Early Retirement Extreme

— a combination of simple living, anticonsumerism, DIY ethics, self-reliance, resilience, and applied capitalism

The independence of money

Published in April 10th, 2013
Posted by in Finance, Philosophy
17 Comments

I had a minor revelation while reading through George Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (*warning*: heavy reading). You depend on other people in order to spend money. This means, that money has no value outside a social system. In a mature consumer oriented society it is usually taken for granted that The customer is always […]

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How I live on $7,000 per year

Published in April 10th, 2013
Posted by in Early Retirement, Finance, Work
162 Comments

Disclaimer: This post has gotten wildly popular on the internet so in many cases this post is the first and only post many people will read. Regular readers will already know that I’m married and that we split expenses 50/50. Hence, our combined budget is $14,000/year. For first time readers, let me point out that […]

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Efficient markets have zero returns

Published in April 10th, 2013
Posted by in Finance
17 Comments

If markets were 100% efficient there would not be any trading. When new information was made available to the market, everybody would simply adjust their price expectations. Since trading happens, markets are not efficient. The efficient market hypothesis can, therefore, easily be shown to be wrong. Yet it is still a good approximation which makes […]

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