I have seen several financial bloggers cover financial milestones one needs to hit by age thirty. Liquid from Freedom 35 blog not long ago posted his progress, along with Bridget from Money After Graduation.

Even though I’ve been enjoying 30’s for a couple of years by now, I thought I’ll follow their example and jump off the roof see if I hit any of financial milestones along the way.

Please keep in mind I’m a financial underdog because I’ve came to this country in my 20’s, spent a number of years working minimum wage jobs, and had to learn personal finance on the go. My wife is an immigrant too and came to Canada in 2006. Because of this we might be behind on things.

What about you? Have you hit these milestones yourself?

 

 

1. Financially independent from your parents ?

Been so for a very long time. Sometimes I miss living with my parents. Adult life has too many responsibilities. You have to go to work, pay bills, act all mature…What a drag!

 

2. Debt free ?

We have no debt outside of our mortgage. Currently working on accelerating our mortgage repayment but it’s still a very long way to go. Unless I bump into Morgan Freeman tomorrow who wants to give me large sum of money for my opinion of his work (mostly positive), we probably have another 10 years before it’s fully repaid. This makes me a sad panda.

Don’t borrow money, people! Debt means less money in your pocket. Don’t you want to have more money?

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Why we will never borrow money:

Just the other day my wife and I were having a discussion. Out of the blue, I asked her - is there anything you’d consider buying if it meant borrowing money? After thinking for few minutes, she couldn’t come up with anything. And then she asked - why would we ever borrow money for “stuff”?

She is a smart cookie. Much smarter than me, I fully admit. After all, I’ve borrowed money before and got into all sorts of trouble because I couldn’t control my borrowing and spending. I’ve had collection agencies call me several times a day and demand payments. I’ve worked two jobs with no days off to pay them off. I ate copious amounts of noodles with tuna to save every penny to pay them off. I’ve sold virtually everything I owned to pay them off.

And it’s not like I’ve borrowed money to do something cool - my borrowed money went into school I didn’t even finish and “things” I just had to have.

New laptop.

Pickup truck.

Vacation.

Oh, the insanity! I want to go back in the past and slap myself for doing it. It actually hurts to think about how stupid I was with borrowed money.

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I want to be all about passive investment income!

One thing I’m always curious about is how people live. A bit nosey, but it became a habit shortly after moving to Canada from Russia as I tried to become more social and more familiar with Canadian people.

After looking at how people around me live, I’ve come to conclusion that there are two types of people. One group of people (group A) goes to work every day and works to get a paycheck every two weeks: store employees, nurses, police officers, business managers, truck drivers, and many others.

And group B lives off passive investment income without going to work. They enjoy income earned in forms of dividends, business distributions, royalties, and even blogging. Of course, there are people who happily enjoy both of these worlds and use passive investment income to increase their earning capacity.

 

 

 

Personally, I’d like to see us slowly transition from Group A into Group B. And I been thinking about this for quite some time and discussed possibilities with my wife.

What would this transition look like? Well, currently we’re making decent income for our age group. Money we earn comes in every other week and leaves in form of bills and expenses. What if we could replace work income with passive investment income, and pay our bills and expenses with it? That would put us into strange world where we can choose to work, but are not forced to do so. We can spend more time enjoying doing things we are passionate about. We can probably do more travelling and connect better with our family members living overseas. Oh boy, do I like the sound of that!

 

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