Day 1 of the journey - Welcome onboard!

Hi, and welcome onboard to my "Next Stop: Million" blog!

The purpose with this blog is to help you too to reach your financial freedom, nothing less. My intention is first to get you started, support you in ramping up to full speed, and eventually help you find your way to the first destination - a cool one million! We will do this with simple, straightforward, practical methods and advice that just about anyone is able to apply in order to get there.

Hard to believe, huh? Sounds way too good and simple to be true, right? Any proof that this might actually work? Well, if I can do it - and I already did - anyone can do it!

My methods are be based on my own experiences and on all the things I learnt from many others during my own journey over the past 5 years. And yes, that's exactly how long it took in my case to get to the same first destination are we are now heading to.

When I started in 2004, I figured it would take me nearly 10 years to reach that one million milestone. I felt my estimate was conservative but realistic - a lot of things could and probably would go wrong in ten years. And man, how some things really did go wrong!

Just to mention the main catastrophe that hit me: the financial meltdown in the fall of 2008. It happened just when I was first time getting close – so close! – to the first stop milestone. The feeling was a bit like in a board game: “You were caught and fined for speeding - go back ten steps!” – or rather go back a hundred thousand, in my case.

The worst was that the signs had been there for some while already, but I had done nothing to get prepared for what had seemed probably. I – like many others – had simply gotten too greedy and was blindsided by the nice speed I had gathered. I should have noticed that the road was leading towards a cliff with no bridge, but of course I noticed nothing. I was just so busy trying to figure how to further get even more speed out of my machine!

So, I sure got a real learning experience, like we all did. The nice thing was, though, that I fared pretty OK, given the circumstances. I soon noticed that most of what had happened – I mean the financial meltdown itself – was just bad luck for me, the sort of stuff I had expected to happen even if I had hoped it wouldn’t. It still really hurt, I must say, but also appeared like a temporary set-back rather than the apocalypse now. My fundaments were still mostly correct and working, so with some adjustments to my machine and this sure-hard-to-forget learning experience in my pocket, I figured I should just solder on. And so I did.

Fast forward a year and a few months later, I was suddenly there! I could hardly believe it when I actually got to my one million milestone. I sure had seen it coming for some months already, given the way things had been going. Yet, having had my real learning experience just a year earlier, I though the world might well collapse again, like it had just done. I did think it now seemed less probably, though: the economy was already near rock-bottom, so it could hardly get much worse. And it didn’t.

Since I passed my first stop milestone last fall, I had gathered really great speed, and I sure didn’t feel it was time to stop now. Actually I still don’t! Instead, I have set my sights on new destinations, both financial and non-financial.

One of these destinations is the one I intend to reach through this blog. I felt I really want to help others to do the same that I had done, because it’s not as hard as most thing, and because the reward really is worth pursuing. Based on my own experience, the first step and the very key to the success on this journey is to get the motivation. Once you really decide you want to make this journey, everything else will follow in very natural way and much easier that most expect.

So let's get cracking! My next posting will be all about the motivation: the real rewards, as well as the initially-luring-but-eventually-not-so-important ones, and – most importantly – my personal testimony for why this journey really is worth making.

So, once more welcome onboard, and on to my next posting next week!