50-15-5-Rule

Money can make money. 

A path to freeing yourself from being a productive asset is the 50-15-5-Rule. If you have an income stream because YOU are a productive asset being paid for your work, and you have capacity to gain significant control over your expenses, you can apply this rule. 

It starts by not consuming everything you produce. 

If you can invest half (50%) every year, for 15 years, and your money makes 5% real return (paid $5 for each $100 that works, AFTER all expenses and inflation)… then your capital can grow to the point where your money makes as much money as you were spending. 

These are aggressive assumptions. Investing half is hard. 15 years is long. 5% is proper work for proper money. 

All that said... it is possible to get to the point where you have an engine. 

An engine is capital that (on average), earns more than you spend (on average). 

If you sustainably spend less than your money sustainably earns, then you are no longer bound by the constraints of money on how you spend your time and energy.

Half