Free from 9 to 5 Chronicles of people and ideas to inspire and achieve freedom from a 9 to 5 job

Get your financial house in order before quitting your dayjob

Before you can be free from 9 to 5, you have to know the state of your finances. How much do you spend every month? How much income do you need every month? Is your new venture making enough to allow you to quit your dayjob?

I’ve been using Quicken for 5 years now, and it tells me at a glance how my finances are doing. I know when any of my accounts are off by a penny. I know exactly how profitable each of my ventures are. I spend just about an hour every month getting all my information in, mostly by downloading data from bank, brokerage and credit card accounts.

Quicken already comes with categories for classifying your income/expenses, but I like to create more categories for things I want to track in more detail. For example, Quicken has a “Groceries” category, but I’ve broken it down further into Ralphs, Albertsons, etc. My “Auto” category is broken down by each car I own, and then into gas, repairs, insurance, etc. And everytime I take a vacation, I create a category for it and put all vacation expenses in there, so at the end, I know how much it cost me. This may sound extreme, but it’s taken me 5 years to get to this point and it is second nature by now.

I find the knowledge of where your money comes from and how it is spent to be invaluable, not just in terms of tracking income/expenses, but also for planning and forecasting. If you’re not already using some sort of personal finance program, I’d highly recommend doing so. It won’t speed or guarantee your freedom from 9 to 5, but it can play a part in facilitating it.