Financial Freedom 2 - 2025 New Year Cohort
Financial Freedom 2 - 2025 New Year Cohort
Winter Cohort: January 1-February 28
Coach: Douglas Tsoi
Growing and Nurturing Your Income
The rich are investors, not spenders. This online course continues where Financial Freedom 1 left off, focusing on creating the passive income needed to escape having to work to meet your monthly expenses. The main topics are introductory investing, growing annual income, and the psychology of money. Topics include the basics of different investment accounts, how to choose investments that fit your ethics, and how to make your time more valuable. If you are a novice, this course will jumpstart your investing. If you have some experience, it will deepen your understanding of what to invest in, given your timeline and risk tolerance.
This course is for Financial Freedom 1 alumni. You have three months to complete it. There are fewer lessons, but feedback has been that the ideas are deeper and it takes longer.
Tier A Pricing: $997 ($60/hr or above wage earners)
Tier B Pricing: $797 ($30-$59/hr wage earners)
Tier C Pricing: $597 ($16-$29/hr wage earners)
Tier D Pricing: $297 ($15/hr or below wage earners)
See our Pricing Policy for more information on income-based equity pricing. All tuition will be donated to the Jubilee Fund.
Similar to the current Financial Freedom 1, this is a self-paced online course, meaning you can take it wherever you are. You will be in an online community where you challenge and support each other as you work through the lessons. You have two months to complete the 30 lessons, each about 30-60 minutes long.
The Millionaire Next Door describes how Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth spend 8 hours a month studying and examining their investments. Under-Accumulators of Wealth spend an average of 4 hours a month. If you aren't spending this amount of time on your finances since Financial Freedom 1, this is an opportunity to pick back up with other FF1 alumni.
Capitalism creates stress and insecurity in order for it to grow. In FF1, we focused on the consumption side, the ever-constant need for more and status competition. In FF2, we focus on the income side. The gig economy and technology are the flip side of consumerism: capitalism's way of running us down and keeping us in the system. Just as the consumerism draw downs our defense systematically, gig economic and automation batter offense systematically too. In real numbers, the gig economy is lowering pay 20%-30% by the simple fact of not paying benefits. And not just freelancers, it’s everyone, because the gig economy puts pressure on full-time job salaries as well. In short: if you aren’t aware and don’t advocate for yourself, you will be grossly underpaid.
And how do you earn a higher rate of return on the money you save? If you haven't invested any savings you have since FF1, this is the chance to figure out where to put your money so it grows. Learn about stock market fundamentals, the debates of ethical investing, and how time factors into the strategy of risk and return.
This course is for people who want to nurture and grow their money so that it helps them reach their 25x crossover date faster.
Module 4: Investing and Income Money Scripts
Your own emotional and mental barriers stop you from investing and earning income far before any limits the world puts up on you. We start with a few exercises to deconstruct what beliefs you have about money, dive deeper into your money scripts and what it would mean to your identity if you had more money. What old story would you be betraying if you made more money?
Module 5: Investing Basics
How do you invest? In FF1, you made a goal for how many years it would take to reach financial freedom. The math was based on 6% annual investment growth, after inflation. As you learned in FF1, 7% returns double in 10 years and 3% returns double in 25 years. That's a huge difference in life hours and a subject worthy of your time. If you're not spending time learning how to get that 6%, you are losing those years.
In Financial Freedom 2, you'll learn the nuts and bolts of aiming for 6% after inflation (8-9% nominal). Module 5 covers topics including:
eliminating debt
buying real estate
setting up brokerage accounts
choosing stocks + bonds
using retirement accounts
the debate about socially responsible investing
choosing investment advisors
Managing risk and return.
We'll also cover important other topics like avoiding the heavy drag of fees by putting your money into "passive investing" and recognizing the often dirty, underhanded tactics of the financial industry which makes money from people's ignorance or lack of self-determination.
Module 6: Creating More Offense
Again, the only way to increase your savings rate is to widen the spread between your annual income and your annual consumption. For most people, creating more annual income is the greatest opportunity, more than cutting housing, transportation, or grocery costs. Making your labor more valuable has the effect of reaching financial freedom faster and giving you more of your life hours back, critical with a future of increasing job instability and change. You think about how you can create more income each year, gaining an increased sense of self while decreasing stress and worry about your finances. We will discuss
How to make your life hours valuable to others
The problems with Do What You Love
Attitudes, skills, and behaviors you have that can be turned into income while being fulfilling and enriching.
Negotiating, i.e. being paid what you're worth
Understanding your money setpoint (i.e. your money script about how much is fair for your to earn) and moving it up
FF3: Behavioral Economics (bonus)
Why do seemingly rational people make irrational financial decisions? What triggers the impulse to ignore common sense and act against our self-interest? The emerging field of behavioral economics studies the predictably irrational financial behavior. We’ll examine how people fall into common patterns of thinking in how we spend, save, borrow, invest, and waste money. We’ll also talk about how our family histories play into how we understand and value money.
Seeing how you use framing and mental accounting to make irrational decisions
Recognizing status quo bias and statistical illiteracy and improving your decision making.
Overcoming the extremely powerful habits of anchoring, confirmation bias, and male overconfidence.
Understanding family histories and the emotional content of money.
Living with the Paradox of Choice and the dissatisfaction of too many options.
Learning the neurobiology of consumption: how companies take advantage of your domamine and seratonin response.
Douglas Tsoi, JD, is the founder of the School of Financial Freedom. For twenty years, he worked as a lawyer, schoolteacher, and climate change activist, saving half of his salary and investing the rest. That earned him financial freedom at age 42 to do what he wants with his time, which includes helping people take control of their finances, make a plan, and live the life they truly want (after soccer, napping, and traveling).
He wrote the curriculum for FF1 and FF2.