ThinkOfThe.Money
Financial Panther – one of my favourite personal finance blogs – has a good post today on The Parallels Between College Life And Financial Independence. It’s one of those posts about the life goals and wider thinking around personal finance, rather than the nuts and bolts of financial planning. These are often the best kinds of personal finance reading.
This quote summarises the whole post:
“…the things that made me happy in school are pretty similar to the things that I want out of financial independence.”
The general theme is that having more control of your life, and control of how you use your time in particular, is a route to greater life satisfaction. This is a core idea in financial independence, and is also reflected in the king and lifestyles story.
“I loved having control of my time like this. … I could control what I was doing and when I did it. "
I totally agree with this. Financial Panther talks about how he was able to put in a lot of hours of work on a daily basis at uni, which was possible because there was a clear goal and an end-date in sight. I remember the same thing from my own time at university. It was enjoyable to put huge amounts of effort in. The key aspect here is that this is work with a clear objective and with autonomy on how to achieve it.
The post also mentions a loathing of regular status update meetings in most jobs, and again I can relate to this! Regular status updates will poison any sense of autonomy that might have existed.
It’s good to think through these kinds of wider themes around financial independence, especially ones that bring more focus to the independence part of that.