Earn What You Need…With Flexibility

Getting to this point I will assume that you have created your vision, and that having the flexibility to live a Location Independent Lifestyle is important to you.  If you haven’t already done so, please review this post and start thinking seriously about what you want in your life.  Today we’re going to discuss a few ways to give you the income you need, along with the flexibility that you need, in order to pull all of this off.

How To Do It

There are far too many variables that could go in to covering the unique situations of everyone reading this, but today we’ll go over some high level ideas, that will get drilled down in to in future weeks.  Let’s start with a book written by Robert Kiyosaki called the Cashflow Quadrant.  I recommend that everyone read it.  You can find it here.  The main concept that we’re going to discuss is the Quadrant itself.  Here’s what it looks like:

The steps you take, and the characteristics of your positions within each quadrant, will dictate to some extent the easiest path for you to take to start pursuing a Location Independent Lifestyle.  You can pull it off in any of the above quadrants, but, in general, true freedom lies on the right side of the Cashflow Quadrant.

Employee Quadrant

Here you are working for a company or an organization, and you are trading dollars for hours.  For all intents and purposes they own your time.  You are expected to be available and working certain hours each week.  This is the quadrant most people reside in, and is also the most difficult one in which to create for yourself a Location Independent Lifestyle.  It can be done, but it’s much more difficult than in other quadrants, just because you are pretty much at their beck and call.  If your job requires you to meet people face to face on a consistent basis then you’re done.  That characteristic of your job is not consistent with living somewhere away from where your job is.

In order to pull off this type of a lifestyle, and have a job, you’ll need the ability to consistently work remotely.  Not a one day a week in the office kind of a thing either.  You’ll need to be able to work remotely every day.  You’ll also need to be available at their prescribed times of day.  This makes international travel a challenge, due to the time zone changes.  Most of the time you need to earn this ability to do this.  Tim Ferriss in the 4-hour workweek actually has a good discussion concerning approaching your employer and working towards this.  I recommend reading this book too.

Self Employed Quadrant

There are more opportunities today to offer services to people remotely than at any time in our history.  If you want to trade your hours for dollars within this quadrant you can absolutely build your lifestyle here.  All you need is a phone (Skype works), a computer, and internet access, preferably secure.  Most people that you are doing work for, short of being a full time contractor for one company, don’t really care what hours you do your work during the day.  They are concerned about the results, not the specific hours of the day you’re working.

If you are in this quadrant but have a retail location, it will be a challenge for you to pull this off because it still, by definition of you being in this quadrant, relies on your efforts and presence.  If you can bring in an employee or contractor to take care of the activities that MUST be done in that location then you might still be able to pull this off.  The easiest way to pull it off in this quadrant is to be a one person show, with maybe some Virtual Assistants to help you, or to transition from this quadrant to the Business Owner quadrant.  Being in the in between area will make things difficult because you haven’t removed yourself from the requirements to be available locally on a relatively consistent basis, and you’ve started to build things up to a point where you have more overhead that will need to be dealt with before you actually start to pull your own money out.

Business Owner Quadrant

Here you truly gain freedom.  By definition, in this quadrant your business will run without your continual, day to day, involvement in it.  You can have a business built with anywhere from zero to thousands of employees.  You just need to build out the systems and organization in such a way that everything that needs to be done day to day is being done by someone other than yourself.  If your involvement is still needed pretty much daily then you’re not truly in this quadrant.  You’re still in the Self Employed quadrant.

If you aren’t needed each day, and your business kicks off enough cash flow consistently, what’s keeping you from being able to lead a Location Independent Lifestyle?  In this quadrant and making enough money, if you’re not doing it, and you want to, then there’s something else holding you back.

Investor Quadrant

In this quadrant your money, in investment form, is kicking off a return to you.  This has nothing to do with you trading hours for dollars, like on the left side of the Cashflow Quadrant, but has you trading the temporary use of your dollars in return for more dollars.  You’ll find yourself, to some degree, within this quadrant based on your efforts in one or more of the other quadrants.  Maybe you’re investing profits in to an investment.  Maybe you’re trading your efforts/work for a piece of an investment.  Most people are, at least in part, in this quadrant.  Your goal would be to build your activities in this quadrant up to such a level that you can live your Location Independent Lifestyle with the proceeds from this quadrant alone.

We’ll work on digging deeper in to each of these quadrants in future weeks.

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