Patterns of Deep Response

Tag: VLCOL

  • maintain a high savings rate

    Action Save most of your income, instead of spending most of it. Discussion Conventional personal finance advice is to save 10% of your income, and spend the rest. This advice comes from within the paradigm of consumerism, which is the fundamental idea that quality of life scales linearly with consumption as measured in dollars spent.…

  • a very low cost of living is magic

    The Issue Spending money requires earning money, which requires exchanging labor in a job of some sort. The Response Aim to spend very little money while maintaining or increasing your subjective quality of life. The less money you spend, the less time you need to spend earning money, the more time you have available to…

  • plan picnics and bbqs

    Action Prepare food and go eat it with friends in a park or forest. Discussion Somewhere along the way it became unthought-of to enjoy food that you prepared yourself with friends in the outdoors. You had to spend a lot of money sitting indoors at a restaurant where someone else prepared the food. I suspect…

  • spend less than 10k a year

    $10,000 a year is $833 a month. It’s below the federal poverty level, and as such you could earn more than twice your expenses and pay no income tax. You’d also likely qualify for subsidized health insurance in the US. For an 85% Savings Rate, your annual income would need to be $66,667 Here’s a…

  • convert a bus or trailer

    Buy a used bus or cargo trailer and convert it to living space. This is like a van conversion except vans are typically several tens of thousands of dollars. A cargo trailer can be had for a couple thousand, a bus for not much more. The build will depend on your climate, amount of travel,…