Financial planning is crucial for any person aspiring financial freedom. Here is my 10 year plan. 

My 10 Year Plan: Patience is the Key to Financial Success

By starting Millionaire Mob, I’ve learned a lot. Most importantly, I’ve learned that I have a long road to go to achieve my goals for personal finance. I wanted to create a community where I could learn from my mistakes and make sure you don’t commit them.

Also, I might end up passing up a few of the things I did well along the way too! After tracking my net worth with Personal Capital for nearly 10 years, I’ve paid off debt, bought a house, created a website and more.

I give a lot of credit to Personal Capital for my financial success. It’s a completely free way to get smarter about your finances.

My 10-year plan includes the goal of having a significant income from dividends, having multiple streams of passive income and ownership in an online business. I’ll break down each section of this goal on how I plan to get there. I’ve realized how important it is to increase your income over time and build a diversified portfolio of side hustles.

Ever heard the term: Patience is a virtue? How about patience is the key to success? They aren’t just sayings for no reason. They are true sayings from actual experiences of people passed along for years.

With my 10 year plan, patience will definitely be the key to success. With financial freedom, patience is a virtue. Financial freedom is indeed a marathon and not a sprint. If you try to win the race by starting fast, it might not end well.

10 Year Goals

I’d love to be retired in some fashion after my 10 year plan. Here are some examples of 10 year goals that you should incorporate in your plan:

• What do you want to achieve financially?
• How do you want to live your lifestyle?
• What do you want to experience?
• Do you want to leave a legacy?

Goals for 10 years from now for me would include all of the above. By starting Millionaire Mob, I hope that I can leave stories and create new experiences that are beyond what an ordinary day job can provide. These 10 year goals play an important part in developing your plan. Plan and goals should be synonymous, but with planning, you have actionable steps. With goals, you have an endpoint.

Let’s dive into my four-pronged 10 year plan for achieving financial success with more detail.

10 Year Plan Example and Ideas for Goals

In order to build your 10 year plan, you need to set out your top priorities for success. What is most important to you to achieve? Is it living more financially stable? Is it raising a family? All these factors play into how you start building your 10 year plan.

I’ll highlight some of the key areas for my 10 year life plan that perhaps you can take in stride and craft your own 10 year plan.

For me, I want to achieve four things in my 10 year financial plan:

1. Dividend growth investing (surprise!): Through value dividend growth investing, I can invest in passive income. I have the goal of living off dividends forever.
2. Passive income: I love running online businesses. I call all of this passive income because I want to work on projects that require significant upfront time but produce cash flow into perpetuity. It’s important to diversify your income and surround yourself with things that will pay you over time.
3. Sound budgeting, saving and investing: I’ve been doing this for years now. I made a couple of small investing mistakes along the way, but I don’t plan to repeat those.
4. Travel hacking: Travel hacking is a source for me to explore the world and learn from others.

A 10 year plan is crucial for achieving success in anything. Planning will never hurt what you do. It will only help. These are some of the most important goals in my 10 year plan. A lot of people think that 10 years is a long time. Well, it isn’t. Let’s get into the details about how I think about each one of my 10 year goals.

Dividend Income & Dividend Investing 10 Year Plan

My goals for passive dividend income are somewhat lofty, but I think I can achieve them. So far, I’m a bit ahead of plan. However, the tough sledding happens in the outer years. As seen in the dividend calculator, you can test what you want to achieve as far as dividends by adjusting the assumptions including contribution amounts, growth rates, and dividend yield.

Here is what I’m currently doing in my dividend income portfolio:

1. I’m automatically contributing $200 per month.
2. Contributing additional funds at my discretion.
3. Reinvesting every dividend check back into the portfolio.

Based on my living off dividends case studies, I expect to achieve the following by year 10.

You can achieve a $100,000 passive income per year and a multi-million dollar portfolio.

By year 10, I should have $5,500 in annual dividend income and a $188,439 portfolio value. I’m a bit ahead of plan in terms of portfolio value in that I have around $27,000 in my dividend income portfolio. Based on the plan above, I should have a portfolio value of $5,724.

However, I need to continue to accelerate contributions and investments.

Please keep in mind that my dividend income portfolio is completely separate from all of my retirement accounts (401k, Roth IRA, etc.). For these accounts, I have been making the max contributions for 5 years now that I have no student loans. I will cover more of the detail about my retirement accounts in my personal financial 10-year plan.

The above table is an outstanding example of compound interest. It is easy to say that I have met the goals there, but there is a lot of hard work left. I truly believe in compound interest, which is why I wrote a book on it. Here is why I wrote my dividend investing book in more depth.

My 10 Year Plan for Passive Income

With passive income, I’m trying to build multiple sources of income streams that can ‘shelter’ me from my primary day job income. Increasing your income is very important. Diversifying it is even more important.

Right now, I’m making roughly $2,000 to $4,000 per month on my passive income streams. That volatility on the income is not acceptable. I need more stability in my income. By year 10, I need to have at least $10,000 of monthly income from my various passive income streams.

Here are some of the passive income streams that I have focused on building:

1. Selling my travel photography.
2. Writing an ebook on how to make money from dividend growth investing.
3. Renting out empty rooms in my house on Airbnb… I got a monthly renter, which I earned $1,300 for a month! House hacking is indeed passive income.
4. My freelance consulting business where I help others build pitch decks, write blog articles, advise on digital marketing and more.
5. A small amount of income from my blogs. I own a few other sites. However, I don’t strive to make much from blogging because for me it’s all about learning. I think everyone should start a blog (it only costs $3.95/month, which includes a free domain name).

What do I need to do to get to $10,000 of monthly income from passive income streams? I need to get better at all of them! The beauty of Airbnb is that I can just let it ride and I don’t have to focus on it.

I have a lot to learn on numbers 1-3. My freelance consulting business is not an issue. I earn some great income from using Fiverr and Freelancer. I really need to scale number 1-3 above to a point that I can automate and enjoy the fruits of my labor.

Income are some of the most important aspects for my 10 year goals. I want to retire early, but I still want some form of automated income coming in. Increasing my income will be one of the hardest components of my 10 year life plan.

My 10 Year Plan for Improving my Personal Finances

My personal financial plan has been focused on maximizing my retirement investments and staying within the boundaries of my budget.

I refinanced my student loans with SoFi back in 2014 and I’m very glad I did. This freed up so much money for me to focus on extinguishing my debt.

What I need to do now is focus on prepaying my mortgage to try to live completely mortgage free. This would reduce my expenses significantly. I would be left with paying about $500/month for property taxes.

However, I still have a small principal balance of student loans outstanding. Then, I wasn’t in an urgent rush to pay this off completely because the interest rate is so low. Thanks, SoFi! This has allowed me to retain some dry powder for investments.

Since I work in private equity, I’m required to commit a portion of my capital to the funds. It is only a few thousand dollars, but I figured I’d keep it on hand for when I receive a capital call.

I’m happy committing capital to 15-25% internal rate of return cost of capital rather than prepaying debt that has an interest rate of 4.375%.

My 10 Year Plan for Travel Hacking

Oh my, where to start? There are so many places on my list to visit in the world. Through travel hacking, I’m able to go to a number of different places around the world for little to no cost. I’ve been to North America, Europe, and Asia. My trip to Japan was amazing. I can’t wait to go back. I was able to fly there for $1.60 round trip!

Here are some places that I need to visit in my 10 years:

• Middle East
• Africa
• More of Europe

I love going to places that are completely new to me. You can’t replace the feeling of arriving in a new country and being completely shell-shocked at the cultural experience. In order to do this, I need to continue to step up my points game.

I track my points like I track my net worth. I’m a firm believer that points should be viewed like assets or investments.

Conclusion on My 10 Year Plan

My 10 year plan is a diverse one. I am focused on investing, increasing my income and travel hacking (clearly). In order to hit my 10 year plan, I need to get a lot better and improve every single day. There is still so much more learning to do.

That is exactly why I started Millionaire Mob. I can track my goals, build my income and help others learn along the way. I’m literally making my dreams a reality.

A 10 year plan is a long period of time. Patience is the key to success here. If you follow your exact steps to achieve your financial goals, you will be okay. Personal finance and financial planning is all about repetition.

As far as the in-between goes, focus on motivators to keep you on track. For me, financial freedom quotes help me stay on track.

Related Resources

• M1 Finance Review
• Best Investing Apps to Use Today
• How to Become a Landlord

Millionaire Mob is an early retirement blog focused on passive income, personal finance, dividend growth investing and travel hacking. With both a million rewards points and a million dollar net worth you can live a happier lifestyle.

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