Financial Freedom = Creative Freedom

If you were to stop working today for whatever reason (you’re burned out, you got sick/had an accident and need to recuperate, you lost/quit your job, you have no new freelance gig lined up, etc.) how many months will you be able to afford your (and, if you are the breadwinner, your family’s) current lifestyle—pay rent/mortgage, food, gasoline/transportation, utilities, entertainment, cell phone/Internet bills, tuition fees, etc.—before you have to go back and earn a living again?

Put another way:

*If the money—your income--stops coming in today, how long do you have before your stash runs out?

If your answer is somewhere between three to six months, congratulations! You have an Emergency Fund. Which means you have three to six months to not panic because you have that little window to look for a new freelance project, get well or find a new job.

If your answer is between a year to three years—at the least--GOOD JOB! You have what I call a Short-Term Art Fund (or Passion Project Fund). This means you can afford a certain degree of creative freedom – you can take a year to two and a half years off from having to make money/earn a living in order to focus on a creative/personal project. (The remaining six months is for finding a new gig, regular or freelance, to replenish your used up savings.) Without having to worry about how you will survive financially and feed yourself and your family for a year to two and a half years, you can:

…Write that book you’ve been meaning to write

…Rethink your painting style and discover a new one

…Take that yoga teacher training course

…Do more research and rewrite your screenplay

…Produce your own film (take a break from being a director for hire)

…Start your social enterprise

…Home-school your little kids (shape and properly equip them before the world gets to them)

…Go on that literary/artistic/spiritual pilgrimage to Paris/Florence/Bhutan

…Enroll in that culinary class

…Study Shakespeare for a year

…Put up that dance studio

…Apprentice with a creative idol/mentor

…Or just travel, discover new things to get inspired again and perhaps figure out what you want to do next.  

Now, if you have enough cash (or assets that can be converted to cash without trouble) stashed away to last you between 30 years and the rest of your life, then, by GOLLY, you have that very rare thing called a Long-Term or Sustainable Art Fund. In the financial world, it’s called Financial Freedom. But they both mean the same thing: You have the freedom to keep creating the things you imagined, to keep making the art that calls to you, to keep contributing your authentic, uncompromised voice in making this world a better place, until you croak.

You see, I know what it’s like to want to make something and not be able to… because of a lack of funds. That was how it was for me for a good portion of my creative life. Until I got tired of living that way and decided that, surely, there must be a smarter, more efficient way, to do this whole creative thing.

Not only did I get ahold of a financial advisor, I actually went and trained to be one. The best way to learn something is to teach it, right?  

So here's what I learned: A good financial advisor/planner will sit down with you and map out a strategy for reaching your goals. Meaning, she will help you compute how long and how much it would take to get to where you want to be. And then she advises you on what you can do NOW—with what you already have (no matter how “small” you think it is)--to start getting there.

You do not pay the financial advisor for this service. At least, not the way you would pay a lawyer or a doctor or a shrink—which is, for their time and how much their standard fees are, which varies from lawyer to lawyer and from doctor to doctor. It’s just the way the current financial services industry in the Philippines is set up.

In the Philippines, most financial planners are connected to financial institutions—banks, insurance companies, investment houses, etc.—and it is these companies that pay the financial planners. 

As a society, we’re not yet as sophisticated as other countries in terms of financial savvy/literacy, so most of us won’t hire a financial planner. The market for one is not yet big enough for many independent financial planning careers to thrive. Seriously planning our financial life, sadly, is still at the bottom of most Filipinos’ priority list. We’re still kind of in the day-to-day, bahala-na-si-Batman mindset when it comes to managing our money.

But sound money management (and I am fully aware how much like the parents we didn’t listen to I sound like)—which involves mindfulness, accountability, delayed gratification and foresight--is a vital, empowering skill to learn and to share with our loved ones, especially with the next generation.

I’ve learned, from 19 years of being a working creative, that if you want a sustainable creative life—if you are in love with and excited by birthing new ideas and long for a life that is authentically productive, joyful and meaningful—then you must have financial freedom. Because financial freedom is creative freedom. If you aren’t financially free, then it must be your utmost priority to plot your freedom.

The books you see proudly plastered on this site are products of my being in a financially comfortable place—I didn’t have to think of where I was going to get the money to pay for rent, food, utilities, etc. In order to have the peace of mind to focus on my first book, I had enough savings to last me all of two months. It didn’t even qualify as an Emergency Fund, let alone a Short-Term Art Fund. But I didn’t know it then. For me, any amount of cash that could buy me my freedom from having to work for money (take on a full-time job or a freelance gig) even for just a short while was a Writing/Art Fund. Deadma na kung short-term or long-term.

So, with my two months’ worth of financial/creative freedom, I wrote like a maniac for a solid month. Didn’t leave my apartment. Didn’t see people. And had to survive on Tapa King delivery for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The second month was spent editing, preparing for the book launch and scrambling for a new regular job.

As you can imagine, I kinda, sorta got sick because of that. I vowed I would never do that to myself again.

So for my next book, I played it smarter (and, to be honest, shameless): I asked my parents to take me back. I moved out of my apartment and into my old room at my parents’ house and stayed there for three rent-free years. Kapal ng mukha, yes. But absolutely necessary, if I valued my sanity. Which I thankfully did. I had become ill, in about every aspect of my life, and the only real remedy that I saw was to focus on writing and completing my second book. (I am one of those people, by the way, who firmly believes that not creating/expressing oneself is the root cause of most illnesses.)

After that, it made sense for me to go and get some serious financial planning education and create a Short-Term Art Fund and then a Long-Term Art Fund (or get a writing grant—which is next to nonexistent in this country) so that I wouldn’t have to move back to my parents’ house again to write my third book.

I know that, like me, you have dreams other than providing the necessities and the material luxuries for yourself and your family. The objective of this blog is to affirm and encourage you to hold on to and to keep sacred those dreams. It will make you very sick and very restless and very miserable and very old (than your age) if you don’t.

I want you to have the dream house, the car/s, the nice vacations and trips abroad, the good schools for the kids, the financial capacity to support your aging/retired parents, the financial safety net for yourself and your loved ones in case something happens to you or to them--all without sacrificing your creative life.

In other words, I want you to keep making astig things (films, books, paintings, businesses, etc.) without making yourself and your loved ones poor and miserable like many many creatives that have come before us. And I want you to keep doing so for the rest of your natural life. :)

Live long and prosper, people! :) 

Your ally and enabler,

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