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Creating Value Through Financial Freedom
It’s the June holidays and I brought my daughter to the Singapore Zoological Gardens to see the animals and experience a day out with her. It was a fun time although the weather was very hot and the perspiration was free with the Zoo experience
The zoo entrance fees are not cheap at $20 for adults and $13 for children (3-12 years) and yet many flock to the zoo on repeat visits.
It got me thinking about the value proposition that the zoo was able to create and still retain its customers.
Your Own Value Creation Process
The road towards financial freedom requires you to develop your own value creation process. For many of us, studying hard, getting a good job and sustaining that career is one form of value creation.
To do that successfully, we have to continously improve on our personal contributions to the organisation and the work that we do. That requires us to gain domain knowledge, acquire relevant skills to the workplace and to develop good working relationships within the team and within the organisation.
For professionals, our value creation process relies on some form of continuing professional education such as attending talks, seminars or conferences related to our areas. It also includes developing softskills such as inter-personal relationships, written and oral communication as well as networking.
If you want to know how to become financially free, you need to know how to create value in the conventional sense, i.e. through earned income from career or from running a business or from investing. This requires you to develop some capability to do so. Capability development comes from self-directed learning and attending formal training. For a start, I find that always reading in areas that I want to grow helps a lot.
Public libraries and a great free resource to read many classics in personal finance. That is how I read many of the books related to personal finance. Personal finance blogs abound and there are many blogs that talk about personal finance besides this one.
Value Creation Habits
Having a mindset on value creation extends beyond your career. In life, I believe if you give more than you get in return, good things happen. Of course, life can sometimes be unfair but I do believe in the golden rule of not doing onto others what you yourself do not desire.
Thus, I have been giving away my “Panzer’s Guide to Financial Freedom” that I wrote back in 2008/9 to many people over the years free-of-charge. “Panzer’s Guide” contains many of the thoughts and ideas that I have come across in my journey towards financial freedom.
Some of the habits that I started out in 2008 such as recording my expenditure has stuck with me and I feel uncomfortable if I don’t update my Excel worksheet on expenditure. Although I don’t focus too much on the specific amount of savings each month, I get a degree of satisfaction knowing that my spending is within the limits that I’ve given myself.
Value creation for financial freedom starts with us. We are the main income generating asset in our lives. We determine what and how value can be created for ourselves. We determine how that value creating generates assets that provide passive income or is used up in consumption.
Share with Panzer what are some of your own ways in creating value towards financial freedom.
Be well and prosper.