Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

Changemongers thus have the following four variables to play with: Increase your dissatisfaction with present situation. Strengthen your vision of future situation. Build a plan to get from the present to the future. Lower the perceived cost of the plan.

Second, having significantly reduced expenses, invest the difference in businesses. If widely adopted, businesses producing obsolete things which are no longer in demand will shut down, but new ones will appear, and it's a lot easier to change investments than it is to change careers. Alternatively, those with greater control over their income can

time (labor), therefore money (capital) is spent to compensate, hence the existence of automatic egg boiler gadgets and other atrocities. What is ignored here is that the opportunity cost in terms of time spent working (or watching TV) and time not spent learning a skill (such as how to boil an egg) is often higher than the cost in time to learn to

Anyone with access to rich resources has two choices: turn those resources into waste or turn them into wealth; that is, they can be consumers or producers (see Foundations of economics and finance). What

Conversely, a hunter-gatherer lives in an environment conducive to living. The traditional hunter-gatherer works 15 hours a week to gather resources from his environment. With our level of technology and understanding, we can gather resources from our environment more effectively and only work a few hours a week, or part of the year, or develop eno

deserve does not imply any moral judgment, nor does it imply any form of entitlement. In particular, it's not meant in the modern marketing sense, that people "deserve" anything they can imagine. Rather, it means that attitudes combined with actions lead to habits which, over time, tend to deliver certain deserved outcomes. The mathematic

The design presented in the rest of the book rests on three pillars. First, reduce waste and increase efficiency. It's possible to live with the same benefits as the rest of society for one quarter of what the average consumer spends. Many of these

The individual consumers depend as strongly on an aggregate of stores as the stores depend on the aggregate of consumers.

Avoid generating waste and find ways to use the waste of others. Learn to use the system to your advantage, but don't be evil! Serve yourself rather than having others serve you. Instead, help them. Keep running costs down but pay for value. Maintain health to avoid the personal and monetary cost of sickness. Build up the capital to live as a capit