Sample Path to Financial Freedom

Everyone’s financial journey is different. Below is a sample path that can lead you from any financial situation to a life of financial freedom. Adjust as needed to fit your personal finance situation, and that of your household.

Steps: 
1. Embrace gratitude towards God. Face life with a positive, grateful attitude, accepting and anticipating abundance and prosperity. Act with discipline and consistency with a long term perspective. You can develop these traits over time. Be generous towards others. The most important thing is to act in love towards God, others and yourself as you take action.

2. Track your current financial situation: Expenses, Income, Savings, and all other financial accounts to get a complete financial perspective. To progress on your path you need to know where you are starting from. For this and all financial tracking, digital resources are more useful than pen and paper, and there are free online and app resources available.

Example platform: M1 Finance allows high yield saving and investing in 1 platform.

If you do not have internet access, even at a library, then use pen and paper. If pen and paper are too expensive use whatever next best resource is available to you, even if it is general broad tracking using rocks and dirt.

3. Create a monthly budget.
A. Include all of your income and expenses.
B. Prioritize needs and debt repayment over wants.
C. Any excess in the budget after needs, debt repayment and wants should go into a savings/investment bucket.
D. Any annual expenses should be divided by 12 and included.
E. Include 10% tithe. If 10% seems too much, tithe as much as you reasonably can until you reach 10% as your financial situation improves

4. Reduce your expenses as much as you comfortably can. Revaluate what expenses are really needs versus wants.

5.Boost your income.
A. Ask for a raise or promotion
B. Take on a side gig or start your own business while keeping your main job until your side job exceeds your main job income proportionally. Always balance risk and reward. In the digital age, information product and service businesses can be started at zero to low cost, and can scale relatively quickly. Start with a minimal viable product, test the market, adapt and grow.

6. Continuously widen the financial gap between your expenses and income as this gap will determine your disposable income which in turn will determine how much you can invest.

7. Save $1,000 in an emergency fund.

8. Pay off debt relatively quickly using the Avalanche method:
A. Create a 4 column tracker with columns: Debt/Vendor, Amount_Owed, Interest_Rate, Minimum_Payment
B. List all your debts in order from highest to lowest interest rate, excluding your mortgage. However, still account for your mortgage in your budget.
C. Allocate funds to meet all your minimum payments. Apply left over disposable income from your budget to the highest interest rate debt.
D. Once the highest interest rate debt is paid off, apply the amount that went to it to the next highest interest debt
E. Repeat paying off the debts in this order until all debts other than mortgage are paid off

9. Grow emergency fund to equivalent of 3 to 6 months worth of expenses

10. Shift your disposable income into investments, aiming to save at least 15%. If this seems like too much, then invest as much as you’re comfortable with and grow your allocation by 1% a month until you reach at least 15%.
A. Focus on maxing out any tax advantaged funds first
B. For any leftover disposable income, invest as much as you can in at least 2 broad-based index funds on a reputable financial platform with either zero or low fees. These are already diversified, low cost (often with fees less than 0.1%), match the performance of the market they track, and carry relatively low risk in the long term.
C. Pay off your mortgage
D. Increase your investment percentage as much as possible to accelerate towards your financial freedom goals

11. Invest time, energy and money in yourself. Seek education and self-improvement.

12. Continue to increase your income. While there is a limit to how much you can save, there is no limit to how much you can earn.

13. Give generously of your time, energy, knowledge and finances.

14. Choose to enjoy life, even the struggles.

15. Be guided by the love of Lord Jesus Christ as you pursue and surpass your financial freedom goals.

Works Cited:
Assistance provided by Microsoft Copilot in grammar and spelling adjustments