Book Review Series 1: Financial Freedom by Grant Sabatier

New Year, New blog post series. I have been wanting to do this for a few months now. I had originally thought this would be a video series, but I'm too cheap to buy the camera! So in an effort to get this going I will start with blogs for now! 

I believe learning is essential to personal growth and happiness. I read a minimum of one book a month. I do this to increase my knowledge and to decrease limitations. The more you know, the more leverage and opportunities you will have. This belief lead me to give up TV last year (to be honest, I do watch the patriots when they play, so 99% gave up). I needed more time to read, take online classes, and work on Happy Healthy Hundreds. With time being of short supply, TV was out and reading was in! While reading I always take notes on the information that strikes me so I can reread at a later date. After doing this on a few books I thought I should use these notes and my blog to review different books and give quick summaries of them. This way you get great insights into the books and can make a decision on whether or not you want to invest your time in reading the entire book! After all, we all shouldn't have to give up our re-runs of friends!

So here goes the first one. 

Financial Freedom is written by Grant Sabatier. The overall concept is based in the F.I.R.E movement. This stands for Financial Independence and Retire Early. This has been written about on thousands of blogs and was all the rage a few year back. While all writers on this topic have different ideas the one constant goal is being able to retire before well before normal retirement age, this is usually done through extreme savings (50% or more of income) and adding additional income sources.

Here are the main points of this particular book:

1. Find your number and work backwards: The idea is to get your realistic monetary number that would allow you to retire. There are a few equations in the book to help you figure this out. The main focus is to achieve 25x your annual spending. If you can do this and live off a withdraw rate of 4%, you should be able to retire ( stock market is  a factor in this equation)
2. How much you got?: this is simple, just need to figure out your net worth, this is assets minus liabilities
3. How Much you need?: Take your number from step 1, subtract number from step 2, and now you know the amount of money you need. This is basically the entire idea of the book. 
4. How do I get it?: This encompasses the rest of the book. He covers side hustle/income stream ideas, savings rates, and investing strategies. There are various charts and graphs that are helpful to aid you in creating a plan to achieve your F.I.R.E. number.

In a nut shell the book tells you figure out your monetary goal, increase your income, save as much money as possible, invest your money, watch your money grow, and when you hit your magic number retire! 

Here are some of the best tidbits:

-Invest in low cost index funds (Warren Buffet is a big fan of this as well). Over long periods of time the stock market averages 7% return, at this rate your invested money should double every ten years. 

-increase your savings rate slowly until you hit your savings goal (this is really high, 50% or more)

- When deciding on a side gig, cross reference your skills with things you actually enjoy doing

-Money is limited only of you don't try to make more of it

- Getting started is the most important part

So what are my thoughts?

 I enjoyed the book, there are a few good ideas in it. Obviously, Mr. Sabatier goes into a lot more details when it comes to investing and side hustles than I've covered here. 

As for the equations and charts,  I found them helpful and the book itself is a quick read.

Is there anything groundbreaking?

NO, there's no magic answer here, but then again there is no magic answer anywhere. The investing advice is the same as many other books and blogs, so is the savings advice. So if your looking for that you can skip it. However if your looking for help creating a monetary road map to Financial independence, this will help. The side hustle ideas are good as well as the charts and graphs. 

My only word of caution and this is not solely directed at the writer of this book as i found his book interesting. 

 often have a hard time buying into something like the F.I.R.E. movement. It seems that most people who claim to have achieved this are still working! Usually through books or blogs. They often say that they are only working because they want to not because they have to. This may or may not be true, we will never really know.

That being said, I believe there to be value in almost any book and I did find some in this one!

I hope you enjoyed the review! Please let us know if you would like to see a book reviewed on the site!

​Happy Healthy Hundreds