Few people understand basic personal finance: Classified Balance Sheet. “I’m money ahead! I can get a boat!” That boat is fun and increases your popularity, but unless you are using it to run hot commodities from clandestine ports, it is a liability (and smuggling is its own non-financial liability). You now get to pay docking fees, buy fuel and insurance and cover maintenance now and then. You’ve just upped your outgo and committed yourself more to the treadmill.

The smart fork in the road is to tighten your belt and acquire assets, things that up your income. In 1963, my dad let drop that he made $11,000 a year. Doesn’t sound like much, but $11k then equates to roughly $100k now. We lived in a rural town, and that was double and more what my friends’ dads made. However, we lived much poorer. My friends all had souped-up cars that their parents bought in their name. I got to borrow the family Ford Custom. They had afternoons and weekends free. I had to clear the lots and tear down the houses on the distressed properties my dad bought.

Freedom, your personal freedom, comes at a steep price. As my dad would say, “You work 8 hours a day for someone else and 8 for yourself. Then, on the weekends, you can work 32 hours for yourself.” Not only did he mean that he lived it. Before long, he no longer had a job. And, a decade or so after that, he could see to his affairs as necessary and take off as desired.

That’s the fork in the road to take. Work hard when you are young and build toward your freedom, because, believe me, one day you are going to ache to be off that treadmill and won’t begin to see a way to manage that.