How long can you afford to say no?

How long can you afford to say no?

A few days ago, I caught myself thinking that working for a salary can feel a bit like a modern form of slavery. Yes, these are the sorts of things that go through my head while I’m walking down the street.

Soon I realised that using the word slave was a pretty extreme. I can leave my job, find another one, move to another country, save money, try to build something of my own. Someone who is actually enslaved has none of those choices, and comparing the two is a bit like complaining about your Wi-Fi to someone who doesn’t have running water. So I dropped the word but I didn’t drop the question: if you can’t afford to stop working, how free are you really?

Earning more isn’t the same as being freer

For years, I confused the two. Study, get a good job, work your way up, earn more. And it works, earning more helps enormously. But income on its own tells you surprisingly little about how much freedom you actually have.

Imagine someone earning £100,000 a year and spending almost all of it. Lovely house, two cars, holidays, loans and a lifestyle that needs to be maintained. Now imagine someone else earning £45,000, with low outgoings, some savings and a couple of investments bringing in extra income. The first person is richer on paper. But if their boss suddenly imposes conditions they don’t want to accept, they may have little choice but to put up with them because they depend on that salary.

And the same thing happens on the other side of the pyramid, which is where I used to think the freedom was. You can own a business and be a prisoner to it. You can own ten properties and lie awake at night because you also have ten mortgages and ten tenants. Being your own boss sometimes just means having the worst boss imaginable: one who doesn’t let you sleep and doesn’t even give you paid holidays.

So I don’t think where you sit in the pyramid necessarily makes you freer. There are simply different degrees of dependence. And I’ve decided I want to reduce mine.

A nice boss doesn’t make you free

It makes you lucky. Those are two different things.

Being free means not depending on them staying nice. As long as your life depends on keeping someone happy, on the company not restructuring, or on a client renewing your contract, you’re not completely free. You’re simply someone who hasn’t been told no yet.

That’s why I’ve stopped measuring my freedom in pounds and started measuring it in a different unit: months of being able to say no.

No to a job you no longer want. No to a client who isn’t worth it. No to living in a city where you don’t want to be. No to staying in a relationship because you can’t financially afford to leave.

I don’t want to stop working

Just to be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with working for someone else. I’ve done it for years and it has given me the life I have today. Nor is my ambition to reach a point where I never work again. I’d be bored within two weeks and would probably end up organising my wardrobe by colour.

What I want is for work to be a choice. To take on a project because I’m interested in it, not just because the bills need paying. To be able to take a few months off if I ever need them. To try something new knowing that, if it goes wrong, nothing falls apart. To walk away when something is no longer worth it without my first thought being how I’m going to cover next month’s expenses.

To me, that looks much more like financial freedom than any particular number on a payslip.

The question that changes your decisions

If you stopped getting paid tomorrow, how long could you maintain your current life? A year? Three months? Until Friday?

There’s no right answer, and it doesn’t need to be “forever”. What’s interesting is what happens when you start looking at your financial decisions through that lens. An emergency fund stops being £10,000 sitting in an account and becomes four months in which you can look for a job without having to take the first one that comes along. The return on an investment stops being a percentage on a spreadsheet and becomes part of your living costs that, one day, you might no longer have to cover by selling your time.

That’s what this blog is about: building options, little by little, while having a job, a family, responsibilities and a normal life that you can’t simply put on hold while you chase the elusive idea of financial freedom. I’m still a long way from where I want to be, and I certainly don’t have a magic formula. I’m learning, experimenting, getting things wrong and changing my mind along the way.

Maybe financial freedom doesn’t begin on the day you can afford to stop working forever. Maybe it starts much earlier, on the day you know that, if you need to, you can say no.

And there’s one thing that eats away at those months of “no” faster than almost anything else. It isn’t your boss. It smiles at you from an app, congratulates you on your instant approval and comes neatly divided into manageable monthly payments.

That’s what I’ll be talking about in the next post.

Freedom isn’t given to you. You build it.