After years of working, I got tired of my financial situation. I’m sure you’ve heard of the metaphor of the hamster wheel. Living in America, it’s hard not to feel as if I was always working to play catch up. It’s the same old millennial story: I took out student loans with the promise of getting my dream job out of school. Then, when I graduated and that didn’t happen, I found myself saddled with a lifelong debt to something I could hardly relate to. To be honest, I didn’t even end up working the field I studied. Not to mention, all that student loan money was something I should have been putting towards a mortgage, retirement, my car payment. So what was I to do? Give up completely and settle for a drain on every paycheck? I wasn’t interested in that. Instead, I devised 4 steps to get the financial freedom I’d been dreaming of my whole adult life. 1. Refinance Those Loans Some of my student loans had interest rates of 7%. The interest was literally killing me. Every month I paid, every month I barely took anything off the premium. I shopped around at banks, at SoFi, but it was at my local credit union that I found an opportunity to really cut down on what I was paying. 2) Putting Liquid Savings To Work If you have a savings account with Chase, Wells Fargo or the like, chances are you’re getting next-to-nothing in terms of interest. Why’s this bad? Well, it’s the inverse of the tale of my student loans. Compound interest can make you very rich, but only if you find the right opportunities. That’s why I found a high yield savings account and let my funds grow.If your savings are sitting in an average bank, you’re actively losing money. 3) Invest With Your Own Money Additionally, you can open up an IRA and put $6,000 a year into it. That ties your savings to the stock market, but it can mean astounding growth over a lifetime. Or you can do research to learn about which stocks are worth investing in. This obviously involves more risk and time, which makes some people wary. However, if you’re willing to play the numbers and work hard, it can really pay off. 4) Invest With Other People’s Money The same can be said for this one. If you put in the time, you’ll see major life changes. There are many ways to trade with other people’s money, namely the capital of finance firms, but most of them end up being a bad deal. Much like big banks like Chase, a lot of these prop trading companies give you a bad yield. That’s why I like Try2BFunded, which gives me access to $100,000 to make money off of and 60% of the profits. It took me 7 weeks of learning their system and making it past the qualifying rounds, but afterwards I saw my checking account blossom. These are 4 ways to really be active with your money, your loans, your lifestyle. By combining the 4 of them, I started enjoying a life of financial liberation.