I've made mistakes in the past talking about the concept of financial independence to people who weren't ready to accept them.

It's incredibly frustrating talking to these group of people who seem to surround it with not only negative connotation that they are not accepting but also refuse to listen to views that other people have.

Since then, I've not openly brought up talking on this subject to anyone I've hardly known unless there's some indication that they are open to listening about different viewpoints.

In the past weeks, I've gone for interviews and met up with people who've questioned my motives when they did a background check and found my articles online preaching and advocating about financial independence and the article that highlights my goal to "retire" at the age of 35.

As much as I can explain to them the whole idea and intention within a short timespan that I have, they simply dismissed the notion and questioned on my long term commitment. After all, most companies would like to have employees that are loyal and remain with the company for as long as the company requires them to be. 

You see, there's nothing wrong being sceptical about this whole thing. There is also nothing wrong with companies wanting their prospective employees to remain and commit with them for a longer term.

What I think needs clarifications is how some people tends to perceive them, perhaps unconsciously or maybe there's misconception about certain things that they heard on the streets that they didn't like. In this article, I hope I could address and explain some of these misconceptions.

This is the most misconception that people have for those who doesn't understand.

Everyone knows that to reach the state of financial independence, you need a crazy amount of hard work, grit and perseverance before being able to reach the ultimate state that you desire.

The misconception about being lazy is the wrong portray that people have in their minds about sitting by the couch or beach all day doing nothing once you have achieved all your financial goals in life.

And we know that this is hardly true (we'll, technically you can if you choose to do that but hardly anyone I've met has done that).

Most people who've actually achieved the real thing actually goes on to do greater things in life such as spending their time building things and giving back to society and that determination and ambition and the traits of hard work and perseverance continue to play a big role in the activities that they do.

The only thing financial bloggers care about is things that are monetary related and focused.

In fact, the opposite is true.

Sure, most of us talk about numbers in our blogs - how we derive certain percentage of compounding interests or how much emergency savings should we hold - things that generally borings and frightens the people but that is not all that we are offering.

This whole thing is larger than monetary benefits alone.

What we are trying to achieve is a sense of optimization of how we should live our lives to the fullest it can be, starting from planning the basic foundation of our needs right, protecting our loved ones with sufficient health coverage, ensuring we have the right investments that can fight off against inflation, finding jobs that we think are aligned with our goal and ambition, doing things that we are good at and many more.

I can understand why most people are sceptical about this whole idea because I did the same too when I first started.

Most people don't believe that it is actually possible for them to achieve some sort of financial independence at some stage in their working lives even in an expensive first world nation like Singapore where we have one of the highest cost of living in the world.

The social retirement and healthcare security has actually been designed to meet the rising needs against healthcare and lifestyle inflation that we have to cope in our aging days so it is something that has been well taken care of by the government.

To do one step better, there is a need to spend some time understanding the relationship between higher savings and higher returns rate and the number of years you have on compounding. Even if you are not able to match your peers who are earning or saving higher rate than you are at the moment, it is always good to give it your best shot and results will always show that you are glad taking this rather than not.

Thanks for reading.