There Is Always an Exit Tax: The Price of Freedom and the Future

I am a big fan of Codie Sanchez who I had the privilege to meet once at my friend Eric Siu’s Leveling up Mastermind. An accomplished investor, business woman, one person media company, she is also a great teacher. She buys and manages an empire of small unsexy offline and online businesses like laundromats, car washes and other traditional service businesses.  

Well known for sharing her knowledge online and teaching people how to get financial independence via buying profitable small businesses to build mini-Berkshire Hathaway's (for those who don’t know, Berkshire Hathaway is Warren Buffet's immensely massive and successful holding company of big businesses).

But she is also an amazingly wise lady about life. In a podcast she talks about her divorce from her previous husband and the key lesson from her father. Her words here:

“Two words my dad said to me which was “Exit Tax”. When I left it was expensive. Both physically and emotionally. And I told my dad about it, he said there is always an exit tax to freedom. And it stuck with me, this is just a toll. A Payment. Once it gets paid, what’s on the other side? That word freedom.”

It made me think. A LOT. Everything that we do comes to an end. Our life is full of relationships, work, business, personal and family. But we sometimes stay in them longer than is healthy for us because we are scared or weak. Or too proud or care too much about what people around us think. 

Or more likely we suffer from sunk costs fallacy: where we are worried that everything we have put in before will be lost or wasted, whether these are emotional or monetary investments. 

But we have to get past it mentally. Being sentimental and stuck in the past does not serve us well. We have to treat these as lost forever and take the hard lesson. It’s like taking a loss in stock investing, so you can deploy what’s left to a better, more profitable investment in the future. 

That is the exit tax we need to pay so we can move on and hopefully get to a better place. Life is too short to stay in unhappy jobs, unhappy relationships or bad businesses & situations.