I met a family who had just moved to Wisconson from Italy last week. The four of them (Mom, Dad, ~14yo son, and ~12yo daughter) packed everything they were going to bring with them into a backpack and two checked bags each. Incredible! What would you pick?
I have a garage and a shed (OK, fine, it's a 24x36 barn) and a basement and a home office that barely contain the enormous quantity of my stuff at home. And yet I honestly think the highlight of this summer was waking up to the sunrise on one of the remotest parts of the Appalachian trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with no possessions that wouldn't fit in a 22L ultralight backpack - including several of the same items as this guy's kit.
On the one hand, most of the stuff is replaceable, "fungible" if you like, rather than sentimental. On the other, I keep it because I like to have certain capabilities, like cooking and auto repair and home building - I can't fit a tablesaw or pressure washer or food processor in a backpack; I've got a rack of 24 giant totes in the garage with painting supplies and plumbing supplies and bike parts and specialty auto repair tool cases and on and on that each occupy more volume than the one backpack this guy lives out of. I also recognize that this is a colossally inefficient way to allocate things among a group of people: I'm not going to pay a painter $1500 to do a crappy job to repaint my bathroom when I can do it myself with far greater quality for $100 in paint and a couple hundred bucks worth of tools in a giant tote, and neither are most of my neighbors, but this means that a sizeable fraction of people in the neighborhood live around our own personal totes of painting supplies.
If I was going to pay someone else to build and repair and maintain and clean the house/apartment/condo/hotel that I live in (when I'm not in a tent, that's only about 5% of my time), and to take care of the cars and bikes that I ride in and on, and to cook the variety of food that I eat, and on and on, I would have a lot less stuff. If I bought tools to do these tasks that I would use once and then sell/give/throw them away...that would be unaffordable for me. One of the lessons that my Dad passed down to me is to never buy a thing unless you have the resources in time, price of consumables, tools, and space to clean it, maintain it, fix it, and store it - those are real costs beyond the sticker price of a new toy.
Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end?
>Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end?
If you keep your standards modest, the math isn't as bad as it intuitively seems.
A $100 hotel per night is the equivalent of a $3000 mortgage/rent. And if you're living out of one bag you don't necessarily need that and probably have cheaper options like hostels (or tent camping) available.
If you're working a software job or have worked such jobs long enough to have a few million in assets gathering interest, the cost of living isn't prohibitive.
At no point was this positioned as a "for everyone" approach. It requires resources and compromises. None of the gear in this article is particularly cheap.
That said, the cost is not significantly different from other forms of living. The average rent in SF/NYC/Seattle/London/etc. is sky high as well.
>None of the gear in this article is particularly cheap.
For western standards they're not particularly expensive either. The most expensive things are the Macbook and the iPhone, and like 30%-40% of the US population has one or the other.
> None of the gear in this article is particularly cheap.
The $4 baseball cap isn't bad :) Darn Tough socks are also arguably also pretty cheap over a lifetime of use since the company mails you a free replacement pair if you wear one out
I feel like the real problem is tying one's purpose to employment. If you can't find value in your life without someone telling you what to do you should take some time off work and reflect deeply on that.
You don't have to sit at home in retirement. You can go out and be involved in any number of communities - volunteer, join local government, go do fundraising for a cause you care about. The biggest difference there is that if you're not enjoying it you can just leave and not worry about how you're paying rent.
I certainly feel a lot better than where I was latterly. Would have preferred some projects that got a bit sidetracked for various reasons. Overall, pretty happy not having a full-time job. As I clean some things up though, definitely looking forward to having a more scheduled (if part-time) plan.
Can work for money or not, but if you are and your employer creates unacceptable or undesirable conditions you can immediately say Fuck You and just go do something else without worrying about covering the necessities of life.
Nah. That's not how it works. I could retire, but choose to keep working. The idea that you can simply step out is based on the idea that you don't need work.cbut in my case I need it for its social aspects and to stay motivated to do things. I still have the same issues as other people where in the mornings I just want to stay in bed. But I still go to work. Because I know it's ultimately a better choice.
It means you get to choose what to work on, instead of being forced to do work you don’t want to do to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.
sorry if this comes across the wrong way, but you don't have to be retired. there's plenty of purposeful things you can find to give your life meaning. Given that you don't need to be paid, there are even more opportunities that could benefit from your expertise that you've built up over your career or careers.
Different people make different choices on how to spend their money. Some spend their money on cigarettes, or sports season tickets, or modifications to cars, or collections of things. Some give most of their spare money to their church or a charity. Some send money off to relatives. Some travel.
Hotels wherever you are probably aren't $100 a night.
If you have a mortgage below $1000 you have something that almost no one in a western nation will ever see again. Congratulations, but your anecdote is irrelevant to basically everyone.
The current 30 year fixed mortgage rate is about 6.3%. It should probably be higher. A $1000 payment would mean a loan for about $160000 - significantly less if property taxes and insurance are included in that mortgage payment. There are very few places in the world with a significant number of available jobs where most people can buy a house for that.
Let's look through the midwest and throw a dart at Akron, OH. You're within commuting distance of Cleveland, you've got a university and an airport, there are probably jobs.
Property taxes are 1.8%. Home insurance is hard to estimate but let's pretend $1500/yr. Average home sale price is around $137K. That puts you closer to $1200/mo, and most places are far worse.
Yeah, a 28yo on a 'permanent holiday' has a very different life than someone like you who is doing, say, renovation work in the house you own. They are opposite stations in life in many ways.
As for your final question, I was living in a cheap country. Rent was $200/mo with roommates. Taxis/Uber was cheap. Food was cheap. I made a modest wage in software.
I have a garage and a shed (OK, fine, it's a 24x36 barn) and a basement and a home office that barely contain the enormous quantity of my stuff at home. And yet I honestly think the highlight of this summer was waking up to the sunrise on one of the remotest parts of the Appalachian trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with no possessions that wouldn't fit in a 22L ultralight backpack - including several of the same items as this guy's kit.
On the one hand, most of the stuff is replaceable, "fungible" if you like, rather than sentimental. On the other, I keep it because I like to have certain capabilities, like cooking and auto repair and home building - I can't fit a tablesaw or pressure washer or food processor in a backpack; I've got a rack of 24 giant totes in the garage with painting supplies and plumbing supplies and bike parts and specialty auto repair tool cases and on and on that each occupy more volume than the one backpack this guy lives out of. I also recognize that this is a colossally inefficient way to allocate things among a group of people: I'm not going to pay a painter $1500 to do a crappy job to repaint my bathroom when I can do it myself with far greater quality for $100 in paint and a couple hundred bucks worth of tools in a giant tote, and neither are most of my neighbors, but this means that a sizeable fraction of people in the neighborhood live around our own personal totes of painting supplies.
If I was going to pay someone else to build and repair and maintain and clean the house/apartment/condo/hotel that I live in (when I'm not in a tent, that's only about 5% of my time), and to take care of the cars and bikes that I ride in and on, and to cook the variety of food that I eat, and on and on, I would have a lot less stuff. If I bought tools to do these tasks that I would use once and then sell/give/throw them away...that would be unaffordable for me. One of the lessons that my Dad passed down to me is to never buy a thing unless you have the resources in time, price of consumables, tools, and space to clean it, maintain it, fix it, and store it - those are real costs beyond the sticker price of a new toy.
Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end?