What does Financial Freedom mean?

What does "financial freedom" even mean?

We see this term thrown around a lot especially in the investing world.

Everyone wants to reach financial freedom. But what does that even mean?

Does it mean you don't need to work anymore?

Does it mean you don't need money anymore?

Does it mean you have enough money to live forever?

The term gets used typically with no definition. If there's no definition how do you ever achieve it?

I think financial freedom is unique to everyone and needs to be reverse engineered based on how you want your life to look.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

-How do I want my life to look in 10, 20, 30+ years from now? What are the things I want to be doing, where do I want to live, how expensive of a house do I want?

-How much money do I think I'm going to need per month and per year to be able to live the way I just described?

-Based on that, how am I going to get that money? Will it be paid to me in cash flow from real estate? Dividends from the stock market? Retirement account distributions, cash from savings, etc.?

-What net worth am I going to need to realize this kind if income from real estate, dividends, etc.?

-At what age am I looking to achieve this by?

Based on all that, what do I need to be doing right now to get there? How much per month do I need to invest? How much cash flow from real estate am I going to need to add each year? How much real estate will I need to get to that number? How much will I need in brokerage to pull that kind of money out and not run out?

Only once you have started to map all this out can you truly start to define what and how financial freedom looks to you and what steps you need to start taking to get there.

It's a great goal to shoot for, but you must have a plan!