 Good day fellow investors! I recently received a private message from a viewer asking me whether $250,000 would be enough for financial independence. This is the story of a 28-year-old viewer who has been working two to three jobs at a time over the past eight years and managed to save up $250,000. I think that a lot of you viewers have somewhere a portfolio around $250,000, have the goal to retire or to retire early and be financially independent. Today we're going to see whether $250,000 are enough to retire and what should we do with those $250,000. As that is a significant amount of capital you should really lower your risks before investing or doing something stupid because if you lose it then you're in trouble. So let's see what can $250,000 bring to us and whether it could make us financially independent. I will go to three scenarios and then also discuss a fourth scenario why I think financial independence is extremely important and can be your best investment ever. So the safest investment of all are treasuries of course, considered riskless. If the US government doesn't go bankrupt or your government goes bankrupt wherever you live in the world, which is always a possibility, however, strange possibility today, you never know. Nevertheless, if we invest in treasuries, the $250,000, we get to a very, very low return on investment. The five-year treasury yields 2.18%, which is very, very low. On the $250,000 portfolio we would get about $6,000 in income per year, which is closely just above inflation. This is really not enough for financial independence. So treasuries risk-free, we would not lose much of our capital, but we are really getting low income, which is not enough for financial independence. The second option is to invest in something also that is relatively safe, a little bit more risky because with treasuries you know you will get $250,000 after five years. If it reads real estate investment trusts, you don't know whether you will get $250,000 after five years, but something you can be relatively sure of, especially if you invest in low-risk reads, is the income. If you now invest, you can get 5% and you can bet on it that after five years you will still get the 5% on your initial capital. However, that initial capital might not be $250,000, it might now be $125,000, and that's the risk. However, if we are talking about financial independence, we are talking about monthly income, not so much about the capital. If you have enough monthly income, you will be financially independent, and that's the point. I have found one read that looks really stable, it's Realty Income Corporation that has a very defensive industry diversified portfolio and a 4.7% yield. It sounds like a much better deal than treasuries. Let's see the portfolio of Realty Income. It is drug stores, convenience stores, dollar stores, nothing goes really beyond 10% and most of it around 5%, 7% of the portfolio. Thus, whatever happens, there are very defensive portfolios, there Realty Income would highly unlikely be a hit, as in 2009 it wasn't hit by the recession. Now what about the yield, 4.7% yield, that would be around $11,750, $12,000 per year, which is $1,000 per month. Is $1,000 per month enough for your financial independence? If you have a quarter of a million, I doubt that $1,000 per month is enough, but there is always something that can be done where $1,000 would be enough. Just to show you here that if you invest in a REIT, unlike treasuries, a REIT usually grows over time as inflation allows for higher prices, higher rents, which means higher dividends. You can see here that in the last 15 years Realty Income has doubled its dividend, which means that in the next 50 years, if you invest in it, your current $12,000 income might be $24,000, which would be much, much better than $1,000 per month. This you cannot get from treasuries. Now the third thing for financial independence is moving. If you have $250k, you invest it in a REIT, you get $1,000 per month, you are probably not rich in most of the cities in the US or around the world, but there are some places where you could live independent and independence is not the end. Financial independence is the start of your life. Then you start building, you start being what you really are and it will bring to more money than whatever was the job you were doing before. Just a quick example here. If you look at a price of a studio apartment in Oklahoma, it is $500 per month. The same apartment in Boston is five times more expensive. So if you live in Boston, if you buy something in Boston, if you own something in Boston, you can rent it out to somebody and probably the difference between what you get from rent and what you have to pay the mortgage will be enough to pay for the apartment in Oklahoma. So that's one way. If you live in Europe, if you move from cities like Amsterdam, Paris, London, if you move just even 100 kilometers from those cities, you can lower your rents very quickly four or five times. So 250K, if you lower your living means, you can be financially independent. And as I said, that's the start because if you have 250K, it means that you are an active person. You want to grow, you want to learn, you want to build, you want to develop yourself. Which means that you are not going to do nothing when you are financially independent. You are going to do what you love. And that doing what you love, sometimes it takes time, but over time you can build something that you will love doing during your whole life and that is the best investment in the world. So really think about whether you can lower your standards now in order to improve them in the long term by investing now in financial independence. It's something crazy. It's a concept that I am doing now. I have really lowered my living standards to invest in my financial independence and I'm loving it. Since I quit my job, my life has improved 20 times just because every day I do what I love. Thank you for watching. Looking forward to your comments, looking forward to your financial independence goals. We are here to learn and to motivate each other. So please send us motivating comments, your stories, whatever so that we can see better improved tricks how to get quicker to financial independence. I'll see you in the next video and have a great independent day.