How to increase your free time by 500% - a true story (and the investment strategy to get there faster)

Let’s do some scary math:

Health experts say you should sleep 8 hours a day.

Fitness experts say you should exercise or walk for an hour a day.

Mental health experts say you should meditate for 20 minutes a day.

Finance experts say you should to cook at home to save money. Together with grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and eating, let’s put that at 2 hours a day.

And let’s put personal hygiene at 40 minutes a day.

That’s a total of 12 hours. 12 hours of your day is necessary to be a healthy, clean, frugal human being. That's a lot.

Now let’s add a job.

Assuming you refuse to do a single minute of overtime, you’re at 8 hours a day.

Add an hour for your lunchbreak.

And an hour for commuting.

That’s at least 10 hours you’re spending away from home. Time you spend trying to maintain your job.

That adds up to 22 hours.

22 hours needed to be a normal, healthy, frugal, employee.

That gives you only two hours of real free time per day.

Two hours.

That’s only 8% of your day.

That’s tiny.

But it gets worst.

Most people get a worse outcome than that. In an effort to increase their free time, they sleep less than 8 hours a day, skip the gym, and order take-out.

All of these increase your risk of heart diseases and decreases your life expectancy.

So while you may think you’re saving time, you’re actually shortening your lifespan.

You’re losing time. You’re making things worse.

And all that so you can give your job your most energetic time, and your best years.

But It doesn’t have to be this way.

If you manage to live below your means, and invest the difference, you’ll start to get some passive income. Keep at it long enough and one day your passive income will match your expenses.

When you reach that point, you reached financial independence.

At this point, work becomes optional; you don’t need the money anymore. And if you quit your job, you won’t have to spend 10 hours of your day to that activity.

No more boring meetings.

No more tedious tasks.

And no more needless commuting.

You go from 2 hours of free time to 12.

That’s a 500% increase in free time.

And all you have to do is live below your means for a while.

Here's how I did it

I lived below my means, each month, since the age of 16. It took a while, but it aggregate into considerable savings. I then invested these savings in low-cost index funds (to avoid paying unnecessary commissions to Wall Street) and kept the strategy going for over a decade (to smooth out timing risk and the short-term uncertainty of the stock market).

Now the investing part was easy. When I understood that there is no better alternative than investing in a broad stock market index, I started ignoring sub-optimal asset class like savings account, gold, bonds, or real estate. This helped me get the mental nudge to start investing. Once I reached that level of awareness, investing stopped being a thrill. Instead it turned into a simple and repetitive process.

The first market downturn I experienced was terrifying; it filled me full of doubt. And the first bull market was a thrill (+30% in a year? Hell yeah!). But since then, each market movement became more and more dull. It became uninteresting. Investing seemed scary at first, but it's now a process I've conquered and tamed.

Investing is easy. The personal finance part is what's difficult.

Sure it's easy to resist the urge to spend money once. Declining a dinner invitation because you're saving up for a vacation? Pretty painless.

But doing it consistently for over a decade?

That's hard.

While your colleagues are upgrading their lifestyle, moving to fancier apartments, and buying nicer cars, you're saving money.

When your friends are going for their 7th brunch of the month, you're saving money.

And when your friends are organizing a last minute trip to Paris, you're declining and saving money.

Living below your means and not upgrading your lifestyle is tough. Your ego will trick you into believing you deserve to spend. The stress of your job will nudge you to book all-inclusive holidays. And some "friends" may shun you for not imitating their lifestyle expenses.

Psychologically, it's not easy.

But the rewards for seeing it through?

Retirement in your 30s? Never having to work again? No tedious meeting, senseless tasks, and ridiculous commuting traffic? That's priceless.

Imagine never fulfilling your dream of visiting Antartica, joining a surf school in Costa Rica, or a backpacking through Japan because you never could find the time or the money to leave your job?

Imagine having to work until the age of 67, when they're practically kicking you out because you're too old and falling asleep at your desk?

Worst yet, according to US social security data, only 73% of men live to age 67. Meaning 27% of men reading this will probably never get to retire.

I refuse to let that happen to me. That's why I insist so much on saving and investing. And I'm not worried about "living below my means". According to the howrichami calculator, the monthly $2,000 I was living on ranks me in the top 4.2% richest people in the world.

Top 4% richest person in the world and retire in my 30s? Yes please.

I don't know about you, but it sounds better than spending $3,700 per month, ranking in the top 1% richest people in the world, but retiring 30 later.

Don't believe me? Here's what investing $1,700 each month in the US market over the last 15 years would have given you:

That's right, almost a million dollars. For most, that's enough to retire.

Your spending matters.

Are you ready to increase your free time by 500%? Or is upgrading your lifestyle to fancier goodies more important?

Follow me if you're the former.

#personalfinance #investing #financialfreedom