Oct 31, 2012

This episode is about saving money and it's relationship with freedom. Many people are trapped in a "wage slavery" lifestyle, living from month to month. Although their income rises during their career, their expenses scale correspondingly (or even lead ahead, creating debt). There are two approaches to developing the savings that allow get you out of this trap:

• One route is to increase earnings without increasing expenses, creating savings. The difficulty with this approach is that the higher the income, the bigger the tendency or temptation to spend more on a more comfortable lifestyle.
• The other approach is to decrease expenses without decreasing earnings, by focussing on minimising living expenses as much as possible. The challenge with this approach is to do so without losing income (for example, moving to a low cost location might not make it possible to keep a well paid job).

Jake talks about his experience focussing on the first approach and discusses some of the benefits in terms of freedom that saving provides:

• Developing an emergency fund of approximately 3 months expenses reduces a huge amount of stress associated with living month to month and enables you to cope with unexpected expenses or irregular cashflow.
• Developing savings to cover 1 year of expenses opens up a huge degree of freedom, for example to start your own business, to leave a job if you don't like it or even to change your life in other ways such as by emigrating to another country.