One of those websites "nominated" by my readers is Early Retirement Extreme. His website is not limited to retiring. He is painstakingly documents how to live within a very small resource footprint. And that is a topic that interests me.
His three most popular essays (and longish excerpts so you can get a feel for the content) are:
In a home I need walls, roof, windows, and a door that can be opened and closed. I also need a place to cook, a place to eat, a place to sleep, a place for a guest, and a place to write. More space is not better. More space means a bigger house. A bigger house means more hassle, more maintenance, more work to pay for rent, mortgage, taxes, and less time for living....Comfort is freedom and independence....Success is having everything you need and doing everything you want.
My journey towards financial independence was not always with financial independence in mind per se. Had that been my sole goal all a long I would have done things differently and probably faster e.g. 3-4 years instead of 5...I also suspect I was born with certain miserly qualities so that I did not need to change my basic personality too much...The first thing I realized was therefore that my expensive hobbies had to go and be replaced with “free” hobbies, which meant no more buying toys. Instead I become interested in system administration, linux, and geopolitics, in particular resource depletion and overpopulatio...By Rich Dad Poor Dad standards I was still thinking like a poor person, saving and paying in cash and I was probably on my way to thinking like a middle class person who buys everything on credit. Instead I started thinking like a wealthy person and having my money work for me while cutting down on my liabilities
- How I live on $7000 per year (In the San Francisco Bay Area!!!!)
Okay, that does it. I’m getting tired of the pervasive media articles that detail how people are “surviving” or “barely managing” on what qualifies as average or definitely median household incomes...The media must be living in a bubble that is entirely separated from Main Street. Look, it isn’t that hard to find someone who lives on $10,000/year, or $5,000/year...The problem is that budgets denominated in dollars are very one-dimensional. If you look at the article above of a guy who spends 20k/year—that’s almost three times as much as I do— while living in the same area (San Francisco bay area), I note that he does something I don’t (go to bars) but I have something he hasn’t (health insurance). Otherwise we have and do many of the same things...What is the difference? If I had to venture a guess, I’d say I’m more frugal (the way your grandparents were frugal... Multiple specifics listed later in essayPop on over and check him out if his topics or writing appeals to you.
Will do, thanks for the link!
ReplyDeleteJoe, just want to let you know that I still do check in on occasion. I had an article posted this week at http://bluecollarprepping.blogspot.com/. It is about ham radio, and is under my name tim kies. I get out and about to different places, and have written for a couple of them. Mostly now, I comment here and there, I am trying to wean off some, but it is hard. I am just saddened by all the hatred that is in our country right now. Hopefully, it will ease up, as the weather warms up in the spring. At least, I will be able to go fishing and won't see it as much. And thank you for this post also. My wife and I are debt free, but we always try to learn about how others that live like that maintain the progress, and maximize their dollars.
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