Financial Freedom Is the Power to Say No
Wealth is easy to display and harder to define. A large house, bright sports car or five-star itinerary can prove that someone has money, but none reveals whether that person controls their own time. For real estate investor and private money lender Jon Schoeller, that distinction changes the meaning of financial freedom.
In his twenties, Schoeller believed success meant earning more, buying more and proving his doubters wrong. By his early thirties, he and his wife, Rhianna, had built businesses, invested in real estate and become financially free. Adopting their daughter then brought the purpose behind all that work into sharper focus.
Money remained important, but no longer as a scorecard. Its value lay in the time, choice and security it could create.
“Financial freedom is not actually the ability to say yes to everything. It is the ability to say no to the things you don’t want to do.”
Financial Freedom Begins With Knowing What Is Enough
Freedom cannot be built around a target that never stops moving. A person reaches one income goal, expands their lifestyle and soon needs a larger income to maintain it. What looked like progress becomes a more expensive version of the same dependency.
Schoeller is not arguing against beautiful homes, travel or expensive possessions. The important question is whether a purchase supports a life someone genuinely values or simply advertises success to other people. Enjoyment and performance can look identical from the outside while producing entirely different lives.
That question carries particular weight in yachting. Crew can earn strong incomes while working inside one of the world’s most visible expressions of wealth. Constant exposure to larger yachts, luxury destinations and apparently limitless spending can distort what a normal life should cost. Unless crew define enough for themselves, years of valuable earnings can disappear into a lifestyle that becomes increasingly difficult to leave.
“You don’t want money to have everything. You want money to have options.”
The Hedonic Treadmill Makes More Feel Normal
Lifestyle inflation rarely arrives through one reckless decision. It grows through upgrades that each appear reasonable. A higher income justifies a better car, which changes expectations around the house and holidays. What once felt exceptional becomes normal, and normal eventually feels insufficient.
Schoeller explains the pattern through an ordinary television. After using a 45-inch model for roughly 15 years, he could afford almost any replacement and initially wanted the largest screen his living room could hold. Instead, he chose a 65-inch television.
The decision was not really about screen size. Moving immediately to the maximum would have created one dramatic improvement before establishing a new baseline. This is the hedonic treadmill: people adapt quickly to better circumstances, then begin searching for the next upgrade. Buying the most someone can afford today can quietly reduce the choices available tomorrow.
The BMW That Changed the Meaning of Success
Schoeller learned that lesson much earlier through a more expensive purchase. At 21, his first business was doing well and he traded a 1992 Honda Civic hatchback for a white BMW 335i with a red interior.
After spending nearly an entire day securing the financing, he drove away with tears in his eyes. The car appeared to confirm that the young man from a trailer park, whom others had underestimated, had become successful.
The emotion faded quickly. Schoeller owned a moving company and spent most days working from a box truck. During the five or six months he owned the BMW, he drove it only about 3,000 miles. The car and insurance cost more than $1,000 each month, while much of his limited time around it was spent cleaning it or worrying about damage.
The BMW looked like freedom but behaved like another obligation. Schoeller realised that every month or two he was spending the equivalent of an international trip on something that mostly sat outside losing value and creating stress.
He sold it and lost roughly $8,000, yet still considers it one of his best investments because the loss clarified what he wanted. He and Rhianna redirected the money towards their first trip abroad, beginning a pattern of travel that later became central to their family life.
The lesson was not that cars are bad or travel is inherently better. The BMW communicated success to strangers. The journeys created memories for the people who mattered.
Raising a Child Who Understands Value
Financial security creates a different challenge when raising a child. Parents who struggled often want to remove every difficulty from their children’s lives. Schoeller and Rhianna do not believe their daughter should struggle simply because they did, but they also know that money can remove consequences she needs in order to grow.
When their daughter wanted to buy something but had lost her wallet, Schoeller could easily have paid for it. He chose not to. If losing money never changed the outcome, responsibility would remain an abstract idea rather than a lived lesson. Confidence and self-discipline develop through manageable problems, not by having every frustration cleared away.
“I am not raising a daughter. I am raising a woman.”
Their daughter can enjoy opportunities her parents never had while still learning that choices carry consequences. Comfort without personal capability is not freedom. It is dependency with better surroundings.
Private Money Lending Requires More Than Capital
Schoeller supports this philosophy with a practical investment strategy. Through hundreds of property transactions, he has operated as both a real estate borrower and private money lender. Lending can provide exposure to real estate without requiring him to manage tenants, repairs, utilities or contractors.
In a typical transaction, a private lender provides capital for an operator to purchase and renovate a property. The borrower repays the principal with interest when the property is sold or refinanced. The arrangement may sound passive, but passive should never be confused with automatic or risk-free.
Schoeller begins by assessing the borrower. He looks for experience, a credible track record, resources beyond the individual project and evidence that previous lenders were repaid. He wants to know how someone behaves when a deal goes badly, not only how they present the deals that succeeded.
Only then does he examine the property, including its purchase price, renovation budget, comparable sales and likely value after the work. He also describes using a closing attorney, promissory note, deed of trust, clear title, insurance and first-lien positioning where appropriate. Precise requirements vary by transaction and jurisdiction, making independent professional advice essential.
Collateral can reduce risk, but it cannot eliminate it. Values can fall, costs can rise and borrowers can default. The possibility of an attractive return should therefore be the end of the analysis, not the beginning.
Sustainable Wealth Is Built in the Middle
Schoeller helped create the More Than Money community after years of completing his own real estate deals. The name reflects a deliberate rejection of the luxury cars and rapid results often used to sell financial education.
That marketing resembles a fitness advertisement showing only the before-and-after photographs. The hidden middle contains the research, patience, mistakes and repeated work that produced the result. It is also where judgement develops and sustainable wealth is built.
A first deal does not need to be spectacular. It needs to be understood. A repeatable skill that can be used for decades is more valuable than one exceptional result that encourages carelessness.
Entrepreneurship Is Not Automatically Freedom
Schoeller also rejects the idea that owning a business is always better than having a job. If someone earns enough, enjoys their work, has manageable stress and still has time for family, leaving simply to pursue the image of entrepreneurship may reduce their freedom.
Rhianna continues working as a nurse anaesthetist because she spent years qualifying and genuinely enjoys the profession. When her shift ends, she is not responsible for operating the hospital. A business owner may control their calendar in theory while remaining responsible for staff, bills, customers and problems at every hour.
Schoeller has walked away from profitable projects when they began competing with his family. He left a successful real estate YouTube channel because he could not sustain it alongside the family channel he and Rhianna were building. He has also stepped away from Instagram when social media began controlling too much of his attention.
Those decisions do not reflect diminished ambition. They show that the ambition achieved its purpose. Financial freedom gave Schoeller the power to protect his time rather than monetise every available opportunity.
The real measure of wealth is not whether someone can buy the house, car or yacht. It is whether they can decline work that no longer fits, leave when their family needs them and enjoy what they have built without becoming trapped by the cost of maintaining it.
The strongest financial position is not being able to afford everything. It is no longer being owned by anything.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal or tax advice.
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