Financial Freedom

I’ve been talking about Financial Freedom way before. I thought it was a long, long way to go. I thought I needed to earn lots and lots of money to achieve this. Everything changed after reading Francisco Colayco’s “Wealth within your Reach: Pera Mo, Palaguin Mo!” It was such an eye opener. My takeaway after reading it – START NOW!

It all made sense now – all that cash flow, assets, liabilities and other stuff I usually hate back in college. I’ve never really imagined how it’s important to everyone. There is a reason why everyone is taught these concepts. I thought back then that I would not need these because I’m from engineering, and these are business management stuff. There actually is such a thing as personal finance, and that you need to think that you should not be working all your life. You would have to make your money work harder for you. Just think about this – What will happen to you if you lose your job now? Where will you get your money when you retire?

The answer to that now is to have passive income, as Colayco would say. You have to plan it – know where you are right now and know where you want to be. You should live your life with restraint of your current income and your financial roadmap. Most of all, learn the value of time. If you have not thought about it, you need to think about right away, that is, today.

My struggle as a college student was to read lots of material, but as I started working, I’ve had this insatiable hunger to learn new stuff, making me read much more that I used to. Started out learning what I do as my day job and now, still can’t believe I am able to read a lot of stuff about finance without falling asleep. I guess when you really want something, nothing’s going to stop you – and yes, I want my Financial Freedom badly!

Join me in my journey to my financial freedom. I’ll try to share useful stuff. We can be a better Filipino by being part of a more responsible workforce. Let’s be wise about money.

Pizza Pig Out

 On my second job, I made it a point to save some amount every pay day. Its Salary minus SAVINGS equals Expenses as some of my workmates would put it. I would deposit part of my salary before I could spend a single peso from it. But how will I be able to go through the next pay day without getting bankrupt?

Its all about discipline, and making sure that you know how much you can spend each day. With the remaining amount on my payroll account, I would do some math to have those figures. Also, I make sure I allot some allowance in case something comes up (dota in netopia? haha!).

Here goes one of the specific restrictions I gave to myself - its not bad to eat out, but set a maximum you are gonna let out. That's 200 bucks for me. And I tell you, 200 pesos is a lot. See pizza right here? its just 200 bucks per person. Both pizzas are stuffed crust (additional 190 pesos), mind you - yes that's two pizzas, its just that I was not able to control my craving, we ate half before I took the photo. We had  a bottle of pepsi to let everything sink in. My friend had a palm card and that was all we needed to pig out. We were barely breathing after that meal.

Pizza by the way was terrific, that's triple cheese in stuffed crust and cheeze burger deluxe also in stuffed crust. Bill was exactly 602 pesos. Now, isn't that worth your money?! Maybe I'll be making another post about how much a feast this pig out was. :D

But wait, make sure you don't go out everyday!! Fwahahahah!

P.S.
If you see this signage right here ("PIZZA HUT TAKEOUT"), that branch of pizza hut lets you eat your take out inside the store. :) We just found out about that when we ate here, branch in Boni, GA Towers.

Three Steps Forward

These past few days, a lot of things were coming into my head - things to learn and make money out of.  I made some sort of a to-do list out of it. Here I go again, wanting to do so much - but this time, I'll make sure I'll get somewhere. I'm taking one step at a time and soon, definitely, I'll get there.

So here. Like most of my recent posts, I've been digging photography. Shot on the right is one of the firsts that I am happy about. This photo of Cecille was taken in Fully Booked, Bonifacio High Street, during Digital Photographer Philippines' 4th Anniversary Celebration. We were listening to a session about sports photography but ended up going around the venue because the room was filled up. We just made the most of our visit the bookstore by going around and taking photos. That's one step closer to my goal.

Let's get to step two - learning everything about blogging. That meant doing AdSense, Analytics and Blogger from Google. Check out the AdSense corner on the side (click the links please, hahaha!). I also started doing some CSS and Javascript tweaks here in my blog. For some who had gone to my site the past week, you should have noticed minor changes on how the page looks like. I hope you like it, and come here more often.

And lastly, step three - setting up the financial part. Opened a bank account in BDO last Tuesday and I'm hoping that will be filled with savings and earnings. Been working out the saving parts, but am having a hard time, hahaha! Let's just wait and see, fwahahah! I am trying so hard, so I'll guess I'll do good, haha!

Guess that's it for now, I'm late for work. Good job for me! I'll make sure I'll do a progress report every now and then. I hope you guys will be checking it then. See yah!