You Can Reach Financial Independence Even if You Don’t Earn 6 Figures

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a real method to get rich quickly? Unfortunately, the only ones who get rich from get-rich-quick schemes are the scammers who sell them to people desperate to escape poverty.

You Can Reach Financial Independence Even if You Don’t Earn 6 Figures

Financial independence isn’t determined by a set number of dollars. It depends on your personal situation—the balance between your passive income and your expenses.

How Much Does One Need for Financial Independence?

Your Path to Financial Independence

Whether your FI (or FU) number is $1 million, $2 million, or any other number, there are several ways you can reach it. Ideally, you want to combine several to maximize your chance for success and reach it as early as possible.

Review your spending in the past year and identify which things on which you spent money didn’t bring you enough enjoyment to justify the amount spent.

Step 1

Step 2

Look far into the future (whether a decade or several depends on your age, your current net worth, and how long you’re willing to keep working toward your FI point).

Invest in yourself by getting trained in something you’d enjoy doing and that would make you more effective and productive at work (some employers will not just cover the cost of such training, but will even pay your regular salary for time spent in training).

Step 3

Invest for passive income. Every dollar you reduce from your expenses, and at least half the extra dollars you bring in, should go to investing for your FI. 

Step 4

The short of it is that you need to start early (e.g., when you’re 20), set aside 10% of your likely meager income at that point, then, each time you increase your earnings, divert half of the extra income to your long-term investments.

You Don’t Need to Be Earning 6 Figures to Reach Financial Independence