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Happy Birthday to Panzer

My birthday is this week and I’m coming closer to 40 than 30 this year.

Birthdays are starting to take a more interesting turn because I am getting older. Instead of birthday cake and wishes upon blown candles, my birthday wishes are more grounded in achieving financial independence, happiness and health for myself and my loved ones.

Reflections and Recollections

Birthdays start to become a more reflective time, for me to examine what I’ve done in my life and the major milestones achieved. It is also time for me to celebrate life and to understand that while most of us hope to live to a ripe old age in health and happiness, we have to be prepared to live each day as if it were our last.

I watched “Flash Forward” the television series and its intriguing plot made me start to think about whether there is free will or fate in life. Has my life really been driven in the direction that I consciously choose or have I drifted along based on the choices that happened to open up as I went along?

My initial thoughts are that they are a combination of both. We have free will in that we can choose our responses to whatever happens to us in life. While we may not control the external circumstances that life thrusts onto us, we can control how we feel and more importantly, how we react to life’s circumstances.

My Journey Towards Financial Freedom

The key learning that I got from my continuing journey towards financial freedom is that it never stops. Financial freedom is really a journey just as life is a journey. It is the day to day, moment to moment process of experiencing life in each unique moment that makes up our lives.

Many times, I forget to live in the moment, my body here but my mind elsewhere. That is where we function more as robots with programmed automatic responses that to react consciously to life.

Financial freedom requires one to be autopilot in that we strive to live within our means, to spend less than we earn. But it also requires our active participation in the lifestyle choices we make that affects whether we can control our wants versus our needs and to focus on living within our means and to be happy with what we already have.

I realise that life is to be lived each day. Even as I strive to live within my means, to save and invest and to grow and protect my means, I also do allow myself to enjoy life’s little luxuries.

An iPhone, a day-off to sip tea and watch the world go by, a day to focus my mind on nothing specific except to think about where I’ve been, where I am now and where I want to go in the future.

My own highlight of this journey towards financial freedom is really about growing my concept of what it means to be financially free. It makes me more open to unconventional ideas and to really think for myself what I really want in life in balancing between earning and spending and how money (our life-force) is being spent each day in helping us achieve what we want in life (or not!).

And so, I will spend tomorrow catching up with a friend related to building my cv for the future and at the same time, catch up with myself by doing something I enjoy and giving myself a little bit of tender loving care.

Even in your own journey towards financial freedom, how do you celebrate your birthday?

Share with Panzer in the comments page.

Be well and prosper.