At 22, I read a book written 100 years ago.
It's called The Richest Man in Babylon.
Set in ancient Babylon, it teaches financial principles through parables. The core lesson is deceptively simple: pay yourself first.
Before you pay your landlord, your phone bill, your grocery store — set aside at least 10% of everything you earn as money that belongs to you permanently.
Never touch it. Let it grow. Put it to work.
The rest of the book elaborates on that single idea: a part of all you earn is yours to keep.
It's not a complicated book. That's the point. The principles fit on a single page. Which is exactly what makes the gap between reading it and acting on it so uncomfortable to explain.
I understood it at 22. Most people do. And yet...
Why knowing isn't enough
Soon after reading, the doubts started flooding in.
"I'm just a university student making $700 a month. $70 a month isn't gonna do anything."
"By the time that money habit helps me, I'll be old and gray. What's the point?"
So I continued spending everything I made.
17 years passed. Still not following advice I had wholeheartedly agreed with.
And sadly, I'm not alone.
The Federal Reserve found that roughly 4 in 10 Americans couldn't cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing money or selling something.
Not 4 in 10 people living in poverty. 4 in 10 Americans across all income levels.
That's not a money problem. That's a system problem. Most people were never taught to build one.
I asked my father what advice he had for me from his 65 years of living.
"Start saving for retirement earlier," he said.
Of course he'd say that. He'd just retired and realized the number he had to live on for the rest of his life was far from the number of his dreams.
But for me, retirement felt too far away to make me care. So I postponed.
What finally changed
I spent 17 years with subtle lifestyle creep.
The sense that there wasn't enough left to save, and the vague plan to start when things stabilize. But there was always something else that seemed more urgent.
What finally shifted it was writing.
Writing frequently about my thoughts and my future plans forced me to confront something I'd been avoiding: you always need a buffer in this uncertain world.
Epidemics, wars, financial collapse — any one of them ready to disrupt the sensitive global systems we all rely on.
I realized that freedom doesn't only depend on the amount you make. It also depends on the amount you always have backing you up.
That's what will allow you to dare to quit the job you hate, start your own business before it's profitable, move halfway across the world for a critical opportunity.
Not as a retirement fund you touch at 65. As a foundation of the life you're living now.
The system I built
Just like the book, it's not complicated. It just needs to be set up once.
10% of everything I earn is automatically sent to an investment account each month.
That account then automatically uses 80% of it to buy global index funds.
I chose global index funds because I wanted to own a small piece of 1,000+ major businesses on earth without having to pick winners. When the world economy grows, I grow with it. When it dips, I stay in and wait. No stock picking, no timing the market, no watching charts.
Just automatic, boring, compounding — which is exactly the kind of system a 9-to-5er building something on the side has time for.
The remaining 20% goes into two asset classes I didn't want to leave out.
Gold. I hold physical gold (and silver) because it's the one asset that has stored value across every civilization, every currency collapse, every war in recorded history.
Not a promise. Not a number on a screen. Something you can hold in your hand. In a world where governments can print money at will, gold is the thing they can't print more of. I'm not betting on it going up. I'm betting on everything else potentially going wrong.
Crypto. I hold Bitcoin and Ethereum because I think we're still early in a fundamental shift in how value is stored and transferred.
It's volatile, it's speculative, and I only put in what I can afford to lose entirely. But the asymmetric upside is worth a small, disciplined allocation.
There's also a practical reason: in a worst case scenario, physical gold can be confiscated at borders. Crypto can't. A hardware wallet in your pocket crosses any border invisibly. For someone planning to relocate and building toward location freedom, that's not paranoia. It's preparation.
Together: gold protects against the worst case. Crypto bets on the best case. Index funds capture the middle — the steady, compounding growth of the global economy doing what it's always done.
Three different futures. No single bet covering all of them.
The final piece is a 4-6 month cash buffer so I'm never forced to sell investments at a bad time.
Almost everything runs automatically. The only exception is physical gold & silver, which I buy manually (though in some countries you can automate even that).
Once a year I rebalance to keep the ratios roughly where I want them. That's the whole system.
Why this matters for your escape
None of this is financial advice. It's just what I've done.
But here's what building it changed for me psychologically:
When you know your family's floor is protected regardless of what happens with the freelance business, you take different risks. Better risks.
You outreach without desperation. You turn down bad clients. You negotiate from a position of stability rather than scarcity.
I've taken on horrible clients at horrible rates out of desperation. You never want to put yourself in that position.
A system like this makes the escape inevitable instead of reckless.
I wish I'd built this at 22.
I didn't. I built it at 39.
The gap between knowing and doing cost me 17 years of compounding.
I won't let it cost me 17 more.
P.S. Building toward financial freedom is only half the picture. If you're also trying to escape your 9-to-5 but keep hitting the same wall, take the 9-5 Escape Quiz at uglyemails dot com.
In 3 minutes it shows you your exact bottleneck and what to fix first. The system above protects your floor. The quiz helps you figure out what's stopping you from raising the ceiling.
