The Slow Path to Financial Freedom — Why Boring Works
I ‘d like to tell you about a spreadsheet.
I know, I know, this is far from a sexy opening. But bear with me.
As my wife finished university and started working full time, we were for the first time earning some decent money between us with enough left over at the end of the month to do something with. Up until then we’d been focused on saving to put her through uni, paying off our tiny townhouse, and the occasional trip back to Europe to see her family. So, the question was what do we do with the extra cash.
One of the default moves is of course to add it into a retirement account. Given I’d heard a bit of chatter around how much was required by age 65 to have a retirement with dignity, I was suddenly interested in seeing what we were on the path to achieve using some basic modelling. The next step was to open Excel one night after work. I started with some basic formulas — nothing sophisticated — and then dragged those formulas down to represent outcomes by year. Honestly, until you see compounding play out it’s hard to believe. This was the first time for me. Once I started to see the possibilities, I was hooked.
I stared at the result. I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing. Turns out, boring monthly contributions dragged down a spreadsheet for thirty years look anything but boring at the end. Why did nobody tell me this?!
I’d been working since I was young – paper runs, fast food, part-time work through university, landing my first real job right before the GFC. I’d always worked hard. I just hadn’t ever stopped to think about what the money could actually do if I pointed it in the right direction.
That spreadsheet changed everything. Not because it showed me I was going to be rich. But because it showed me that boring, consistent, unsexy decisions compound into something genuinely remarkable over time. And that the earlier you start, the more the maths works in your favour. I wish someone had shown me that spreadsheet at twenty-two.
How I grew up thinking about money
Money wasn’t talked about much growing up — at least not in terms of growing or building it. We talked about managing it, making it last and being careful with it. My dad was an engineer and my mum worked part-time once we were in school. Three kids with one main income led to the occasional dinner table conversation about things being tight, which I guess is pretty normal. We weren’t doing it tough. It just wasn’t talked about in the lens of opportunity
My mum came from a large family with even less. There was a lens of scarcity that coloured how money was discussed — and an unspoken assumption that people who had a lot of it had probably gotten it at someone else’s expense.
Money was earned as a child. Pocket money was distributed based on a roster of chores. It helped us grow up with a strong work ethic but not a lot of financial education. I knew how to earn money, yet had no idea what to do with it beyond spend it — and avoid debt, which seemed like a dirty word.
Avoiding debt felt responsible. And technically it was. But “not in debt” and “building something” are very different things, and I confused them for too long.
The lost years
My first full-time job out of university paid, technically, just below the poverty line. Five and a half years of university and the paycheck was shockingly humbling. The GFC had just hit and it was an employer’s market. Being young and relatively cheap to employ had its advantages for once — I was largely insulated from the worst of it, too oblivious to really understand the full impact.
A few years later and after a few promotions, when I started earning just okay money, I did what most people do: I spent it. Lifestyle creep arrived quietly and made itself at home. Eating (and drinking) out more, buying clothes on a whim, coffee multiple times a day to survive the long hours. It felt like reward for the lean years. It probably was, in part.
What I wasn’t doing was thinking about the future at all. My retirement account was on auto — default fund with default settings. I didn’t look at it. I definitely didn’t compare it to other funds. I just assumed they had our best interests in mind, and that someone had it handled. I was so naïve.
Of course, they didn’t. Or more precisely — they had their interests handled, which weren’t really the same as mine. A royal commission into the financial services industry later confirmed: funds had recommended products that weren’t in members’ best interests, but rather their own. I was one of millions of people who had simply trusted the system without questioning it.
That was an expensive assumption.
The moment things clicked
Two things happened around the same time that changed how I thought about money.
The first was that basic spreadsheet. Watching compound interest do its work over a thirty-year projection — seeing how dramatically the outcomes changed based on a longer timeframe, or what fund you were in and the fees you were paying — made it real in a way that abstract advice never had.
As Warren Buffett has said, compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it. I’d been paying it, in lost time, for years.
The second was discovering personal finance books, well not just discovering them which I’d done years earlier, but actually reading them. A colleague had gifted me a well-known Australian book called The Barefoot Investor around the age of 30, and I’m embarrassed to say it sat unread for quite a few years. Anything finance-related went straight into the boring bucket and I just couldn’t be bothered. When I finally got around to reading it, I was surprised at just how easy, practical and genuinely entertaining it was. Genuinely different to what I’d expected. It opened a door I didn’t know existed, and from there I went down a rabbit hole I haven’t really come back from.
The concept of financial independence. Index investing. The difference between building wealth and speculating. The idea that you could actually design your financial life rather than just react to it.
I kick myself I didn’t read it earlier. But I also know I probably wasn’t ready to hear it until I was. The funny thing about good advice is that timing matters as much as content.
The mistakes I made — and what they taught me
I want to be honest here because I think it’s useful.
When I first started getting interested in investing I was as green as green can be. I’d read something on a forum or on Youtube, get excited about a stock that was getting serious coverage because it had seen astronomical gains over the previous twelve months, and buy in with a serious case of FOMO. ZIP was my first — a buy now pay later stock on the ASX that had ridden a wave of hype and seemed unstoppable.
It dropped. Then kept dropping. Then dropped some more.
I made most of the classic mistakes: buying on momentum, having no idea about fundamentals, holding on too long hoping for a recovery, sitting on losses that kept getting worse. I wasn’t investing. I was speculating, or rather, vibe investing, and was just beginning to learn the difference.
What the data tells us — and what I eventually learned — is that most professional fund managers underperform the market index over five or more years once fees are accounted for. If the professionals can’t reliably beat the market, the idea that I could was optimistic at best.
I’m glad it happened early when the amounts were small. You learn from mistakes, and I’d rather have made those mistakes at the beginning than go all in later after somehow getting lucky. The losses were a cheap education compared to what they could have been.
Index funds change everything. Broad-based, low-cost, diversified. Boring in the best possible way. And likely investing really should be boring. You’re not trying to find the winning stock — you’re buying the whole market and letting time do the work. It removes emotion from the equation, and just like perhaps buying a new shirt, investing with a clear head is probably the best thing we can do.
What I actually do — and what I don’t
None of this is financial advice. I’m certainly not a financial advisor, I’m not trying to be one, and you should absolutely do your own research based on your own circumstances. What I share is my own personal approach, and the thinking behind it. You can tell by now that I’ve fumbled my way here.
The shift that made the biggest difference wasn’t finding some clever strategy. It was changing the order of operations.
Most people earn, spend, and save whatever’s left. It’s pure chance, and as I found in my younger years, the problem is there’s rarely much left. What I’d learned and makes complete sense is to flip that around — deciding in advance what we wanted to put away, and there is no harm in figuring that out after doing a spending plan, then having it leave the account before we can spend it. You just live on what remains. Aptly named paying yourself first. It sounds simple because it is. Simple and effective, especially given it doesn’t mean you necessarily have to live frugally. Just with focus.
It’s not just about investing though. Say you want a trip to Japan, this same method ensures you’re putting enough aside to make sure you’re boarding that plane.
So, once you have the money aside, the goal is to make sure the money was actually working for you. Not sitting in a low-interest savings account. Not in a default retirement fund that doesn’t align with your long term goals, quietly eroding returns through fees over decades. Actually invested, in things likely to grow at a decent rate over time.
These days we keep an eye on how we spend our money — not with scarcity in mind, but with a lens of abundance in the areas we actually value. That framing matters. It’s not about restriction. It’s about intention — and intention, compounded over time, unlocks more than you’d expect.
A note on retirement accounts
Be it a 401k or an IRA, through to Superannuation in Australia, your retirement account is often your most powerful long-term wealth building tool. It’s worth understanding and paying attention to. Most people don’t.
Unfortunately when you’re young retirement seems just so far away and frankly we have a lot of priorities right now. It’s a difficult thing in your 20s. Having enough foresight and delayed gratification to put cash away that you won’t be touching for decades.
That aside, the way some of these funds label their investment options has always bothered me. “High growth” gets labelled as “high risk” and the question “how comfortable are you with losing money?” predictably sends people toward conservative options. But the framing is wrong. Who in their right mind would naturally describe their risk tolerance with the word aggressive?
The real risk for someone in their twenties or thirties isn’t volatility — it’s the long-term cost of sitting in a conservative fund and achieving underwhelming returns over decades. Volatility is temporary. Compound underperformance is permanent.
Check what fund you’re in. Definitely check the fees. I got bit early on from being in funds with fees over 1%, which has a serious impact on long term returns, and they likely aren’t delivering any better result for it. Check the ten-year performance compared to alternatives. It takes an afternoon and the difference over a working lifetime can be significant.
The slow part
Here’s the thing nobody really wants to hear: this takes time.
Not a little time. A lot of time. The compounding that makes all of this work needs decades to really show its power. There’s no shortcut that replicates what consistent, boring investment over twenty or thirty years produces.
Which is actually good news, if you reframe it. Because it means the strategy isn’t complicated. It doesn’t require special knowledge or spending hours watching markets. It requires setting things up sensibly and then largely leaving them alone. It’s not as exciting as the beginning when you’re first seeing what can happen over time, but it’s even more important.
Spend less than you earn. Put the difference somewhere it can grow. Don’t panic when markets drop — they recover, and a market dip is actually a sale if you’re still in the accumulation phase. Repeat for a long time.
That’s most of it.
What financial freedom actually means to me
I want to be careful here because financial independence means different things to different people. At a base level it’s clearly the same, having enough money to have control over your time. But the method, the why, the speed can all be so personal.
For some it means retiring as early as possible. I understand the appeal, but it’s not quite my version. Maybe because I’ve missed that chance to a degree already. I actually don’t mind working — when the conditions are right and the work is meaningful. What I really want are options. The freedom to make choices about how I spend my time without every decision being dictated purely by financial necessity.
That’s a different and I think more achievable target for most people. Not escaping work entirely, but slowly building enough of a foundation that work becomes a choice rather than a requirement. That the mortgage doesn’t own you. That a bad year at work doesn’t derail everything. Being able to pull the emergency cord if you’re in a toxic workplace or job – that you can take three months off to breathe if you need to — which, as it happens, I once did.
The slow path to financial freedom isn’t glamorous. But neither is staying stuck. And unlike most things worth having, this one gets more appealing over time.
Where to start
If you’re reading this and thinking okay, but what do I actually do — here are four places to begin. Not all at once. Just somewhere.
Understand how you currently spend your money. Track it for a month without judgement — just to see where it goes. Most people I suggest this to say “Hell no, I’m terrified of finding out.” That reaction is precisely why you should do it. I guarantee there will be a few surprises, and likely not where you expect them. The goal absolutely isn’t guilt. It’s awareness. It’s about checking whether where you spend your money is actually where you want to be spending it — at a higher level, whether it aligns with your values and goals. And check that you’re spending less than you earn. If you’re not, you’ve got to fix it.
Know your why. Have a think about what you’re actually trying to build toward. It’s a daunting question and honestly not something I was thinking about in my early twenties. Even now it can seem abstract — but I encourage everyone to have a go. Don’t put too much pressure on getting it right. It’s not high stakes as you can always revisit it. Start with questions like: if money wasn’t an issue, how would your days look different? How would you be spending your time? Who would you want to be spending it with? The answers to these questions become guiding thoughts. They make what could come across as boring financial decisions feel a lot more purposeful when you know what they’re pointing toward.
Read before you act. Pick up a couple of books in this space before making any moves. A favourite of mine is The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. Also worth your time is The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley — not as entertaining but genuinely eye-opening about how people spend their money and certainly as relevant now with social media as it has ever been. Don’t treat any of them as gospel — authors have points of view, and you’ll sometimes find they conflict or contradict. That’s fine. Read widely, identify the common themes, and let those guide you. You’ll find there’s more consensus than you’d expect on the fundamentals.
Calculate your net worth. Add up everything you own — cash, retirement accounts, property, investments, any significant assets. Subtract everything you owe — mortgage, loans, credit card balances. That number is your starting point. If it’s the first time you’ve done it, don’t let it be the last. Be prepared for it to not be encouraging at first. That’s okay. Watching it move in the right direction over time — even slowly — is genuinely motivating. It gives you something real to hold onto when the boring decisions feel hard.
Start paying attention.
— Dave
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