Today I want to talk about the reason I’m most excited about having side hustles. For me its not just about increasing my income, in fact its the opportunity to increase my savings rate from its current ~30% of my income up to my target of 50%. But why? Surely the main objective of having more money is to buy a nicer car, live in a nicer house. I’ve tried that before, I’ve lived in the fancy townhome in the HoA managed community next to the people with the Range Rovers and the new Mercedes. I hated it and based on my conversations with my neighbors I think they all did too. Everything become a comparison which sucks. I don’t want to feel judged if I treat myself to a junky fast food breakfast! It might not be haute cuisine, but for a simple treat or reward for myself its my definite go to.
The biggest luxury I can think of is having more time, not having fancier cars with more things to go wrong or having a house with extra bedrooms I’ll never use. If I don’t feel my time is being used in a valuable way then I don’t want to be doing that task. Having time to go on vacation and not worry about where my job is at, having time to spend with my family and partner, these are the things that make me wake up an hour early to blog, or work that second job.
This has led to me really believeing in financial freedom and really pushing myself to fund my dreams without relying on income that I don’t control the source of. Doesn’t that sound great? No more waking up at 5am and wondering if you’re next in line to get a promotion. I want to remove that cognitive load and create my own promotion, my own opportunity and I think that anybody can do this. The internet doesn’t depend on your status in life or where you started from, all you need to create a blog is an idea and a library card.
Another big driver of my savings rate and increasing it is knowing that I might not be the smartest person in the room, and that we are all a heartbeat away from being unemployed – all it takes is a change of boss or even change of daily tasks to turn a dream job into a must-escape situation, and having financial freedom gives you the best boat possible to weather this great ocean called life, and the easiest way I’ve found to build the resources we need to thrive on our journey through it is to save at a high rate and consistently invest.
A lot of people who work in technology are so focussed on building things for the future that they have forgotten how to build their future itself. An example of this is the furious growth of all these on-demand (and thus more expensive) services in the major tech hubs, Seattle where I live and San Francisco being the key examples. I find it bizarre that people would rather pay $10 a day to have their meals delivered, or buy a $8 pre-made sandwich rather than spend that same $8 on enough ingredients to make sandwiches every day for a whole week.
Sure, I could afford to pay for all these services, however I just can’t bring myself too and on top of that instant gratification makes it too simple to just spend as ‘it’s easy’. This is easily the biggest failing I see in my generation of tech workers – we want everything immediately, but more importantly now we can get it. We also like to assume that the good times won’t end – I certainly don’t want to have to work all the way till I turn 65.
Once you accept the power of changing just a few small decisions, you can see how easy it is to build a future for yourself, even while working on creating the future for everyone else. For me the most recent example of this is my coffee habit – I used to pay $5 a day for a venti latte from my neighborhood barista, even though I have a perfectly serviceable Keurig at home. In January this year I re-evaluated my financial goals and decided that this would be my first change to stretch my monthly savings, and in fact the first thing I bought with my side hustle income was a flask to take a nice homemade coffee with me on my commute. Even factoring in the cost of a coffee pod, milk, electricity and water these coffees are now costing me about $1, that’s $4 a day! Now every day I’m putting $4 a day into investments or into my hustles which are the best kind of investment – investing in yourself!
I am a financial freedom hustler and entrepreneur based in Seattle, WA. I run this blog to share the tools and techniques I use to stretch my income and radically increase my savings rate for the future in the hope it inspires and helps you to build your own version of the future.