The Truth Will Set You Free

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Don posted a blog post about his struggle with what to do with himself right now. Specifically, whether he should pursue his love, film-making, or pursue a paycheck and dabble in film on weekends he had free. Its a difficult choice: saftey and security or happiness and self-fulfillment.

Its a choice we've all had to make at some point, for me at several points in my life. The most recent was applying for and taking an accounting job when I really wanted to do was to continue to teach voice, because accounting was a steady (and larger) paycheck.

You might think that I'm unhappy, defeated, etc about it, but I'm not. Something fairly interesting happened to me, and to my mindset, several months ago that changed my situation from where I had to be to where I wanted to be. I've struggled with explaining to people how this happened, or how it works, and I've written and deleted several blog posts that weren't quite right. Hopefully, this one will be better.

I spent time trying to live as a singer, and then as a voice teacher. Before that I tried a soul sucking but well paying job in genetics (my major). Neither really worked. Obviously the soul sucking job didn't work. I hated it, and I hated myself for accepting it. At first pursuing music was great, but because I didn't just have to enjoy it but live off of it, that faded quickly. When your livelihood is dependent on whether people like you and what you've created, its takes all the joy out of creating and replaces it with varying degrees of pressure, fear, and insecurity about why it works one time and not another. In the end, neither makes me happy.

I started working at Roadside as an accountant to survive, but found I actually enjoy it. The work is decently challenging and I like the people who are here. Even better, the work is fulfilling my actual dream: to do the things I love as much as I want without needing to make money from them. To have my entire day free to sing, write, dance, spend time with family, spend time with friends, work on a new skill, or travel the world.

How does this happen? Passive income. We've been chasing that for a while, but the book Your Money or Your Life gave me a fail safe path to it, even if Jeremy's real estate never comes through. After reading this book, it became completely and totally real to me. It will happen, there is no doubt in my mind. I've done the math, I've charted the course. Worst case senario is that it won't happen for 18 years. More likely is around 10 years, and if we do well in the next few years and there are significant increases in our income, it could as little as 5 years. 5 years. That's retirement at age 35, without major windfalls or making millions of dollars a year.

You should really read the book, but it involves paying off debt, lowering expenses, increasing income and saving all the extra income until it builds up to paying interest and dividends high enough to cover all your living expenses. There's a lot of math and explanation to our plan, but here's the first part: paying off our debt by the end of the year.

We pay over $1000 a month in debt payments: credit cards, personal loans, car loan, timeshare mortgage and taxes. We have put together a debt snowball to pay all this off, and when that's done, the $1000 in minimum payments plus the extra we pay all goes into savings every month. Currently we expect to have $3000 extra a month to put into savings. And that's without Jeremy making more as a grip or me getting any raises.

That adds up fast, and the end result is enough savings to kick off interest payments that cover our living expenses. Knowing that I'm creating that life for myself, every day I work, makes me feel so good, so fulfilled that I don't need to do the artistic stuff also. When I have a bad day and I don't like my job, all I have to do is look at this and I'm inspired again.

I would never have believed it if someone had told me this five years ago. I believe my response would have been something like "that hasn't worked since the 50s." But you can't get away from math. The math shows the truth, and that truth has set me free. I have a job that's secure AND emotionally fulfilling. Who knew it was that easy?