Financial Independence and Freedom

Speaking today to the Youths of Church of God Mission at CYF NORTHERN REGCON::ABUJA 2018

The average young person should aspire to be financially independent and financially free.

Financial freedom according to Long Pham in his article on May 6, 2013, means you’re debt free, financially stable, and not living paycheck to paycheck.

Most civil servants live from one paycheck to the next. If you still live such a life, God cannot bless you unless He passes through your boss or your company. Living paycheck to paycheck is like pouring water into a basket; your expenses will leak your salary away and you’ll just live on JOB—just over broke. The average youth must think beyond this job mentality.

Financial freedom means you’re working. The church is creating a mentality in our young people that depicts hard work as suffering. People erroneously believe that favour and labour are mutually exclusive; however, the more favour you have, the more you labour. Donald Trump is working harder now when he is a president than when he was just an ordinary businessman. Every additional favour creates additional responsibility and labour. In fact, the relationship of labour and favour is like a cycle of rainy and dry seasons; the more you labour, the more the chances of getting favour and the more favour you get, the more labour you’ll need to sustain it.

At the same time financial freedom guarantees you the opportunity to enjoy life. The average youth of today wants to enjoy life at the expense of his/her future. They want to eat the seeds of their future today. If you sow the seeds of your future early, you’re likely to retire into comfort early. I deliberately planned to retire from medical practice at the age of 40. I took that decision in my early 20’s and I started working towards it. Today, I’m living the kind of life I had always wanted to live.

Many youths have been wrongly conditioned by the church to wait for and to expect a chance-occurrence and a sudden miraculous breakthrough that would change their destinies. Unbelievers who are making great strides at very young age brackets deliberately set out very early to live the kind of lives they are living—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.

A life without dreams and decisions is a playground for the devil. Strong dreams and desires, coupled with determination and a strong detestation for poverty and mediocrity, should motivate one very early to set deadlines to attain a certain level of financial freedom and excellence. A life vacant of dreams and deadlines is a life void of drive.

The average youth of today is so engrossed in fashion without passion to be financially independent. The average of our young girl has false hair, false eyelashes, false nails, false buttocks, even false busts, and a false accent. Even women who have attained a level of financial independence set out very early with an entrepreneurial mindset.

It is not out of place for a young lady to learn skills and trades outside their areas of study. It is not out of place for a young lady to be a contributor to the husband’s finances instead of being a parasite and a baby factory.

Financial independence involves living below your means. There is too much over-packaging and simulation amongst our youths. Young men, without tangible evidences, are pretending to be big boys, using a disproportionate percentage of their assets to buy phones and other irrelevant electronic gadgets to impress each other instead of challenging each other with products, business ventures, and ideas. No wonder young men are killing their girlfriends for rituals in a desperation to get rich without labour.

As I’ve often said, I opened my first medical practice at 29. I knew very early that building wealth is a slow, deliberate, planned, and stratified process that takes time. It is challenging but can be very rewarding. If you start early, within an age-bracket within your mid-forties and early-fifties, you can retire early from day-to-day work, do what you want to do, and answer to no one but yourself.

Today, I don’t answer to any person; I do what I want to do. I preach the Truth of God because my income is not tied to any church or determined by any person. I started early.

Every generation has its own challenges; whoever does not want to do well will find enough excuses, but never a good reason, to fail.

Discipline, prudence, frugality, savings, and hard work are virtues that young people must cultivate early and live by throughout their lives. Those are attributes of most successful and supra-rich people. Sudden wealth only exists in the fantasies of young guest preachers and old preachers who feed on the vain expectations and entitlement mentality of religious junkies. And even if it does happen in extremely rare cases, which is not the norm, people who don’t have the disposition to manage it eventually lose it after a short while. Research has shown that most people who won lotteries become bankrupt after an average of six years.

God Bless You.

Don’t forget to share with Friends if You learnt something.