We will now go into detail about the basics of career, which can be extremely hard to choose.
The traditional path is to go to school, study hard and get a job for the rest of your life.
Luckily, this is not the only path to choose in life.
The basics of career are pretty simple, and leaves you with 3 choices:
- You study first and get a job (that you like) which pays salary every month;
- You could use a percentage of this salary to invest in index funds, stocks, etc.;
- You could also start your own business, which basically is the only way to go if your goal is to become financially independent early in life;
Most people settle with the traditional mindset that we learn in school and that our parents often preach, which is to go to school, study until we’re 25, and than get a good paying job.
The major disadvantage is that schooling nowadays costs a lot of money, so we have to start our lives by taking on a massive loan for our studies. This all in the hopes of finding a good job with a decent salary that will help to pay back our student loans.
The problem with this kind of mindset is that basically we sign up to be a worker for the rest of our lives for a boss that runs his/her own company. We only get our monthly salary, and all of the profits go to the boss of the company.
This problem is called living paycheck-to-paycheck, and results in always being dependent on extern factors. You have zero control over your finances!
You could be fired at any time (even if you did nothing wrong), your job could become obsolete, your company could go bankrupt, or you could have an accident that leaves you disabled. The examples are truly endless. But you have zero control!
Another major problem is that you will only get $2000 per month (for example), and the only way to earn more is to work lots of overtime, or take on a second job (which costs even more of your precious time)!
“As long as you are not locking in (investing), you will always be clocking in (at work).”
Than we come to our second option, which is to use a percentage of your monthly salary to invest in index funds, stock, cryptocurrencies, or whatever your choice is.
The major problem with index funds or stocks is that you will have to live on a tight budget for a very long time, because these investments are rather slow!
These could be proven methods to become financially independent, if you know what you’re doing, but the rewards will come (too) late in your life.
Index funds for example are a pretty safe, diversified and low-cost method to achieve financial independence, but they will take half of your lifetime to compound to your goal (maybe 40 years?).
The third and only fast option that we have pointed out for your career is starting your own business. We have already written a blog article about a genius book that you could read about this, which is called The Millionaire Fastlane. In this book you will learn all the basics about starting your own business and how to evaluate business ideas. He explains it all.
Our blog article about this book can be found here.
You will learn more about your career choices throughout our website and blog articles!