How To Become Financially Independent: What It Means and How To Start

If you want to retire early to do some traveling or to spend quality time with your family, you’ll need to create a plan that will result in you becoming financially independent.

Staying out of debt and building your net worth are two actions that can help you gain financial independence and increase your chances of successfully retiring early. Gaining financial stability requires patience — you need to learn how to effectively manage your money and create passive income streams. Here are the retirement strategies you need to achieve financial independence.

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How To Become Financially Independent To Retire Early

It may seem difficult, but with lots of preparation and making some lifestyle and mindset changes, you can retire early and comfortably. Start with envisioning what you would like your future to look like.

Long-Term Thinking: Calculate Your Retirement Needs

To answer the question “When can I retire?” you’ll need to first calculate your retirement needs, as this number is different for everyone. You might need to consult a financial planner to discuss retirement goals or use a financial planning app or another resource with a basic formula that takes into account your current annual spending, income and year you want to retire.

Financial independence blogger Mr. Money Mustache recommends multiplying your annual spending figure by between 20 and 30 to figure out your retirement needs. You could also use an online retirement planning calculator to create a forecast. Having a defined number in mind can help you visualize your goal and progress.

3 Ways To Manage a Budget

The key to achieving retirement on your terms is managing your money. Reducing spending and maximizing your income is necessary to have the funds you’ll need by the target retirement date. A budget is essential to control your finances. Make sure that your budget includes two important factors:

1. Reducing Living Expenses

Spending less than you make is the first start toward reaching your financial goals. You’ll need to give up bad habits that result in overspending on nonessentials.

Unnecessary shopping habits based on convenience, comfort or just fun are widespread in U.S. society, and spending money in this way is what stands between the average person and true wealth. Do what you must to break habits that are costing you, and optimize your budget and spending to reduce living expenses.

2. Increasing Your Income

If you’re still living paycheck to paycheck — even after cutting expenses — you’ll need to find ways to increase your income so you have money to invest. Whether your goal is to play the stock market or invest in a business venture, there are several ways to generate more income.

You could take on a part-time job or do freelance or contract work. There are always opportunities to tutor, mow lawns, sell crafts, and even rent out your car or home. You could also focus on building a side business that can provide income in retirement.

3. Creating Passive Income

If you don’t see yourself working for a company until you retire, you should explore some other ways to generate income. Building passive income streams — that is, recurring revenue from a business or other endeavor like owning rental properties — keeps money coming in so that you don’t have to rely solely on your savings or Social Security benefits.

“You need to start living a lifestyle in which you’re no longer trading time for money — you can create something valuable one time that people will continue to purchase,” said Pat Flynn, creator of the Smart Passive Income blog. But generating passive income requires patience as well as work.

If you start making money from an online business, generating passive income won’t happen overnight, but it will put you on the path to earning revenue from something you created, said Flynn.

Set Goals

Once you know how much you’ll need and you have a budget, it’s time to set goals that will get you to the financial independence you’re in search of. Don’t forget to include the following ideas in your goal-setting and action plan:

Start Investing Early

You’ll have a better chance of reaching your goals if you begin focusing on your retirement investment when you’re young. Even if you think you’ll have more money to invest when you’re older, don’t miss out on the benefits of compound interest on those initial savings contributions now.

Make room in your budget for retirement savings contributions so you can start earning compound interest sooner rather than later. For example, CNN Money reports that if you save $3,000 per year from the age of 25 to 35 at a 7 percent annual return, your initial $30,000 investment will grow to $338,000 by the retirement age of 65.

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Decrease Debt

Getting out of debt by paying off your mortgage, clearing credit card account balances and paying off loans can help increase your net worth. If your goal is financial freedom, you don’t want to be making monthly payments or paying interest on old debts.

You should do whatever you can to reduce your debt load and avoid acquiring new debt to keep yourself on track. You might want to consider using a tool like the Debt Payoff Planner app to organize your debt repayment plan.

Advice

Retiring early as a result of financial independence is possible, even if you don’t earn millions of dollars. All you need is a long-term plan and the commitment to make it possible. It may take some sacrifice, but the best piece of advice is to get started today, even if it’s with small steps.

Figure out how much you need for retirement, create a budget you can stick to, cut back on spending and save aggressively towards your future. You may need to adjust your lifestyle to support less spending and more savings, but you may look back one day and be thankful you did.

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Jamie Young contributed to the reporting for this article.

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: How To Become Financially Independent: What It Means and How To Start