How to survive without a salary

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1. DoreenMicheleMay 2024
   Read "How to survive without a salary" by Charles Long.

   Join some of the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) reddits.

   Look into arranging the kind of life you want/need.

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2. DoreenMicheleJun 2022
   Why is it so?

   New houses have more than doubled in size since the 1950s while holding one less occupant on average.

   Houses have a lot more amenities than they used to have, like AC and a clothes dryer instead of a clothes line.

   We have torn down about a million SROs* since the 1950s and largely zoned out of existence the ability to build new Missing Middle housing.

   We are more car oriented than in the past and cars are typically the second largest expense in a household budget and they've gotten crazy expensive as well.

   Having said that, I will recommend the (possibly out of print) book How to survive without a salary by Charles Long in support of your crazy plan. ;)

   * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

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3. DoreenMicheleNov 2020
   There's a book called "How to survive without a salary" by Charles Long. It may be out of print, but I would recommend you read that.

   There's also a series of books called "The Tightwad Gazette" with a similar theme of learning to spend less.

   Successfully retiring from a tech job is highly likely to be equal parts investing well and learning to live on less. One or the other won't solve it.

   Best of luck.

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4. DoreenMicheleMar 2018
   My favorite book of this ilk is "How to survive without a salary" by Charles Long.

   For understanding where the money goes, tracking every penny for 30 days is a good exercise.

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5. DoreenMicheleDec 2017
   I have mostly managed to avoid working a normal job. Here are some things I have done:

   College. It let me continue to live with parents and not get a job.

   Military spouse and full time parent. It let me see the world, but when I got divorced, starting a career from scratch was challenging. Also, my quality of life went way up with getting a job and no longer being a homemakers. Homemaking isn't exactly a profession that gets a lot of respect or pays particularly well and the retirement plan tends to suck.

   I have been doing freelance work in recent years.

   I will recommend the book "How to survive without a salary" by Charles Long. If you can pay off all your debts, pay cash for a cheap house somewhere with low taxes, raise a garden, etc, you can get off the hamster wheel and do as you choose to a large degree. But it takes a lot of time to arrange and most folks don't actually want to make those sorts of sacrifices.

   This is part of why so many people buy lottery tickets. Wanting an answer with no down side is a popular desire.

   (No I am absolutely not being snarky. This is reality. Finding one's "dream job" and being jazzed to go to work every day is the exception, not the rule.)

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6. MzAug 2016
   If I have to pick just one, it would be "How to survive without a salary" by Charles Long. In short, it helped me escape the American Rat Race. Most of my life, I was middle class, but I side stepped the typical thing of running faster to stay in place. The poverty I have suffered in recent years would have been worse without the mental models it provides me.
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