If you don’t save and invest part of your salary every month, you are on the road to being a sucker for the rest of your life. It is a painful reality that very few people want to hear but without a big financial cushion in your current account you will never have freedom, you will be tied to a salary that will be like a drug. I am not saying it, Nassim Taleb already said it and that is that people in the XXI century have three drugs, the first is heroin, the second carbohydrates and finally a monthly salary.

Without freedom, rest assured that you will give up simple things like watching your son play soccer or going to his Christmas performance at school. I don’t know about you, but it seems like a very bad choice to me. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t work or what you should do with your money, I just want you to take stock of the situation.

You need money to buy freedom and to stop being a sucker, and this can only be achieved by saving and investing.

If you save $5 bucks a day and invest it for 30 years….

Easy, you will be 60 years old and you will have lost a lifetime. Tired of always reading the same topics and we always cling to emotional stories in which to get rid of ‘ant expenses’: Starbucks coffee, eating out, cheap meat from the supermarket around the corner… Let me tell you that this way you will never get it, you will never get to say, F***k You Money.

Starting from the idea that public pensions will cease to exist, or at least will be exponentially reduced in most countries of the world and therefore, it seems stupid to count on them, let’s do some quick math:

• You save 25% of your salary, you are earning one year of freedom for every 3 years worked. If you retire at 65, after 40 years working, you will have 13 years of freedom available. Taking into account that you have left it under the mattress and inflation has eaten most of it, with a little luck you will have money left over until you are 75.

• You save 50% of your salary, in this case, you earn one year, for each year worked, taking into account inflation the result is a little more optimistic, you could have money until you are 90–95.

But in 99% of the jobs, this last scenario has led you to lead a fairly austere life and that is if you have not had to face any setback that life gives you along the way.

I know it is hard and that few people have thought about it in this sense, but there are two solutions to all this: Earn more money and expose your saves to black swans.

The first one nowadays we have an infinite number of methods, the Internet has made it possible for a streamer to earn more money than a Wall Street banker, not to mention that it has taken market share away from journalists, but we will see this in detail another day.

The second is perhaps the least known and is that we should prepare our savings and investments for extreme market situations, many times it is only necessary to get it right once, as we tell you in this article.

The important thing is to be antifragile in any market situation and to have a margin that, although not 100%, buys us freedom as we continue to buy more with our savings.

This second solution is what we do at Asymmetric Finance, we try to expose ourselves to extreme market situations, without having to invest our portfolio 100% and in a leveraged way. In this way an individual investor can replicate it and expose themselves to Black Swans in the same way, or else you know, you can continue with your monthly salary.

This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.