Inge Natalie Hol - 20 Oct

100 STEPS TO FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE

The Definitive Roadmap to Achieving Your Financial Dreams

Copyright 2018 Inge Natalie Hol

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwisewithout prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the email address below.

100 Steps Publishing

100StepstoFI.com

Cover and interior design by Domini Dragoone - dominidragoone.com

Editorial services provided by Susannah Noel and Heidi Dorr of Noel Editorial - noeleditorial.com

ISBN: 978-84-09-05149-6

Disclaimer

100 Steps to Financial Independence is intended to help others on their way to better money management. The information presented is for informational purposes only and is solely the expression of the authors opinion. The author is not offering any legal, investing, or tax advice and is not liable for any actions prompted or caused by the information in this book. While every attempt has been made to verify any information presented in this book, the author is not responsible for any errors, inaccuracies, or omissions. Consult a professional if you have any concerns or doubts regarding your actions to gain financial independence. No liability is assumed for losses or damages due to the information provided.

SHORTCUTS: For a lighter version of the book, use the suggested shortcuts to design your own fast track.

If youre keen to see some immediate results or if your main concern is paying off your debt, you can skip ahead to Part 4.

If your current income covers your expenses, allows you to pay off debt as well as save enough money on a regular basis, you can skip ahead to Part 7.

If you dont want to invest or if you dont feel ready to start investing just yet, you can skip ahead to Part 9.

If youve completed the most important steps but would like to get the bigger picture first before going back to different parts of this book, you can skip ahead to Step 100.

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, dont adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.

CONFUCIUS

Why this book?

Personal finance is a hugely important topic that applies to us all. Yet we dont generally learn about it in school, nor do most parents feel comfortable talking about money with their children. Many of us learn about debts, retirement accounts, and taxes on the go as we live life, making critical financial decisions without understanding the bigger picture. We buy a house without calculating how much the mortgage will really cost us. We take out a consumer loan without understanding how disastrous a low monthly payback can be. Look at retirement accounts is a long-term item many of us have on a to-do list that gets transferred to next years list every January first (and we often dont even know what to look at anyway). Investing is scary and taxes complicated, so why waste effort trying to understand it all?

A few years after the global financial crisis of 2008, I, too, became aware I didnt know much about personal finance. Most shocking was that when that realization hit me, I had already made some major financial decisions in my life. Having grown up in the Netherlands, I decided to go to Spain for six months to finish my university degree. My mother wasnt too keen on my going to Spain, and she made me promise not to fall in love with a Spaniard and stay there. Unfortunately for her, I did fall in love with my (now) husband, who is from the UK but had been living in Spain for a few years by then. Since he wasnt a Spaniard, I felt I didnt technically break my promise when I ended up moving to Spain definitively two years later, thereby moving my entire financial life to my new country. We have since bought a house, gotten married, and set up our own language school, all of which involve serious financial commitment and responsibility.

Youd think I knew a fair bit about finances by the time I made some of those decisions. But the truth is I didnt. By the time I started to take an interest in personal finance, a few years after the financial crisis, I had no clue as to why I had life insurance, what my retirement account provision would look like, and what assets or bonds were. I had never heard of the seven income streams and knew nothing about how much I was paying in taxes. Paying off debt or our mortgage as fast as possible seemed an impossibly illogical decision. As far as inflation, I had heard of it many times, but how it was even remotely connected to interest rates, I had no idea.

The moment I realized I was too old (i.e., a real adult) not to understand these things, I knew it was time to secure a good understanding of personal finance. I began to search for a book that covered all the major topics. But I didnt want to just read about finances. I needed a book that had a clear action-focused design that would help me implement directly what Id learned and tackle my finances one step at a time.

I bought and studied many finance books and began reading financial blogs and listening to hundreds of podcasts. It soon became obvious that although there is a wealth of information available, there was no book that was a clear blueprint of where to start, what action to take, and what route to follow to get me started on that journey to financial literacy. Thousands of books have been written about money and finances, yet I couldnt find a single one that explained all the basic concepts and turned it into a practical course, a step-by-step guide that would take me by the hand and walk me through my own finances. The finance books I read were either very theoretical, leaving me to figure out the practical side of how to apply what I learned to my finances myself, or were mainly focused on just one topicdebts, budgeting, or investing, for example. They did not explain how it was all connected and how to make sure I was on top of all areas of my financial life in a practical way.

Since that roadmap I was looking for didnt exist, I decided to distill those steps from all the information available and put them together myself, to form my own guide to understanding personal finance. That project slowly morphed into 100 Steps to Financial Independence .

After implementing each step myself and making tweaks where needed, what started as a personal project became something bigger. The more I spoke to people about this topic, the more I realized there was a real demand for a handbook to achieving financial independence, and I decided to turn what I learned into a book available to a wider audience.

Where this project initially started as a way to achieve financial independence (FI) to be able to handle my own finances independently without needing to ask others for help or advice, I slowly discovered another meaning of FI: having enough financial resources to do without a nine-to-five job to generate an income. I was soon taken in by the latter concept and decided that this book should not only cover the first meaning of FI, but also the second, which you will learn about as you progress through the material.