Homemaker’s Guide to Financial Freedom
I’ve put together the Homemaker’s Guide to Financial Freedom.
Homemakers are very busy, and often not paid directly for what they do.
So how does a homemaker become financially free?
As a homemaker I understand and I have a step by step guide to your Financial Freedom
Check it out today in just 30 minutes @ 9:30am HST / 3:30pm EST.
Step 1 Gratitude
Step 1 is the key because gratitude brings abundance, wealth and prosperity to anyone who feels it.
Practice being grateful and thankful everyday that you are a homemaker.
You get to actually raise your own children, choose their activities and see them grow up!
You get to be their comfort and their mentor.
You have a great life!
Sometimes I think I’m in a dream that I get to do what I love everyday.
I love being a homemaker.
I love the part with being a Mom and being a wife.
What do you love about it?
I know some homemakers like cooking, where some like decorating and keeping a clean house.
Some like to host parties, send cards and keep up with the social network of family and friends.
What do you specialize in?
What are you great at?
What are you grateful for?
Step 2 Recognition
Step 2 is to recognize how valuable you are.
The key to becoming financially free is feeling and knowing that you already are, and that you are worthy right now.
A lot of homemakers feel that they are not worthy because they don’t bring in money.
However, if your spouse had to pay someone else to do everything you did, it would probably be close to $100,000/year in the United States.
What do homemakers do?
Well, just think about what you do.
I am take care of our 6 year old son Jordan.
I am in charge of getting his Zoom calls ready for his ukulele lessons, and when he’s in school for his Zoom calls and getting his homework done.
It’s sometimes easy sometimes not easy to do.
Sometimes it involves him running around, dropping things, and having fits.
So how much would it cost for me to hire somebody caring and loving to do that for my son?
I think the going rate in Hawaii is free room and board (so about $800/month) plus some spending money?
How about to clean?
I keep our house tidy, clean up, sanitize metal surfaces, wash and put away dishes, do laundry, etc.
What’s the cost of that?
My friend who is a cleaner charges $20/hour, so you can kind of get an idea.
See how it can add up to $100,000/year pretty quickly.
Gosh, homemakers are SO Valuable!
Step 3 Pay Yourselves First
The key to Financial Freedom is the always pay yourself first.
Since you are a homemaker you are in this together with your spouse.
So discuss with your spouse how to pay yourselves first.
What does that mean?
For our family, it means that we put aside at least 10% of everything we make into our financial freedom investment accounts.
So I have my own account, my son Jordan has his own account and my husband Jomel has his own account.
We also have a joint financial freedom account.
Our accounts are brokerage accounts and savings account.
It’s good to have your own personal account. Put money in it weekly or monthly.
Sometimes weekly is better as it can be a smaller amount, like $10 or $20 a week.
You can set up automatic transfers to pull the money out without you looking at it or thinking about it.
The key here is paying yourself FIRST.
Pay yourself before you pay rent, for bills, for food, etc.
This will guarantee that you will always have money.
Step 4 Create a Plan
Step 4 is important and most people don’t have a written plan for their finances let alone financial freedom.
It’s important to create a written plan.
You can create a plan with a financial advisor or you can do it yourself.
Fiduciary Advisor
The benefits of using a financial advisor (Tony Robbins recommends using a fiduciary advisor) is that they have the time and hopefully the knowledge to create a plan for you.
When you work with a fiduciary advisor you pay them a fee directly.
Non-fiduciaries get paid by selling you financial products that pay them a commission…so you don’t want that because the financial products are more expensive for you.
Plus, with a fiduciary advisor, you know exactly what you are paying upfront in fees, and you may be able to deduct their fee from your taxes (ask your CPA about that).
Do It Yourself (DIY)
The nice thing about doing it yourself is you can avoid paying fees altogether and you can learn about how to invest at the same time.
Burton G. Malkiel, professor at Princeton and author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street and 10 Rules for Financial Success, recommends you do your own investing.
He did studies that show that actively managed investment funds do poorly in comparison to the stock market average.
In other words, if you just bought an index fund that is passively managed (run by a computer that just mimics the stock market) then you would do better than a fund with a person stock picking.
Read more about the date and passively managed index funds by CLICKING HERE.
If you want to do it yourself, I’ve created a Free Financial Planning Worksheet that you can use. CLICK HERE to access it.
My blog also has a lot of information on how to create the All Seasons Portfolio recommended by Tony Robbins and created by lengendary Ray Dalio. CLICK HERE for the information you need for that.
The All Seasons uses index funds so it doesn’t involve stock picking.
Unless you are Warren Buffett, or studying Security Analysis, you will probably lose money stock picking.
Index funds hold or mimic stocks in an entire group/index of stocks. Some common indexes are the S & P 500, Dow Jones, or larger indexes that cover over 1,000 different stocks.
CLICK HERE to learn more about investing on your own, what index funds are and how to find them.
It’s not hard to invest in index funds, though it does take some time to open a brokerage account, and call the customer service to find out how to buy shares in them, and what their fees are.
Step 5 Follow the Plan and Adjust as Needed
Once you create your plan be sure to follow it!
Check in monthly or annually to make sure you are on track towards financial freedom.
Sometimes having a fiduciary makes it easier to have an unbiased 3rd party review your plan with you and your spouse.
As you accumulate more wealth and money, you might need more and more advisors to help you manage it.
A lot of the fiduciaries I spoke with said it’s only worth their fee if you have over $500,000 in liquid assets for them to manage.
So if you’re starting small, it is often easier and more cost effective to have one type of fiduciary, who handles smaller investment amounts.
Or if you have the time to go through the resources in this blog post, you can just do it yourself.
In our case, we took half of our liquid assets and put them into 2 different real estate properties, one we live in and one is an AirBnB business.
If you do real estate investing, you’re pretty much on your own, or must find your own real estate mentor.
I manage our liquid assets for now.
I did interview some fiduciary advisors, and most would not work with us since we have less than $500,000 in liquid assets.
There were 2 so far that would manage our liquid assets, but 1 had a fee that was prohibitively expensive.
The other wouldn’t do the All Seasons Portfolio for us, so that’s basically why I started doing it myself.
As our liquid assets grow, I will continue looking for fiduciaries to assist us.
And that is why it is good to re-evaluate your plan on a regular basis.
Conclusion
Being a homemaker is a privilege and an honor.
It’s actually been my dream.
I really enjoy being with Jordan and planning dates with my husband.
I enjoy investing our money, cooking and eating healthy food.
I really enjoy my free time going to the beach and being able to get enough sleep and rest.
When I used to work full time at the bank, I had to deal with customers.
Most of the time this was nice, but I didn’t have the freedom to choose who I would talk to or be around.
As a homemaker, I am free to associate with who I want to.
It is really a wonderful freedom that I am so so grateful for!
I hope you got value from this post.
Good luck to you on your journey to financial freedom!
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If you haven’t taken the 7 Day Financial Freedom Challenge yet, then I recommend you check it out! Click Here, read the information and get started!