Every month, we do a review of things that happened, what we learned, and what the plan is moving forward on our path to financial freedom. This financial freedom update is a great one. Plenty of new discoveries, learning lessons, and decisions made that will benefit us for years to come. Stay tuned for more!
Updates to our income report
One of the bittersweet moments about us progressing is we have to prioritize what’s important. As a result, we’ve since sold off one of our poorest performing vending locations the other week. This not has only allowed us to get 12 months of vending income from that location up front, but it’s one less facility that I need to put the time into to ensure it’s filled. The best return on my time is being home working either on my social media accounts or simply working at my sales job.
Therefore, we’ve lost a portion of our business income in order to free up the time spent on low performing assets, but also make the transition to move to Russia easier. (More on that later)
I’ve also recently made the switch to full time for my high ticket sales role. It has allowed me to earn much higher commissions than I’ve ever earned. It feels so good knowing that I’m not only able to solely focus on one thing, but the returns are outsized as well.
That’s an important part of focusing. A few years ago, I used to try to do 25 things at once because “The average millionaire has 7 income streams.” My thinking was I’ll 3X that and I’ll have over 20!
The caveat is that those millionaires did that AFTER they built there wealth using ONE strategy
I’ve since learned that focusing has not only made me more money, but made me happier because I’m not running in multiple directions.
I’m extremely grateful because over 2 years ago, my family brought in around $4,000 in personal income (2K from my job and 2K from my wife’s income) and $1,000 in business income in the November 2021 Financial Freedom Report.
My job made 10X my own personal income alone. I am beyond blessed that I am able to work with an organization that allows me to earn what I always knew in my heart I was capable of.
At this point, I am constantly looking for ways to improve further and continue driving that income higher.
It actually makes me VERY happy looking back on how our life has turned out in 2 years. My job and income went from grinding every day knocking out 50-75 cold calls a day in order to make less than $30k/yr to now earning a multiple of that is such a blessing.
I don’t want to disclose my income anymore due to us bringing in much more than we used to and I’d rather make this about the process as opposed to the dollars.
That’s subject to change in the future. If it gets requested enough, I will change our future financial freedom updates.
Updates to our expenses
At this point in our lives, we have one house hack and our previous house hack is being used as a long term rental. We’ve moved out of Texas and rent our property to a property manager. The house in Texas is currently vacant which is not extremely fun but it’s a part of real estate.
With that said, we also have a vacancy in our current house in Cincinnati. Our basement is used for an Airbnb/Mid Term rental. We have a guest checking out right at the beginning of December and we don’t have any additional tenants in place for that.
Thanks to Ramit Sethi and his book “ I will teach you to be rich” we have automated our savings so we had plenty of money put away for emergencies and other potential expenses. Especially with holidays already here, it’s given us a lot of peace of mind knowing that we have money put away for these situations. If you want to read the article I posted about how to automate your bank accounts, click this link.
We did massively reduce any future recurring transfers into all of the respective accounts for the time being. We have $10,000 in a HELOC that we’re trying to get rid of.
We just did a $5,000 payment to the lump sum that’s scheduled to hit by the beginning of December. That plus a little over $900 in payments monthly to the balance is going to help us knock this debt down as soon as possible.
We’ve taken on a scorched earth approach where we pause all investments, transfers, extra spending and throw it all into debt.
Through that approach we’ve paid off $50,000 in debt within the past 12 months.
That has freed up so much mental energy so now we can focus solely on building wealth. I’ve never been a big fan of debt outside of a mortgage. Moving forward, if we were to ever be faced with a large unexpected purchase, we would first aim to pay using our emergency fund, but also, I would aim to pay cash as often as possible.
Debt is that last thing I would ever want to take on again. Simply because you’re guaranteed to be giving your money away with no chance of getting it back.
Changes in mindset
There has been a lot of changes over the years to get to where we’re at today.
Over 2 years ago I was at the dentist and I was mentioning that I am interested in real estate. My dentist then mentioned that she already has a few properties in Ecuador.
Her plan was to move there in a few years as it’s an amazing place to retire and live in general. That sounded interesting to me as I’ve contemplated living out of the country from time to time ever since reading Tim Ferriss and his book The 4-Hour Work Week.
It’s funny because now, she’s already living there. She accomplished her dream and i’m so happy for her!
My wife and I are in the process to move to her hometown in Russia. There’s a few reasons for this. Some of the biggest reasons are around having a few more helping hands to help with our family. That and to be able to save more of our income is another big driving force behind the move. We currently spend between 5-7K especially if there’s 2 mortgages we need to pay for.
The same life in Russia costs around $1,500 to $2,000 for a luxurious life. On my income, I know we would be able to live a great life without much financial stress.
One of my favorite sayings is ” Earn dollars live on pesos, compensate in rupees.” So the goal is to earn the American dollar. That is one of the highest valued currencies in the world. Live on pesos or another form of currency that’s not only affordable but gives you a wide range of options to live a great lifestyle. Then you can compensate employees of your business (if you have one) in a more cost effective currency.
My focus now is in earning as much money as I possibly can while also continuing to build out my social media businesses.
God willing I can start to earn a full time income from my blogs and youtube channel to start cushioning my sales job income.
The way I see it is you only need a few articles or videos to do really well for things to take off so you never know.
Quality over quantity.
If you can’t win the game, change the rules, if you can’t change the rules, ignore them.
Moving out of the country would provide so many additional benefits like extremely affordable housing and healthcare, much higher quality of life as the climate is extremely attractive as well, and the people there are so friendly.
There are dozens of other amazing things about moving abroad that we can cover in another blog post but this is the start of something amazing and I wanted to share it with my audience.
What lies ahead?
The move to Russia is our biggest focus outside of eliminating our remaining debt.
We’ll do a test run for 3 months before going all in on living abroad. I’m excited because if we enjoy it and it’s feasible to work abroad, we will be in an amazing situation financially.
We look forward to updating you guys throughout the weeks and months that follow about our mindset and things we have found useful to the world around us.
Until next time
