One my top goals in life is to have financial freedom. What is financial freedom? I don’t think there’s an official meaning for it but here’s my definition. You are financially free when you can decide to do what you want when you want. That also implies at any point in time you can be anywhere you please. This doesn’t mean I want to live like a hippy and constantly travel and never settle, it’s just I want to be able to do so if I wish. Moreover it also allows me to live in whichever country I like. There are of course limitations, for now my definition of whichever is limited to the European union, but it could expand. To be financially free one needs a fairly stable income stream. Let’s enumerate some the properties of such income source.

  1. It doesn’t require daily interactions.
  2. It does not require physical presence.
  3. Should generate cash around the clock.
  4. Potential to grow.
  5. ?

What sort of business checks all the boxes?

  • Selling digital goods or services.
    • Apps
    • E-books
    • Learning programs
    • SaaS services!
    • Podcasts
    • Digital Arts (Not made to order!)
    • ?
  • Selling physical goods in a fully outsources manner.
  • Owning businesses.
    • Shares of publicly traded companies
    • Holding equity in private companies

There’s no need to focus on only one business. You could enjoy taking photograph and licensing them and also maintain two popular mobile Apps, together you could generate enough cash to sustain yourself. However this example is not robust enough, those two apps could easily lose their mojo and your old photographs might soon go out of fashion (for whatever reason). That’s why you need to generate more than you spend for a few years and try to own other businesses with your surplus cash and basically become an investor by yourself. One advantage of decoupling your source of income from time and space is that you can move to cheaper and probably nicer city and reduce costs while enjoying yourself. This way you will even have more surplus of cash.

There are many ways of making money but the only way to be truly financial independent and free is to own businesses that will take care of themselves. Hope this helps.