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22 Reasons Why You Are Not Financially Free

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Money can’t buy happiness but it can buy freedom. Many people out there desperately want to be financially free, and why wouldn’t they? While money may not buy happiness it can buy a better, less stressful, and more fulfilled life.

Money isn’t about being rich. Money is about choice and the freedom that goes along with being able to make decisions when money is not an issue. However, before you can be a millionaire you need to have the right strategy and know the reasons why you haven’t met this goal yet.

1. Have a Purpose

Your life purpose consists of your motivating aims, your definition, and your personal meaning of life.

Having a purpose in life is a fundamental factor of happiness, decision making, influencing behavior, shaping goals, having a sense of direction.


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Success is something that you have to define for yourself, and no one can do it for you. Success could mean financial stability, good health, a sense of giving back, a sense of accomplishment, or having the freedom to be able to do the things you love.

An example: Many millionaires didn’t just start off following selfish interests and goals to buy luxury cars and expensive homes. They had bigger purposes and goals to uplift the lives of their families and communities.

2. Feed your Ambition

Ambition is the fuel that drives purpose, therefore if you lack purpose then you will automatically lack ambition.

There’s a saying AMBITION CHASES THE REWARD, WHILE REWARDS fulfills the PURPOSE

Ambition is an intention to achieve something great in life. It relates to the feelings, emotions, and desires of any individual, It is supported by healthy self-esteem with unyielding determination. The achievement of such goals imparts motivation to perform better, which ultimately leads the individual to reach his objectives and aspirations.

One thing that researchers can agree on is that a healthy amount of ambition can help you succeed in many ways. Driving ambition in healthy amounts can help you grow as a person as well as become a stronger individual in mind and body.

3. Set Clear Goals

Have you thought about what your life will be like in five years’ time?  If you want to succeed, you need to set goals. Without goals, you lack focus and direction. Goal setting not only allows you to take control of your life’s direction; it also provides you a benchmark for determining whether you are actually succeeding. 

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People who don’t have clear goals aren’t going to make smart money decisions. But with a specific goal in mind, such as getting out of debt or saving up for a home, or opening a business makes it much easier for you to say no to tempting opportunities.

With a vision in place, set clear goals and work steadily toward achieving them. Your business objectives should be specific, achievable, relevant, and measurable. Don’t forget to set short-term and long-term goals.

4. Focus

Perhaps the greatest hindrance to financial success is a lack of focus. Focus is so important because it is the gateway to all thinking: perception, memory, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision making. It simply involves the ability to pay attention to things that will help and avoid distractions that will hurt your work efforts.

Focus is the key to success. You must focus on what you want in your life and go after that 100%. Yes, there will be distractions and obstacles that you have to face every now and then but you must overcome them otherwise all aspects of your ability to think will suffer.

Chairman of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, said that he gets about 5,000 new business ideas every day. Unfortunately, he is forced to turn them all down preferring to remain focused on delivering quality service to the millions of customers and suppliers who visit his online stores every day.

5. Life-Long Learning

For most people, learning stops as soon as they graduate college or university.

Continuous learning is indeed a lifestyle choice. Sadly, most people lose the desire to learn something new to improve their lives. they forget that we live in a world that is constantly changing. Therefore, we need to continuously hone our abilities. 

Taking the time to keep your skillset and knowledge base up to date makes you more valuable to your colleagues, clients, and future partners.

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”   Benjamin Franklin

6. Health is Wealth

The proverb means the state of well-being, free from disease or diseases, both physical and mental is indeed wealth.

You need to work to make money, and you need to be healthy in order to work. The rich understand that, and 98% of millionaires consider good health to be their most important personal asset,

7. Be Willing to Make Sacrifices

You really cannot have your cake and eat it too, there are things that you will need to give up. If you can’t sacrifice things like hanging with friends or going out and partying in order to focus on your career or business, then you will never get the financial success you have been looking for.

Elon Musk once said of his work ethic – “All night — no friends, nothing”, but this is his definition of success, maybe you don’t have to sacrifice this much. It really depends on your own dreams and definition of success.

8. Correct your Limiting Beliefs

A limiting belief is a state of mind, conviction, or belief that you think to be true that limits you in some way. But it’s all they are beliefs. Beliefs that limit your true potential- from making good choices, taking new opportunities, or reaching success.

Sample Limiting Beliefs:

  • Limiting Belief: My background or location prevents my success. You can learn, you can transfer, you can start to build capital- there are so many things that you can start with. Be creative because really, nothing can prevent you from success.
  • Limiting Belief: Money is evil and it can’t buy happiness. 1. Money only magnifies who you really are (good or bad). 2. Money is your ticket to freedom, to live life on your own terms. Freedom can lead to happiness.

9. Take Risks

Taking a risk to achieve a goal requires courage to face the fear of uncertainty. No matter the outcome, either way, we grow through the process and become more resilient and confident.

Risk-taking enables and encourages innovation. Indeed it is easy to become content with staying in your lane financially but failed risks aren’t always negative. Sometimes, they provide the most valuable business lessons an entrepreneur can learn.

A healthy respect for risk is good when it comes to preserving your wealth, but a total aversion to risk can hinder your ability to ever build wealth.

10. Act on Your Good Ideas

It’s one thing to come up with a million-dollar idea, but it’s a completely different thing to act on them. If you are more of a dreamer who never puts his money where his mouth is, you’ll never get rich.

Successful people don’t sit around and watch others advance in life.

  1. They take action towards their goals.
  2. They are willing to put in the time, effort, and energy.
  3. They consider time and energy to be an investment.
  4. They understand they won’t get immediate results.
  5. They are willing to do whatever it takes to get the results their aiming for.

11. Develop Discipline

Lack of discipline is perhaps one of the greatest hindrances to financial success because discipline brings stability and structure into a person’s life. It teaches a person to be responsible and respectful.

  • Discipline equals perseverance
  • It helps you to focus on your goals
  • Makes you stick to the work you want to get done in order to achieve success
  • Gives you the drive to ignore current pleasures for bigger rewards to come

12. Be Patient

One of the most underestimated characteristics when it comes to achieving success is Patience. Perfecting anything in life takes time. Success is not an overnight type of deal. It takes months, years, and most of the time decades to become great at something.

When you learn patience, you learn to think critically. You learn what you need to do to get to where you want to go.

Patience gives you the strength to remain calm when facing difficulties and adversity.


13. Kill Procrastination

Procrastination is perhaps the greatest enemy of success and as such, the greatest roadblock to becoming successful. Yes, everyone procrastinates. Even the most successful people struggle with it every day. But successful people do something that most of us don’t, they push past it. They don’t make excuses or allow it to affect their output.

You might have a strong desire to do something, but if you wait until the final possible moment to tackle an important task. This can result in decreased potential and performance, and in extreme cases can cause failure.

Procrastination is detrimental to your success in life.

14. Work Smart

Working smart means conserving energy. It is figuring out what your strengths are and building a network around you to build upon those in order to reach goals in the quickest and most efficient way possible.

Working smart means knowing how to delegate and leverage. It doesn’t mean you don’t ever need to work hard because some tasks demand some sort of physical energy

To work smart, you have to make your brain work to your advantage.

The law of leverage.

  • Learn how to leverage other people’s time.
  • Learn how to leverage other people’s money.
  • Learn how to leverage other people’s skills and talents.
  • Learn how to leverage machines and automation.

15. Manage your Time Wisely

It has often been said that “Time is Money” and it is. All of us have only 24 hours in a single day. More or less we are obligated to spend 8 of those hours either working, going to school, or being responsible for something. Our body then requests at least 8 hours of sleep, the remaining 8 hours are then at our discretion.

We can spend that time either scrolling on Social media, binging on Netflix, hanging out with friends or we can exercise, work on ourselves, take on a goal or build a business.

The difference between the rich and the poor is decided on how we spend those 8 hours. Time makes the Difference. How you Spend your day will determine, your future.

16. Be Consistent

Consistency is all about repetition. It’s about repeating the same actions (habits and routines) over and over again. Consistency helps build momentum. It leads to progress, which speeds up the achievement of what you want.

Most successful people implement just one business idea and remain faithful and consistent with it for a long time.

17. Face your Fears

The greatest roadblock holding most people back from becoming successful is FEAR.

In life it is inevitable that you will fail, you will make mistakes, and you need to learn to get over it. Life is about taking risks. Learning how to analyze, calculate, manage and take calculated risks is a common trait many successful people have.

There are different faces of Fear, but the most common success killing fears are:

  1. The Fear of Success involves being afraid of achievement, often to the point that people will sabotage themselves. 
  2. The Fear of Failure can cause us to do nothing, and therefore resist moving forward.
  3. The Fear of Change causes people to avoid changing their circumstances due to being extremely afraid of the unknown.

18. Keeping up with the Joneses Syndrome

“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like.” -Will Rogers

Keeping up with the Joneses is an idiom that represents the comparison to your peers or neighbors as a benchmark for the kind of material goods and lifestyle you should have.

Measuring your financial success against that of your peers and letting their spending behavior influence your own is a very dangerous game. Keeping up with the Joneses will make you broke and unhappy. You will never be happy no matter how much money you spend because you will constantly compare yourself to EVERYONE. The worst part is you might go into debt because that’s the only way you feel like you can keep up.

19. Save and Invest

Saving money typically means it is available when we need it. We usually save money for purchases and emergencies. The obvious (but often ignored) principle – “If you don’t save money, you’re never going to be rich”, is a fact that should be taken seriously because even if you earn seven figures if you spend it all, your net worth is still zero.

Investing, on the other hand, is typically long-term and it offers the best means to achieve your long-term goals to be financially free. Good investment ideas have a high probability of success. So bet on yourself and your future.

20. Don’t Live Beyond Your Means

If you have more than enough income for the basics and your future needs such as:

  • Healthy savings account
  • Adequate retirement savings
  • Passive income
  • Healthy investments

Then there’s nothing wrong with enjoying life’s pleasures, you deserve it. But spending more than you earn like indulging in vacations, and overspending on clothes and cars can put you in a dangerous hole of debt that will keep you working hard for a long time.

21.  Connect with the Right People

They say your “Network is your Net worth”. You won’t become successful in life if you spend time with lazy people who aren’t interested in living a successful life.

Having a connection with the right people is the key to success.  Too often we find ourselves in relationships that drain the very life out of us. If you want to make a positive change in your life, you should remember that the people around you have a critical influence on your energy, growth, and probability of success.

22. Develop a Millionaire Mindset

The biggest difference between the rich and average people is not found in their education, luck, skills, or choice of investments — it’s found in their mindset. Mindset defines how you think, speak and act. It defines your vocabulary.

The millionaire mindset is a way of thinking that can change your fortune, future, and business. It’s how you can achieve financial success from average results. If you want to be a millionaire, you need to learn how to think, act, and feel like a millionaire.

Conclusion

Opportunities and chances come equally to everyone, and when they do, the saying ” When opportunity meets preparation comes into play” if you are not prepared, you lack vision, and financial discipline, that opportunity might not translate to financial success.

Everyone has the ability to succeed. The difference between someone mediocre and someone who has achieved greatness is the determination and drive they put into what they do. Even the mediocre can achieve success by working smart.

Being wealthy is not only having enough money to meet your needs but being able to afford not to work if you don’t have to. It’s about amassing assets and making your money work for you. In other words, it’s having a significant net worth.

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16 Comments

  • Reply leena November 17, 2021 at 10:46 am

    Beautiful post, so well written and such excellent advice, thank you for sharing I will be trying to implement some of your tips x

    • Reply Lani November 18, 2021 at 7:40 am

      Hi Leena,

      I’m glad you enjoyed this post. Hope it works out for you.

  • Reply Crystal Green November 17, 2021 at 7:46 pm

    This list covers everything a person needs to be financially sound. I definitely need to put many of these things into action!

    • Reply Lani November 18, 2021 at 7:39 am

      Hi Crystal,

      Thanks for your comment. Like you, I’m also working on this list. Glad it helped though.

  • Reply Collins Nwokolo November 18, 2021 at 5:58 am

    This is such an insightful post. I made a lot of these mistakes when I started investing early. However, I started making good decisions.

    • Reply Lani November 18, 2021 at 7:38 am

      Hi Collins,

      Thanks for your comment. They say we learn from making mistakes right? Happy to hear you’re on the right track.

  • Reply Julianne November 18, 2021 at 1:47 pm

    Such great tips here! I’m still young and starting out on my own financially. I feel like so many people learn these tips the hard way! Thank you so much for sharing.

    • Reply Lani November 18, 2021 at 11:52 pm

      Hi Julianne,

      Thanks for your comment. How wonderful it is to start young! You definitely have a huge advantage, hope you use these tips for your benefit!

  • Reply Kaybee Lives November 18, 2021 at 4:43 pm

    Love this! There are so many limiting beliefs that people have which causes them to not take action with their finances. Thanks for bringing up these great ideas and sharing them with us!

    • Reply Lani November 18, 2021 at 11:51 pm

      Hi Kaybee,

      Thanks for your comment. I hope something in the list resonates with you and you can work on it.

  • Reply Tamera-YourChristianBestFriend November 19, 2021 at 10:32 am

    Great tips! I’m still working on killing procrastination.

    • Reply Lani November 22, 2021 at 1:43 am

      Hi Tamera,

      Thanks for your comment. Like you, I battle with procrastination often but that just means we’re human. So just keep pushing forward, never give up!

      • Reply Meghan November 22, 2021 at 1:10 pm

        This is a fantastic article! For me, the limiting beliefs one was a hurdle I struggled with for years but I’m finally starting to overcome it! The health one is also a big one for me, so this serves as a reminder to take care of myself. Thanks for sharing!

        • Reply Lani November 23, 2021 at 6:50 am

          Hi Meghan,

          Thanks for your comment. I’m glad you loved the post. Like you, one of my issues is also limiting beliefs so I work on it every day! Glad you are on the same path as me.

  • Reply Krysten Quiles November 19, 2021 at 8:11 pm

    Wow, this puts a lot of things into perspective, thank you!

    • Reply Lani November 22, 2021 at 1:41 am

      Hi Krysten,

      Thanks for your comment. Yes, it definitely puts things in perspective. Hope it works for you.

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