What does it mean to live the cheap life?
Living the cheap life is about living cheap, but it’s about more than that. It’s about freedom: freedom from the daily grind, freedom from bill collectors, freedom from the overhyped and unpleasant task of staying up to speed with a world in which the speed of consumption keeps increasing. Living the cheap life means questioning basic assumptions about how you’re supposed to spend your money. It means being miserly when it makes sense to be miserly and giving when it makes sense to give. It means respecting every dollar that you make for its power to change your life and the lives of others and putting each penny to its best possible use.
Living cheap won’t save your soul or anything but it may free you from certain ugly excesses and allow you to put the energy you save to better use. This blog is about the quest to free up that energy so you can do the one thing in life that is more important to you than any other. This blog isn’t about the quest to get rich, but about the quest for financial freedom – freedom from money achieved through mastery of money.
A tiny bit about me
My name is Mike, I’m in my mid-twenties, and I live in Los Angeles, where I work as a teacher, translator, and writer. I moved to the urban jungle a little over a year ago and took on a nine-to-five job that made me a decent amount of money. I decided life was great and for a couple of months I spent just about every penny of my pay and after looking at my zero account balance, I decided there was something amiss. I decided to educate myself and plowed through every personal finance book I could get my hands on. I’m still learning, and after quitting that nine-to-five job I’m living on a much-reduced income (I make a little over $2000 a month), only now I’m saving close to half of what I make. By stripping out a lot of the unnecessary crap that only gunks up life and makes it less fulfilling, I’ve managed to create a little surplus cash which I plan to put to work for me so that I myself never have to work another nine-to-five job. My goal is nothing less than financial freedom, and my intent is to use this blog as a forum to discuss tactics that might be used to achieve this goal.
Living cheap is the first step, and I plan to share with you a whole bunch of tips about that, but as I said, living cheap isn’t everything. I’ll also talk about what to do with that surplus money - where to stick it away so that it can work for you and free you up to do what you want to do. I’ll review a bunch of outside resources, share hints, and discuss the general philosophy of the cheap life, which in my mind can be summed up as follows: “live cheap to live free.”
