» How I live on $7,000 per year Early Retirement Extreme: — a combination of simple living, anticonsumerism, DIY ethics, self-reliance, resilience, and applied capitalism

The strategy described in this chapter focuses on living inexpensively in a culture dedicated to extravagance, productivity, and material waste. It follows these guidelines: Reduce wants and needs from the marketplace to a minimum to decouple the buy-work connection. Decrease the volume and size but increase the sophistication of your activities an

In fact, by taking the other end of the bargain, saving as much as other people are spending on wants, it's possible to retire and live on invested savings after just five years of full-time work.

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 expenses are eliminated by only owning what is actually used, and maintaining what is bought.

one of the things I had to do when starting on the path to early retirement was to replace my money-wasting and generally unproductive hobbies with hobbies there were free (see A modular design) and meaningful a) to not cause friction with my money saving, b) to provide meaning that was unrelated to work, and c) to learn new

You can enjoy the fun of beating the system that exists to take your money and live a middle-class lifestyle on a quarter of the usual numbers.

it's possible to retire and live on invested savings after just five years of full-time work. Rather than increasing the amount of work to acquire more stuff, reducing this superficial need reduces the amount of necessary work. It's possible to reduce the amount of work all the way down to zero: financial independence. Indeed, playing the shadow ga

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

Focus on productive assets rather than stuff. Focus on developing skills rather than on passive entertainment. Gain the maximum in satisfaction with the minimum expenditure of money and energy.