If you're new here, this is the one personal finance blog that tells you how to become financially independent in 5 years instead of 30 years or more. You can read my story here and read more about where I am now here. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or use one of the other options in the top right sidebar. Thanks for visiting!

My name is Jacob, I am 33 years old, and I am what is called semi-retired. I reached financial independence at 30 and retired from my career in physics a few years later, but I am still busy doing things.

Most of my focus in my “retirement” is on finding ways to be more economically and ecologically sustainable and find ways to use less resources, live better, and to be the change I want to see in the world. This blog leads the personal effort (individual to family), but I also work with a bunch of great people in start-up non-profit which is dedicated to finding sustainable methods on a much larger scale (community to global).

I basically live differently from 99% of those around me. I don’t have a driver’s license, I don’t have any debt, I don’t live in a house, I cook everything from scratch, I cut my own hair, I practically never buy new or anything at all for that matter, I am not on any prescription medicines, and I am in great physical shape.

Moneywise, I don’t derive a salary anymore, but I still earn a little bit of money, that is, enough to cover my limited expenses by copy-editing papers for a scientific journal. Half an hour’s work a day on average covers my expenses. Copy-editing is a bit like doing crosswords or Sudoku, except I get paid for it and I can essentially work whenever I feel like it although my boss starts enquiring if I take more than 3 weeks getting back to him . This also means that I don’t really have to draw on my capital assets.

Financially, I have what you in finance101 terms could call a 25+ year(!) emergency fund. This is almost fully invested in individual stocks to avoid paying fees. If historic returns are representative, it should last me for the rest of my life. I also have a relatively small tax-deferred retirement account that I divert surplus income to to get the tax deductions.

I did not build this fund by buying and selling real estate at the right time or putting all my money in some five-bagger stock. I simply saved more than three quarters of my income for five years. The math works out. If you save, 83% and spend 17%, you have need 25*0.17/0.83 ~ 5 years of savings, where 25 is the 25 years above. Add 8% interest from your assets, and you “only” need to save around 75%.

It is not difficult to live on 17-25% of a normal salary by substituting time and different skills for money. What is keeping people back is that they have neither time nor an assortment of skills, because they are busy concentrating on their one skill to earn money. At the end of the day many are too tired to do anything but watch TV and so they need to spend their hard-earned money to compensate by buying everything else. They are in other words, very efficient at making money but hopelessly inefficient at spending money. I’m almost the opposite having turned the downsides of the money-economy to my advantage.

To contact me, write an email to:

< my first name >@earlyretirementextreme.com

Important things to note. I read all emails, but I do not always have the time to respond to everyone. Sometimes I just forget, so feel free to send me a new message reminding me if you feel ignored.

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