I usually don’t post on the weekend, actually I don’t really have a schedule but it looks like Monday and Thursday are turning out to be posting days.  Today was different.   While cruising around the net trying to pick up chics, er, I mean blogs, I found a true gem.  If you have not yet come across it check out www.spillingbuckets.com  Very nice thought provoking writing, the kind of fix The Stoic is out to score.  A particular post really got my mind to churning and hence today’s post.  You can find it here, but I want to share a couple of sentences that made me pause and think (always a good thing).

“The way that each of us thinks makes the major difference in where each of us arrives.”  

This goes to the heart of my own recent transformation with financial matters.  The things I’ve done have been what frugal people in all places and all times have always done.  What really changed was my thinking and that transformed my behavior.  If you stop for a moment and really reflect on where you are today in your life you can generally connect it to the series of thoughts linked together as a chain that influenced your behavior that had a cumulative impact on where you are.  If you have always been a saver you are most likely setting on a nice net worth with little or no debt.  Did this happen overnight?  Did you wake up one morning and decided you would have a nice, fat bank account?  The answer is likely no.  Think of every thought that you had that led you to act a certain way that was responsible for the fiscal rewards you now enjoy.   Consider the opposite (my former self).  I spent every dime I had, massive debts, paycheck to paycheck living and a failed marriage that ultimately found the origin of its demise in failed fiscal policy (yes I am one of the statistics that claim finances being one of the main reasons couples fight).   What was my thinking in regards to this behavior?  Are you sitting down?  I literally thought money was of no significance.  I can remember a time in my life (most of it) in which I openly claimed that money was not important.  I’m not sure what I was smoking back in those days, but someone should have come along and smacked the shit out of me and try to assist in removing my head from the dark nether regions in which it was so shamefully lodged!  It was thinking that made it so and in this case a poor quality of thinking,  which is responsible for a good deal of human misery.

Here is another quote from the website that I really enjoyed because it goes to the heart of the freedom/independence I so passionately seek at this juncture in my life:

“Independence is not something one has; it is something one is.”  Jacob Fisker

This sentence is like a dagger to the heart, it penetrates so deeply and completely to leave the landscape of ones soul thoroughly changed.  I’ve been going about it all wrong.  I’ve been thinking of my freedom/independence as something I could possess or a destination in time I would someday arrive at, but that’s not it.  Instead it is what one is and that is powerful stuff.  For it’s not x amount of an investment balance or some passive income stream that will support you forever and ever.  No, it’s being so independent that one is less and less in need of such things and that is an entirely different conception of independence.  It is being independent vs. having independence.

Hope you guys are having a great weekend and well on your way to discovering the independence that already lies within you, even if now it lie dormant.

Cheers