How much money do I need to have before I can stop working? | Rahul Sen | TEDxBITSGoa

how many of you guys in the audience that have asked yourself this question that's a PID his raise their hands Wow that's quite a lot I'd also himself this question back in 1994 I was seven years old I was living in London I'd spent two years working with a company called the added value of me because nothing agency I was wasn't a TR weeks that's roughly about thirty now the name six days a week I should wake up in the morning six o'clock get to work back eight that's like ten at 9:00 get a home I got my girlfriend crash out of buck one two and up again at six and start all over again I was definitely didn't work in the rat-faced but I was driving a Porsche 911 company policy we won't pay you anything that can drive and guy you want so there was I enjoy myself and this passion is departing to my mind how much money you need to have to stop work and my first initial analysis straightforward quite simple and elegant and so said that in my life will explain with two dimensions two independent variables the amount of free time you have and the amount of money that you make and you allow people who were in the lower left-hand quadrant no money no time a whole bunch of us I certainly had friends who had lots of money of no time you know those guys too and they were were my other friends young students or Pez bartenders were a minimum wage and they have lots of time for a cinema but there was just a handful of people were actually in the top right bottom who I got mine and lots of time I sort of felt that this unequal distribution of people so I'm file included that there was actually an invisible barrier then stopped most here we made people from getting into the top right-hand quadrant so I went around asking my friends and buddies how do you go from no time your money to lots of time and lots of money and all of them so three consistently said go work smart get morning come on director gets up options seller make your millions retire I thought now three straight forward three consistent advice that I got from a whole bunch so 2005 wasn't crazy I said double my workload double my clients double my turn projects I saw some things and I was sort of 100 trade on a 30 hours a week that's roughly roughly 18 hours a day seven days my sex life zero okay I should get home after my girlfriend abuse and I'd have to leave before she'd wake up so I knew I was sacrificing my personal life for a promotion and sure enough six months later I was promoted project manager 30,000 pounds a year okay and most people around me thought of me is quite a superstar so now I was a rat who was actually a superstar at with Hot Wheels everything was going fine till one morning when I woke up and I looked at my clock on the side of my bed and it said 3-0 to never forget that two minutes past 3:00 o'clock in the morning and the first thought that came into my head was I'm late for work and I remember looking at myself in the mirror across my bed and the room was dark and I could see the silhouette of a person and all their hair was standing up like they've got a serious amount of electric shocks and I knew there was something wrong with this picture that morning when I drove to work the streets were still empty there's still dark it was cold in wet in London and I realized that there was a significant fundamental problem with my strategy to go into the top right-hand quadrant so I went back to the drawing board I looked at my hypothesis I modified it a beta but some numbers in and this is what I came up with a minimum salary of 100,000 my free time I sort of gave it a slightly simple scale saying if you have just the Sunday's free you've got 50 days free in a year if you take the week off weekend off you get a hundred days a year which is about three months of free time and I had friends of mine in Europe whose parents at that time we're working six months in Europe and then spending six months in some beautiful sunny country so working six months on six months off was definitely happening so we had six months and then nine and twelve months were just logical extensions this paradigm also sort of made me show maybe see that I was swimming in the wrong direction I was sort of moving to no freedom and no money despite getting promoted and despite having a higher salary so the question was know what went wrong and how was I going to fix it I then looked at what people were saying to me what people were saying to me was big money first the freedom will follow you know in other words the money cause and the effect is free time now I knew from personal experience that this relationship wasn't working for me this causal relationship so I looked at this and I said well suppose this is wrong suppose everybody's got it wrong and suppose the causal relationship was reversed but really can have the free time money will follow and this gave me my new hypothesis which really said if you can increase if I could increase my free time my income would grow with the hypothesis immediately of course that I'm looking for a new job it's gonna pay me more money and give me more free time by January of 1996 I was hired by wine our is the world's third largest agency and I was briefed to develop a brand consultancy for them out of Amsterdam Amsterdam my favorite city okay they were going to relocate me to Amsterdam they were going to give me eighty thousand pounds a year they're gonna pay for my house my car my bedroom my bar bills my restaurant expenses and they were gonna fly me every weekend to London so I could hang out with my wife okay so I good back to the chop I looked at it and I said okay I started from down there today I've got more free time and I'm making more money so I was headed at least in the right direction a year later 1997 I got offered another job it was from why not a group across Europe and they wanted to give me the job of being the regional director for strategic planning for Citibank across 36 countries between England and India that is my region now I knew if I kept either job my free time wasn't gonna suffer I was still gonna have my weekends free but me you know I thought what happens if I do both jobs simultaneously well my freedom increase will my income increase so for the next two years I kept two jobs and I was so good at both of them that I became known as a internationally famous rat who could get the job done my hundred my salary touched over a hundred thousand pounds a year my bonus was another 20 grand and my free time went up because not only did I my weekends free but I was actually spending a lot of time in duty-free shopping business class lounges and in some of the best hotels within Chennai and London things were looking good the parrot I was working had more time and more money now than ever before 1999 let me come back 1999 my wife got pregnant and at that time I decided to give up my six-figure salary give up my two jobs and become a full-time dad and a part-time consultant I knew my free time was going to go up the question was what was going to happen at the money I found as a freelance consultant in Europe I could charge thirty to forty thousand pounds per project each project would take me about a month to complete I'd work two three or four projects in a year that'll give me about 120 grand income that was about the same that I was getting at Y&R but now I was only working three to four months a year the other eight months me and my son were in Starbucks parks museums art galleries play groups and any restaurant or pub that was kid-friendly it was looking great then in 2001 there was this a very close friend of mine who came to me and he said Rahul you know we need to start a new consultancy and I said listen David I'm retired I'm done been there done it and are interested and he looked at me said Nora this is not a run-of-the-mill consultancy Rowell we're gonna specialize in three industry sectors adult entertainment Wow gambling okay and biotechnology cloning human cloning companies that are involved that and clearly obviously that is the end of my retirement and that is the birth of Oedipus when people asked us what we did we would say to them you know you come to us looking like that lizard coops eatables you come to us looking like that lizard above because of the industry or the business you represent for 50 grand we guys can transform your businesses image to make you looking like Brad Pitt somebody that everybody likes and wants to be friends with so our clients included the ranked group is the world's largest casino company we had world punch calm it was an online gambling startup we had Spearmint Rhino who is the world's largest lap dancing club we had erotica largest consumer fair we had torture Garden England's largest fetish club and of course we had playboy who was trying to launch sex toys into York those were our clients we had a lot of hard work the work was challenging but guess what happened my free time was now limited to weekends and over the two years David I probably took home 50 grand apiece after taxes and expenses free time went down money went down the next year 2003 my father passed away in India and I inherited his share of India's largest knocking consultancy Quadra advisory it had 21 consultants two offices Bombay and Delhi ternal about three crore rupees so as me and my mom were dealing with my dad's death the other shareholders and directors got together and virtually emotionally blackmailed me and asked me to look after the business that's what good Indian sons did you can guess what happened my freedom was back down to me only Sundays because in India it's quite the norm to work on Saturdays and now my salary was an Indian rupees ladies and gentleman it took me 10 years and had gone full circle as back to where I'd started 10 years later it took me months to years sorry two years to sell Quadra so Martin Sorrell and it's WPD group and once the shareholders were happy to divide the winnings I managed to regain my free time okay and it was at that time I thought to myself I should not now head into starting a new venture that actually depended on my expertise as an international brand consultant to succeed instead the way I was going to make money was by investing in the store Indian stock market or I had absolutely no expertise and in some strange way I felt that by disconnecting my income from my expertise I was actually going to protect my freetime lost over the last four years so I hired a bunch of guys out of Bombay investment bankers and I said here is the money invested in the stock market make sure my mother and I can now live off the returns and they looked at me in the first thing is we're proud how much money do you and your mother want every year and this same old question came back to haunt me again this is a question that I just never been able to answer how often I tried I was always giving up before I could get there and then my mother said well maybe roll the reason is you're asking the wrong question maybe the right question is how little do you need to live your dream and the penny dropped now my mother was absolutely right again it was a wrong question because that question had no answer so the new question an Excel spreadsheets and bank statements and credit card bills I said about trying to identify all the expenses that we were going to incur fixed and variable and once I had those expenses down I looked at one of the least amount of money we needed to spend to maintain our existing lives and 24 hours later the number was clear three lakhs a month each and after taxes and my mother and I could retain our own independent lifestyles we could travel to Europe once a year and I could take a road trip every month I mean after working for 16 years in Europe the one thing I wanted to do with my free time was to explore India by Road so I had to be able to afford it and this was the number so i briefed the investment guys I said listen you need to generate six lakhs a month for me in my mom it was very interesting for the next seven years this is what happened to my mother's net worth it went from 1.5 crores to 10 crores and this is despite two recessions 2008 and 2010 by 2011 my mother was absolutely a dollar pound millionaire and it was at that time that I decided that me and my wife and my dog and my cook we're going to move to go up and so we shifted to a Ghana and these guys in the beach look at me and they say wow dude you really do live the dream and I look at them and I say yep yes I do yes I do ladies and gentlemen that's been my journey from the rat race to paradise thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 123,073

Rating: 3.4051805 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, India, Life, Career, Money

Id: 0qpuEJ9QUZo

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 23 2016