It’s April 15th, tax day, and it seems like a great time to start a personal finance blog. I’ve been mulling this over for a while and I’ve decided it’s time to make it happen. There are already some great personal finance blogs out there (My Money Blog and Get Rich Slowly come immediately to mind), so why start another one?

I have a message that I feel is unique: live cheap to live free. Okay, that’s a neat slogan, but what does it mean? It means that by reducing your level of consumption, you improve your quality of life. You free yourself from bill collectors, from the unreasonable demands of modern advertising, from the need to compete with other people, from work you don’t enjoy.

For me, the ultimate goal of “living the cheap life” is financial freedom. I don’t work a nine-to-five job anymore; I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country and support myself on an income of about $2000 a month, of which I save about 50%. Reducing my expenses in this way has taken a lot of sustained effort, but I don’t feel like I’m deprived of anything I really need.

I see all around me both people who are suffering through great financial trouble and people who are stepping all over each other to succeed. Sometimes, the people who are in trouble try to solve their problems by stepping all over others. I have to believe that such efforts only increase the total amount of unhappiness in the world, and that if everybody let go of the desire to have more than other people, the world would be a nicer place. Maybe it’s a little too grandiose, but if I can contribute in my own small way to the realization of that ideal, I’ll be very pleased.

To read a little more about me and about the mission statement of this blog, see the About page.

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