I haven’t posted as much as I’d have liked to in the past month or so. The truth is I’ve been super busy. I was in Arkansas for three weeks helping my son rehab a new rental. I’m invested with him in some Airbnb rentals there. As anyone who’s ever rehabbed a house knows, it’s a lot of work. And the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing some minor, but time-consuming, updates to software that I designed. When I work on a project, I generally go “all in” and commit full resources to it. Not just to get it done quicker, but I believe good (great) work requires complete focus. If you’re working on something business-related, I don’t believe you can do it half-hearted (at least not in the early years). So I generally work 10-12 hours per day until something is done. That means I’ve been working 70+ hour weeks the last 6-8 weeks. I don’t have a moderate switch.

The truth is, though, when I’m not going all out on a house rehab, or making a minor update to my software, I don’t have to work that much per week anymore to maintain my software company. A “small” software company that has recurring/subscription revenue of ~$700,000/year.

My pursuit of financial freedom started in my 20’s (30 years ago). I did not know anything back then about FI or FIRE, or one of the original books on all of this… “Your Money or Your Life”. I simply didn’t want to have to work and be controlled like my father was at his jobs. My father served in Vietnam in the 101st Airborne in his early 20’s. After that, with his jobs, he pretty much got up to an alarm at 5am for almost 50 years until he died. While I deeply respected my father’s hard work and sacrifices (I’ve never known anyone who worked harder), I wanted more, and I wanted to not be a slave to an alarm clock for the rest of my life.

Fast-forward to 2012, I was finally making some good money after 20+ years of hustle (200+K of profit). I was technically a millionaire on paper by then due to my software subscription business model (X multiplier of net profit with recurring revenue), but I certainly didn’t feel like it. Just a few years prior I was paying off IRS debt (that’s another long story), and I had zero savings. Yes, you read that correct, zero.