Stop Milking Me! - Cow’s Journey To Financial Freedom

Well, I figured that one can’t always just talk about money. There are so many other cool stuff outside of our wallets so here it is, my personal site that talks about everything else but money:

The Cow’s Life – Thinking Outside Of The Barn.

The button to the site is located on the top menu bar.

For those of you who are familiar with Yuna’s Village, yes, I am simply restoring the site by integrating it into FreeTheCow’s look and feel. My original personal site : Yuna’s Village has been moved to here as part of my personal collection for my great grand kids to inherit. Hehehe..

Happy Blogging!

Update:
I finally got through the customer service of my web hosting company and changed the domain name. Now the Cow Site has it’s own domain: www.freethecow.com. Please bookmark. Thanks!

I spent some time last night to create the RSS feeds with Feedburner and FeedBlitz and set up the RSS subscription feature for this site. You can either subscribe via e-mail or any of the news feeders you choose. The links are all located on the right side bar.

I am also battling with my hosting company to point my newly registered domain www.freethecow.com to here so that the Cow Project can be totally separated from Yuna’s Village. It’s a pity that I have to pull down my personal site. But hopefully I will be able to do some cool stuff here if I can figure out the ins and outs of PHP mumbo jumbo. After all, I was a programmer for most of my life and no programming language should scare me… I hope… hehehe…

In addition, I am experimenting with different Ads to try to bring in some supplemental income, so every click is appreciated if you enjoy reading here. Although I don’t know how far I can go with online advertising, it’s something worth trying and it has been kind of fun to play with different methods in the past 2 weeks. I will run a post at the end of each month to summarize my earnings as part of my monthly performance report. So stay tuned…

When a blogger starts his/her “Financial Freedom” journal, there will always be a number associated with it. Whether it is 2 million net worth or 1 million net worth, there is a final financial goal. But I don’t necessarily think that a simple number can represent the type of “financial freedom” I am going after.

I don’t want to stop working, rather, I want to work on something meaningful that gets me going everyday. I don’t want to work for anybody else and whatever I am doing is not only fulfilling but also generating enough income so I don’t have to go back to the barn to be milked by “employers” again.

Yes, I can achieve this by saving and investing until I reach A Number, whether it is 2 million or 1 million. However, there are two problems associate with this picture:

1. Before I reach the million dollar net worth, I still have to bust my ass for someone else and let that person (or corporation) take a big chunk of what I earned just because I am an employee.
2. Will 2 million dollars really last forever? One can only withdraw 4% - 5% in order to maintain the original asset value, otherwise, the money runs out after certain amount of years. 4% of 2 million dollars is only $80.000. That’s not going to buy me much considering the inflation. I want to do better than just making capital gains from stock funds.

Capital gain is certainly good, but I want to generate profits and income. So one day, I don’t need to depend on any employer. And there are millions of possibilities!

Although I don’t have a goal (a specific number to be exact), but I do have a plan:

Know my bottom line:
After helping my parents to start a kitchenware business and settle a legal case, I don’t have much “flexible money” left. So I have to work around with what I have. As of today, I have $421 in my savings account, $15,343 in my bond funds and $11,043 in my stock funds. Yep! The list is short and sweet…

This year’s projects
I am starting 3 projects this year:

1. “Free-The-Cow Project” Site: mainly to keep a financial journal, collect information, get reader suggestions/feedback and test out online advertising.
2. Open an online store to sell kitchenware. I’d like to help my parents to market their store, also to test the e-commerce route. If the poof chair guy can make 6 figure income a year, I want to give it a shot too
3. Fix –it and Flip-it Project. I believe in real estate investing and certainly wouldn’t leave this option out. I plan on buying a ugly home this fall and learn how to flip a house to make a profit.

The Budget Game
Every business needs money to start with, whether it is an online store or flipping a home. My homework? I need to sit down and figure out how much I need and how much minimum I have to save in order to start the 3 projects this year. Know what budget I will need so I can start budgeting.

Study, Research And Learn
Knowledge is money. It is such a sweet wisdom especially in the real estate business. You gotta know what you are getting yourself into. So my main assignment in the next a few months is to learn and research. Find out what tool I need to use to create online store. Research the local real estate market. Learn the principle of flipping. Talk to people, networking, find the dream team to work with me, etc…. This is going to be exciting!

Just Do It!
Too many of us have great ideas, but few act upon them. And even fewer people succeed after having good ideas and act upon them. Nothing is worse than sitting at home and be a couch potato. I am never a couch potato. But I am a cow who is being milked by others and making money for other people. So my situation isn’t any better than the couch potato. Even if I have 99 failed projects, I only need one star project. So let’s get the projects started!

I felt that I have been a cow ever since I graduated from the college. I worked (being milked), worked (being milked), and worked (more milk for the Corporation) until I got crashed and burned a few years ago. Then my employer offered me an easier project to recover from the stressful long hour full time travel job.

Me, the cow was going to take the step to quit the milking situation, but after being thrown on a grassy land and eating the tasty fatty grass under the sun all day, the cow got lazier and thought this grassy land would last forever. Before I knew it, I was put back in the barn and getting milked all day and all night again. Many years have past and the used-to-be-fatty cow was skinny as hell. So, the whole situation started all over again. I was offered with a nice easy work-from-home job by my employer a month ago. And wooohooo! The cow is dancing under the sun in the happy grassy land again!

But this time, I am not forgetting that I have been milked by my employer for 10 long years!! I don’t want to get fatty and thrown back in the barn to be milked again! I want to be able to go to grassy land at anytime I want to and I want to milk myself, not by others!

So here comes my FREE-THE-COW PROJECT!

That is, I want to control my own future. I want to be able to generate multiple income streams so one day I don’t have to work for anyone else. After years of services in Corporate America, I realized that I have no control of my life and every dollar I make ends up in someone else’s pocket. I just can’t picture myself working for a company for 30 years, hoping that my paycheck will still be there tomorrow. Last year after I received our HR announcement about the cancellation of our pension program, I completely lost the trust in our Corporation structure and my own employer.

So here I am, determined to find a way to one day support myself and my family with investment and other projects. So I set up this site to document my ideas, progress, failures and success and hoping one day when I close this project, I will be sitting in a beautiful grassy land of my choice and never need to go back to the barn again.

Keywords: financial freedom, self-employement, early retirement