You can tap out. That’s what control actually means — not a return figure, an option.
by: Duncan Barker, Perspective Advisory.
If Not Returns, Then What?
If it’s not about picking the winning fund or squeezing out the lowest fee — then what is financial freedom actually about?
It’s about you. Specifically: whether you understand your own decision-making well enough to stop working against yourself.
You are completely capable of making the right calls here. The industry doesn’t rest control with you because it’s more profitable for them if you don’t feel capable — but the capability was never actually in question. What gets in the way is us: our own needs, our own desires, and the stories we’ve built around money without ever examining them.
We’re Not Rational Actors
We’re not rational actors, and pretending otherwise is where most financial advice quietly falls apart.
The lens you see the world through, shaped by how you grew up, what you’ve lived through, who you’ve lost and what you’ve built, colours every financial decision you make. Two people can have the exact same income, same hours in a day and use both completely differently. One can see risk everywhere and time as an enemy. Another sees opportunity everywhere and believes there’s always more time. Neither view is “correct” or bad, they’re just a lens each person is looking through, without realising it.
The work isn’t to eliminate that lens. It’s to notice it.
The One-Day Trap
There’s a trap on either side of this. Live only for tomorrow, and you defer every good thing until a finish line that keeps moving. Live only for today, and you never build anything that outlasts that moment.
We are free right now. Not in some future date once your portfolio hits a number and not in a past you can’t change. Freedom is in what you do today: paying attention to your money, moving your body, doing the unglamorous admin. It’s in the doing.
Where people lose their way is getting stuck in planning and fretting, or checked out entirely – scrolling, avoiding, assuming tomorrow will sort itself out. Both are a way of not choosing. And not choosing is still a choice, just an expensive one.
Unlearn, Then Recalibrate
Most of the work here isn’t learning something new. It’s unlearning habits that don’t serve you. Those habits you inherited without ever agreeing to them.
Once you’ve started that, a target helps. Not a finish line but a north star. Something to work towards that gives you momentum and a sense you’re aiming for something, instead of reacting to whatever each month throws at you.
And you won’t do either of these perfectly. You can’t divorce yourself from this process. We’re human, and humans are messy. Your default habits are strong precisely because they’re familiar, and you will slip back into them. That’s not failure. That’s just what change looks like for anyone willing to actually do it. The people who don’t get anywhere aren’t the ones who slip, they’re the ones who let that slip stop them moving forward.
What Control Actually Looks Like
Here’s where this stops being philosophy.
Financial institutions want your money now. Everyone selling you a bright future wants you locked into their product, and no one else’s. Neither of them is thinking about the balancing act you actually need — planning for tomorrow without refusing to live today.
This isn’t an argument against investing, including aggressively, when that’s right for your timeline. It’s an argument against expensive, debt-based “investing,” and against getting so fixated on returns that you neglect the habit that makes everything else possible: saving.
Because here’s the mechanism. When you have cash in the bank, you don’t need debt. And when you don’t need debt, you get to choose. Change jobs. Move towns. Take a few months off. You are not a slave to a system that wants you trapped inside it.
You can tap out. That’s what control actually means — not a return figure, an option.
Honesty
I can talk about this because I’ve lived both sides of it.
I was stuck in a debt cycle for years — one I stepped into the moment I started my career. Banks and lenders are happy to hand young professionals whatever credit they can – whether we ask for it or not. It took something serious to break that pattern. For me, it was my journey to become a father and then culminating in a divorce.
It hit me from every direction it’s possible to be hit. But one of the clearest things to come out of it was realising that unless I actually changed I’d keep repeating those same mistakes.
I heard Ray Dalio say something in a conversation with Steven Bartlett that’s stayed with me: your body will tell you when it’s time to rest. It will fail on you before you’re ready to give in. Sometimes that message is a stroke or a heart attack. Mine was a divorce, no less serious, just a different kind of challenge.
So why wait for your body, or your life, to force the point?
What are you going to do today to change your trajectory?
