The Freedom Day Method - Bucket List

Hey everybody, it's Jeff here with the Freedom Nation podcast. And today, we're going to talk a lot about one of the key components that I found out later in the Freedom Day Method. But also one of the things that I think is one of the key components and one of the things that you should focus on. And that is a bucket list. So stay tuned, and we'll see you back here in just a second.

Welcome to the Freedom Nation podcast with Jeff Kikel. On this show, Jeff shares his expertise in financial and retirement planning from a different perspective, planning for your Freedom Day, which is the first day that you wake up and have enough income or assets and do not have to go to work that day. Learn how to calculate what you need, how to generate income sources, and listen to interviews from others who've done it themselves, get ready to experience your own Freedom Day.

Here we go. We're gonna talk about bucket list today. This is something that for me didn't actually happen until right when I got my Freedom Day. So my Freedom Day was July 1 2022. That was the day that financially I became free. Now I received one of my other freedoms before that, which was time freedom. And when my partner decided to buy me out, I was really bummed out a little bit, I really didn't know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, it was a shock. And one of those things that I had to absorb and a little bit and I just happened to win a trip to a conference out in California, beautiful place called Ojai, California, I highly recommend it, if you just need to get it go and absorb the world was at the most beautiful resort, they're possible. And I didn't want to talk to a soul. I didn't really know anybody there. And I was just really not in the mood to talk to anybody. And the first thing that happened when I checked in once again, I didn't know anybody didn't know anybody was going to be there. But when I checked in, I received the bucket list journal from guy named Ben Namsun, who I had no clue who he was, at the time, I knew he was going to be a speaker at the conference. But I received this bucket list journal. And I'd heard about the bucket list from the movie. And it's become a lexicon of our words. Now, bucket lists, but most of the time you hear this bucket list is Oh, that was a bucket list item on mine, I've always wanted to do, I'd never really put together a bucket list. I'd never really thought about it before. But I figured I had four days there, I didn't want to talk to anybody else. So I was going to take my time. And maybe this was a good exercise to go through, I knew that I wanted to create a new business at that time, I had bought a couple books to help me go through that process. But initially, I just needed to process a little bit. And that's where the bucket list came. And the bucket list journal started. And I just literally dove into it. And for the next three days, all I did was focus on writing my bucket list, I stayed in my room, I didn't go out, I play golf one day, and then went back to my room that night and just sat in there and continued to write my bucket list. And Ben actually has a unique way of doing it. He has 10 areas of your life to keep you well rounded, that he uses in the bucket list journal. So let's go through those real quick. So the first of which is travel and adventure. So you know that when people talk about the bucket list, that's usually what people will talk about is, oh, I want to go travel all these places and all that. And that's their only bucket list. But there's a lot more things that you want to have. Second one on the list is creative goals. What are some things that you wanted to do? Have you always wanted to write a book? Have you always wanted to learn how to play guitar? Have you always wanted to do whatever? Put that on your bucket list and work towards it? Another is material goals. Did you always want to buy and I will tell you this was the hardest one for me. Because typically I buy what I want when I want I don't really worry about it. I'm not a big fancy anything fan. So I don't really look to buy these a lot of material goods and things like that. But I knew there was one thing on my list that was easy. There was a watch that I've always wanted to own that Steve McQueen wore. I'm a huge Steve McQueen fan. So I put that on my list. Will I ever buy it? I don't know. But it's on my list because that was a material thing. Another one is financial goals. What are your financial goals? Do you want to get out of debt? Do you want to build up a real estate portfolio? What is all that? professional goals? What is that? What do you Want to do in your life? Do you want to become the best known person in your profession? Do you want to focus on getting a promotion, all those type of things, that's another piece. Then the other areas that that Ben focuses on are a little bit more kind of personal is what I would say. The next one is intellectual. What do you want to learn? Or have you ever wanted to learn a language? Do you want to get a degree that you never got? Do you want to get that master's degree that you ever be? You've always wanted? Okay, put it on that list. Number seven, is relationships. Do you want to have a better relationship with your spouse, I know that was a big one for me. For the last seven years of my life, I'd been building really, I would say, for almost 10 years between working and traveling a lot in my in one job coming and working in Austin for the first time with another company where I spent 6070 hours working there to starting my own business, and spending 70 to 80 hours. And a lot of those times, I was working with my wife, but I wasn't any, we didn't have time to just spend time together. And that was a big one on my list to really spend time with my wife. And really just simple things. One of the biggest is we started every Friday going out for breakfast together, which we just never did, we would eat at the office. But we just decided to start going out for breakfast and spending time just talking for a little bit and not being at the office and not working. Another one is health goals. So do you have a health goal? Do you want to lose weight do you want to lift I had a very simple one, I wanted to be able to again in my life, lift my bodyweight, which I weighed 240. So be able to lift 240 over my head. Again, in my life, I used to be able to do that I used to be able to almost do two times that amount. So this is it's something that, for me is something I have a goal for, I don't need to do two times my weight at any point in my life ever again. But I just want to be able to lift my body weight above my head again, nine is mental health. So mental health? Are you suffering from any kind of mental health problems, anything along those lines? Do you feel like you need to meditate on a regular basis, we'll set a goal that for the first 90 days of your plan, you're going to meditate for 10 minutes per day, very simple goal. It's something that you can knock off your bucket list, but it's also something that will get you in a habit, and really helping you mentally be able to handle all this. The last list that you make is a gift list. What do you want to gift do you want to give to your church more do you want to give to something else more? Do you want to give your time to a an organization, all of that. Now, once you have your list of 10, what you're going to do is you're gonna go through, and you're going to do 10 per category. It's as simple as that 10 per category 10 categories, guess what? 100 items for your bucket list. Now, here's what I will tell you, your travel one probably is going to fill up really fast. And you're going to feel like you want to do way more than that. That's fine, but you want to be well rounded. If you're like me material, I was struggling to find things to fill up that 10 list because once again, I have everything I want. There's nothing that I can't do that I could tell you that I absolutely have to have. But it was one of those things that I looked at and said, Okay, I'll find stuff to put in there. financially. That's something that a lot of you might just say, hey, I want to have my freedom day. But there's some other things in between there that you could do from that perspective. Intellectually, what do you want to learn? What books do you want to read? Put that out there. I know one of the ones for me, I set a ginormous goal, which was I wanted to read 52 books in 52 weeks. Interestingly enough, I got so focused on that one. And it was actually at the time that I got my Freedom Day, I didn't have a whole lot of work to do, because I was waiting for the sale of the business to happen. I was still getting paid, I really wasn't wanting to work that much in the existing business because it wouldn't have helped my situation any. So I ended up reading a ton and I read those 52 books and three and a half months, I knocked that one off my list in no time because I was just absorbing information. And it was great that I put that on my list, because it made me focus on that it made me really start to just absorb information and figure out what and where and how I was going to do my business going forward. So that's a bucket list. I think everybody should have one. What we do and what we teach you to do with the Freedom Day method though, is to then have your bucket list to now Next step, create another income source that can help you pay for this doesn't take out of your budget doesn't take anything out of what you're making currently today. But what it does is creating that first off retrains your brain and then allows you to go through your bucket list, and start to knock a few things off that list. Give yourself encouragement, give yourself rewards along the way for saving and sacrificing. And in the end, you're going to do some really cool, amazing things that you've never done. And I'm going to tell you one quick story before we leave. So I told you, I wrote my bucket list there at the event, I didn't really want to be around anybody. Because of all that had gone on with the business sale, I was really trying to figure out where I wanted to be. And number 23 on my list, my favorite band of all time is the Eagles. And I said I want to have a private concert with the Eagles. So the last night of the conference, I went down to dinner, they were having a big event that they called sense. And it was held in this beautiful garden area at the Ojai Valley inn, if you've ever been there, it's this gorgeous thing called the farm. You go out there, they had food from all over the world, a whole bunch of different flavors and senses from that perspective. It was in the vegetable and flower garden. So you got the sense of smell, you got the sense of taste, you had visual sense. So it was the view around you the event itself. And they also had things projected up in the sky that if you put 3d glasses on, you could see so it was all this stuff going on. And I was sitting there at the event eating dinner by myself, somebody was came over and was talking with me and out of the corner of my ear. I've heard they had bands playing the whole time, and it was really exciting. Next thing I hear out of my ear is and we'd like to invite to the stage right now Don Felder from the Eagles. And I got to sit there and be 10 feet away from Don Felder who was part of the original eagles to the guy who wrote my favorite song of all time, Hotel California, an amazing guitarist, he's 70 some odd years old, and he can still rock as well as he ever has, and still play as well as he ever has. And that was the moment that I looked over my shoulder and went, Okay, God, you're screwing with me now. But that was the very first thing I checked off my bucket list was my private concert with the Eagles won all of them because they're dying off pretty quick. But it was one of my favorite Eagles of all time and I count that one as a win. So build your bucket list, put that out there to the universe and see what happens. I would love your comments right down below here. If you've had something on your bucket list that you got to check off here recently. Let us know I'd love to see you share that with our group here in our community. Make sure you subscribe and check that little button that says notifications so that you make sure that you're getting notified when we put these things out. We're going to be putting out a ton more of these things up to the launch of the Freedom Day book, which is coming very soon. So keep your eye out for it. Thanks a lot and we will see you back here next time.