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What’s Your Excuse For Not Being Financially Free?

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All my life I have fervently believed that the only way to true financial security and everlasting financial peace-of-mind is to be self-employed. But as an adult I never had the courage to strike out on my own.

As a youngster, I had no problem having my own businesses: I had a paper route when I was in the 4&5th grades until we moved out of the country and when I moved back to the United States for high school I started another paper route for two years; I was a baby-sitter for many years; I mowed lawns for neighbors every summer; and while in college I umpired men’s softball games. This was standard, traditional adolescent entrepreneurship. But when it came time for me to choose a profession for life’s work, it never occurred to me that I could earn a living with my own business. Why was that?

Why did I not feel that I could earn a living based on my wits? I suppose it was because I was too much in my head rather than in my heart. And more simply I really did not have a role model for free-lancing one’s financial fortunes. I knew no one that had started multiple business or even one.

Everyone I knew worked for “the man,” a company or the government. My Dad was career Air Force, my uncles all worked for the Service or for large corporations. Our neighbors, everywhere we had lived, were Air Force neighbors, so they weren’t role models for striking out on one’s own. And because the AF sent us to a new base every three years I never developed any really close relationships to my “townie” (who weren’t in the AF) friends’ parents . In high school most of those parents were farmers, not exactly role models for me.

So in my earliest years, having my own business was simply not a conscious thought. In hindsight, that was very unfortunate.