job or to earn a shed load of money and be financially free? If so what are you doing? Let’s have someone to be accountable to!

What is your business plan to get to be a multi millionaire in 3 years? That seems ambitious.

OP
Following with interest for the moment.
I'm still trying to gather my thoughts as to what I can / would like to do.

I'm a bit suspicious about the franchise, but I don't really know much about that sort of thing.

Have you checked out Alan Donegan on Youtube, and his Rebel Entrepreneur podcast? He runs free courses with a focus on bootstrapping and starting small. The Donegans (his wife Katie, an accountant, has just started creating content with him) are UK based but are also part of the American FIRE movement, which is great because the big FIRE pocasts are great for inspo but not very relevent on a practical level if you're outside the USA.

I'm currently as poor as a church mouse but have figured out that I can probably achieve very lean FI (not RE) in about 20 years, so around the current state retirement age, and that only if nothing major goes wrong! I like the old school FIRE blogs like vintage MMM (his forum is still good) and Early Retirement Extreme. I think the movement has got very bourgeois and out of touch in recent years (other than the resources I've mentioned) so hopefully someone will come along and suggest some blogs/podcasts that don't assume everyone listening has a six figure salary and a spouse earning the same!

What I'm doing: cobbling together miserably paid bits of work as a supply teacher in France, and hoping to pass the exam to get a real teaching job (they keep changing the eligibility criteria). If I can achieve this, I'll have enough income to aim for a 50% savings rate and enough leisure to develop property as a sideline. Current challenges (beyond being insecurely unemployed and skint) include being financially unsophisticated plus being a recent immigrant who's still figuring out how things work. Following your thread with interest!

My day job seems to be going. I work as a nanny one day per week and do a couple of weekend days a month.

My online work (customer services within financial education) is now my main income source. That I can do from anywhere, so when the nanny work ends I can live anywhere. That may be a time to move somewhere I can afford a house, rather than small flat I am in now.

Property investing does not interest me. Investing within Stocks & Shares ISA and pension suits me, and currently net worth is going upwards, so it's heading the right direction.

Good luck with the travel franchise. That does not interest me but if you like travel then I can see that you may be able to sell travel packages to others.

The difficulty I think is getting a steady income stream(s), so you can live off the income and not need to access pension. Then when the time is right to wind down more, use the pension income.

@Brexile I like the Catching Up To FI podcast, though it has now changed one of the hosts so will see what new episodes are like. American, aimed at older people.

Is this franchise part of a travel MLM? Because multimillionaire in three years and posting about it online screams trying to recruit others with false promises.

I’d also be intrigued to hear your business plan to deliver this (and my job is to advise people running multi million pound businesses).

🙄

@nannynick Thanks for the Catching Up to FI recommendation! I wasn't sure about that podcast because the hosts seem to have been high earners in corporate jobs, but they have found a genuinely interesting niche with FI for late starters.

It seems like you've found the holy grail of location-independent salaried work! I would love to do something like that but I've never seen remote work advertised here, unless it was something obviously scammy. Customer service jobs are like gold dust, and apparently in-office only after the end of lockdown. I suspect WFH might be more something that's offered to existing employees. Anyway, well done on working towards FIRE without having to sit in a cubicle!

What DaisyHaites said, it's a known MLM and this sounds like a recruitment drive.

Thanks for the replies, no I am not on a recruitment drive. I don't think I am quite ready to recruit anyone! I am obsessed with the money boards in particular the property one so thought I would start my own thread. I have also managed to earn money job-free for 20 years now but am hitting 50 this year and really need to ramp it up. Also I posted a similar thread when I left my husband and it helped me stay accountable and not go back. So here I am being accountable. It's not something I feel I can do publicly on social media so I thought I might as well do it on Mumsnet.

@Brexile that sounds really intersting, particular your move to France. I love it. And yes there are many ways we can be financially free and it doesn't always involve becoming a multimillionaire. I pulled that out of a hat really as I see all my friends in couples with one or two very high earners and they are all edging towards that category. Doing it on our own means we have to be doubly smart. Or lucky!

@nannynick that's really good you've managed to get online work as well as the nannying. I think that is a massive part of it - work you can do anywhere.

@DaisyHaites I am intrigued about your work advising multimillionaires. Does that mean you are already a multimillionaire yourself or just advising others? And if not, can you take your own advice and become one. I have been doing a lot of thinking about the world of work recently and the whole pyramid scheme that I was involved in when I was working full time. The CEO at the top, no chance for any of us below to achieve the same even if we worked extra hard. That's why for the last 20 years I have worked for myself. It feels that in the UK we are really sceptical about business models like MLM that they embrace more in the US but are not at all sceptical about going to work every day in a similar structure!

Property is not my actual principle career but it is my main way of earning a living at the moment. In some parts of the country where property is cheaper and if I didn't have a massive new mortgage after divorce (just for a pretty standard semi but having to buy last year) I already would be financially-free. I earn enough from it to not have to have a day job which is good considering I have more or less full time child custody.

So - my plan for those who asked is to buy 5 more properties in the next 3 years and rent them out. With one or two I might try holiday lets. I might also try to venture into commercial property although this would be out of my comfort zone as my experience so far is in BTLs. The BTLs are doing well, thank goodness, but buying new property now is obviously more expensive to do at the moment due to the high interest rates. However a couple of more properties would technically put me into multimillionaire category in terms of the total value of the assets, albeit heavily mortgaged.

The aim with the travel thing is to make that the cash-flow side of it, so the property is the assets. So that would be - book more holidays and try to up my client base. I've booked 5 so far and earned around £800 so it's not going to earn me a fortune but hopefully I can build it up. There are people earning a lot of money from it and people not earning from it so I guess it has to do with how much time and effort I can put into it and also who I can sell holidays to! Might run out of clients. I am going to give it a year. The marketing side is networking marketing but whilst I too have always been sceptical of that sort of business I can see no downsides. It's cheap and there are no targets. I love travel too and at the moment can't afford to take my kids away that much, although I travel myself for work, I want to be able to take them to more places.

Thirdly, it sounds twee but I am going to think positive thoughts about money and read all the books I can. I have been doing a lot of reading about how our thoughts can hold us back and I am a firm believer in starting the day in a positive way meaning that we have better encounters either through work or social contact or even the person serving us in a shop. Some people might call it manifesting, I am not that spiritual, but I do believe that what we focus on we find more ways of achieving. It's not always easy to stay positive, being a self-employed single mum with high bills to pay, but whenever I feel pretty shit about something I try to quickly turn it around.

So that's my plan! I am more than happy to update and let you know how it's going.

Work you can do anywhere I think is going to be key for me. It can also help reduce expenses as I have a car now and it is mostly used for work. Also I live in the South East where there is the childcare work, so would not have to live here if all income was from online work.

@Freetodowhatiwant I don’t advise people HOW to become a multi millionaire, I just advise them when it comes to selling for multi millions to make sure the sale is done properly. But I have a lot of exposure to very successful entrepreneurs. All it has taught me is that I have zero desire to be an entrepreneur.

I’ve been working my 9-5 for just over ten years and and my salary is 5x what it was when I started. It is not entirely impossible that I may one day be C-suite in that company. Or at least be paid similar.

And I get paid a guaranteed salary while I work up to it. And it does not rely on anyone below me being underpaid for their time and losing money. The MLM model ONLY works if someone at the bottom is losing money. The corporate world works by paying everyone a minimum wage for their time.

There are just so many more ways to
more lucratively apply your time and effort than an MLM. Please show me an income statement from an MLM that proves otherwise.

Also, you’re not a multimillionaire unless your NET worth is multimillions. If you own £10m of property with £9.5m of mortgages you’re not a millionaire.

Yes perhaps net worth as a multimillionaire in 3 years is too ambitious! But I will take gross worth. But it's not really about the exact figures, it's just to have a lot more cash flow.

I think you're lucky to only work '9-5' @DaisyHaites rather than anything longer. Most people I know working in a corporate job like that do a lot more than 9-5 and often work late into the evening. Of course entrepreneurs do the same, possibly even more hours. I do get that it must be nice to have a salary and holiday pay and pay rises etc etc. I am not saying it's a bad thing, it is just not for me for many reasons. I don't think I would be able to stick at it having not had a proper job for 20 years. But there are a lot of people who look at what I am doing and find it terrifying and risky and insecure and wouldn't dream of doing it. Each to their own, it sounds like this thread isn't where your head is at which is fine. My aim is also about necessity, doing it all on my own is hard so I have to be creative about how I earn a living.

@nannynick yes I agree about work you can do anywhere. I have my kids full-time and one of them doesn't always attend school so I don't think I could hold down a job if I wanted one. I can't go and work in another country right now because they are at school but I do really love my life of pottering to the gym and working in coffee shops and not doing that many hours. My aim now is to just ramp up the cash earning side of things.

Just to be clear I am not on the breadline, I probably earn around 50k a year and that is for - I estimate - an average of 3 hours a day of work, it's just not enough as one person with a high residential mortgage and I need a lot more. I don't really want to increase my hours worked, just to have more investments working harder for me.

FFS, Inteletravel by any chance? You’re wrong about the positive attitude to MLM in the US @Freetodowhatiwant. Take a look at Truth in Advertising in the US. They report on the false income claims of all the MLM scams. For every network marketing multimillionaire there are far more people who end up losing money, in fact economists have researched MLM along with the Federal Trade Commission and concluded that 99.6% of all participants in MLM schemes lose money with around 80% dropping out in the early months having lost money.

The income disclosures they must publish in the US are the best spin the MLMs can put on the damage they do, they are not the full story. I’ve seen people lose their homes and relationships after involvement in MLM. Even the successful looking uplines are pretty much insolvent with massive directors loans rolling from year to year. You want to be part of that damage?

How do you earn £50k on three hours a day. I can do pretty well but the seems remarkable.

I have always wanted financial security. Grew up poor and wanted to get out of poverty.
Have had to work really hard to get to where I am now. Have had debt and hard times on several occasions and never a handout. Am quite frugal, although did fall of the wagon there with some lifestyle inflation but stopped when I realized how silly it was. Found FIRE material in 2019/20 and felt I finally had fellowship in my pursuit. With the FIRE blogs and podcasts got structure and more intentional with my saving.

Today I have four rentals, one of which is an Airbnb. I have been overemployed (another American concept) for a long time on/off through paid employment and have a small business (consulting). I recently cofounded another company but not seen any money from that yet. I have several other income streams that may last a few years but not necessarily permanent stuff. I recently left secure paid employment which may have been crazy but I think I can make more through the two businesses and my other income streams.

I’m in the accumulation phase. They say most who get to a 50% savings rate are FIRE within a decade so I hope I have about 6 years left. That said I have not been keeping track of my savings rate as such but have a FIRE number and I’m okay if it takes longer too.

If you are heavily mortgaged, are still on a very cheap fixed deal? A number of my clients are landlords and those with mortgages are no longer raking it in, in fact, after paying tax some of them just manage to break even.

It does not make sense to count your assets without the loans, in fact, you should only count your liquid assets if you want to feel rich as you can’t use your property to pay for holidays.

Why do I have a feeling your £50k income is mostly from your rental receipts and doesn’t include any deductions for tax and costs?

Have you submitted any tax returns yet?

yes I’ve been self employed for 25 years thanks and submitting tax returns for all of them @messybutfun! My properties are in Ltd companies which helps with the tax a bit and are on low fixed for a few more years yet. Of course any new ones will be higher rates which affect the margins

@Bumblebeeinatree i actually probably work less than 3 hours a day tbh but where I live 50k doesn’t get you very far. So it’s not a stealth boast. I kind of only do the work that comes to me easily but need to pull my finger out and actually chase work to increase that income and yes that probably means increasing my hours.

Anyway this thread was meant to be about anyone who wanted to join me in my endeavours at earning enough to be financially free

That sounds great @Snuppeline and no I don’t think you’re crazy to leave your secure job. Some people might though! I left my last secure job in 2003. To me the fear of staying in it far outweighed the fear of leaving it. It sounds like you’re doing really well and yes multiple sources of income is the key.