I have seen people discover this blog and proceed to read through it from the beginning to the end spending several hours (yes, I’m watching you on sitemeter ) as if they have been intellectually or culturally starved and finally found the answer to something that had been bugging them for some time without knowing what it was.

For these independent thinkers and creative radicals, this blog is like the red pill of the Matrix movie… I hope.

I have had other people tell me that ERE has helped them decide to completely change their life selling their collection of jet skis and their McMansion to seek a better life.

For these, I hope you made the right choice for you. If you would have preferred the blue pill, consider yourself warned

Conversely, I have also had a few duds telling me that I’m an idiot for living in a one-room apartment (currently an RV), eating home-made lentil soup, riding a bicycle, and not spending my time earning money commensurate with my degree. Why would anyone want to do that when they can just get a McJob, drive a McCar, eat out at a McRestaurant, and become a millionaire when they are 60?

The reason is that there is satisfaction in knowing that you never need to work if you don’t want to. There is satisfaction in beating the consumerist system at its own game. There is satisfaction in overcoming challenges and doing things your own way. There is satisfaction in pursuit that does not involve buying cheap crap and replacing it every other year with the latest fashions; satisfaction in owning quality rather than quantity. There is satisfaction in having the time to help other people instead of having to go to work.

Of course many people having been brought up in a world where everything from the school system to the way we eat has been institutionalized to the point where most people lack the energy or imagination to do anything but watch TV or go out to eat after they come home tired from work. These people just want to know how to pay off their credit cards , which kind of index funds to put in their retirement plans, and how to stay or get employed on the treadmill.

This blog, however, goes beyond personal finance 101. The concepts are not more advanced than paying off debt, investing in index funds, writing killer resumes, and job productivity enhancement, they are simply different — which of course means that they will be more challenging to understand at first.

There are essentially two premises to this blog

The first premise is that financial independence is much more easily obtained by finding ways to reduce monetary expenditure than by finding ways to increase monetary income. For 80% of all people it is much easier to reduce their expenses by a factor 10 compared to increasing their income by a factor 10. Only the poorest and the richest can easily increase their income.

The second premise is one can easily live a happy life on much less than is commonly assumed. In fact the difference is sometimes extreme. In a consumer society, the standard measure of utility is money. If it’s twice as expensive, it must be twice as good, right? Wrong! This misconception originates from consumerism where on the poor end of the scale you eat $3 mashed potato powder bought at a quickie-mart, and at the high end of the scale you buy one small scoop of superbly crafted mashed potatoes on a large plate for $25 at a classy restaurant. However, if you make your own mashed potatoes, you can buy a 10lbs sack of potatoes for $1 — or grow them yourself — and make a meal that is only limited by your own skill level; after a few months of practice that is probably at least 80% as good as the chef and easily much better than the pre-processed powder.

What follows from these premises is that for those who are willing and able, it is often possible to reduce expenses significantly by doing things differently rather than doing more or less of the normal way.

Following those ideas it is possible to retire in 3-8 years on a normal income, hence this is why this blog is named early retirement extreme.

Looking at alexa rankings, the blog has more web authority than the US Department of the Interior, the NSA, the PeaceCorps, the websites of several US states, or national newspapers of many smaller countries, but generally less than the larger Britney Spears fan sites. Crazy but true.

Advertisers
If you are interested in advertising, buysellads.com runs the show. Here is a list of the spots that are currently available. You can also buy ad space on the forum.

Review
If you have been reading along for some time, writing a short review of the blog on alexa would be much appreciated. Click on the banner to do so (if you have a facebook account to log in, you can use that. You can remain anonymous.)

Guest authors
Guest authors are welcome (see about me for contact details). I am primarily interested in individual accounts on extreme early retirement: plans as well as those who have actually done it. I reserve the right to edit submissions.

Note that if you appear overly concerned about the number of backlinks to your blog or website in your article, you’re automatically disqualified. I just don’t think we share the same goals.

Blog roll / Link exchanges
My blog roll is based on what I think would be relevant/interesting to my readers. I change it fairly often and since link exchanges sometimes come with the implicit assumption of an obligation, I prefer to avoid them. If you want to get on my blog roll, it seems the best method is to write posts on your blog that link back to some off mine. This almost guarantees that I will read your post. If I then get an impression that your blog is similar to mine, I’ll add it to my blog roll.

Spamming
I read and edit all comments. If I see any spam, that is, commentary that does not add any value to the post and includes a commercial link, I delete it, so don’t even bother. However, if you provide a valuable comment (more than two sentences), I will probably let it stand. That said, you probably shouldn’t be engaged in this kind of behavior. Customers generally don’t seem to appreciate it.