If you're new here, this blog will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years on a median salary. The wiki page gives a good summary of the principles of the strategy. The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that's flexible, agile, and adaptable. Conversely most consumers run their personal finances like an inflexible money-losing anti-business always in danger of losing their jobs.
Here's almost a thousand online journals from people, who are following the ERE strategy tailored to their particular situation (age, children, location, education, goals, ...). Increasing their savings from the usual 5-15% of their income to tens of thousands of dollars each year or typically 40-80% of their income, many accumulate six-figure net-worths within a few years.
Since everybody's situation is different (age, education, location, children, goals, ...) I suggest only spending a brief moment on this blog, which can be thought of as my personal journal, before looking for the crowd's wisdom for your particular situation in the forum journals.
A frog is unable to regulate its internal temperature. It is what we call cold-blooded. If it gets too cold, it must seek refuge in the mud at the bottom. It is also unable to regulate its evaporation, hence it can never go far from a pond lest it dry out. Lizards are slightly more advanced. While they are cold-blooded as well meaning that their activity is regulated by whether it is cold or warm, they can regulate or prevent evaporation on their own and thus lizards can live in very dry areas. Mammals are more advanced still. Mammals are warm-blooded. They are, therefore not very dependent on whether it is warm or cold. If sufficiently dry, humans can live in temperature over 125F without heating up internally. Through the use of technology, modern humans are even more independent of the environment — whether it is dry or wet, cold or warm — using technology for heating and air-condition allows modern humans to live independent of the environment by using energy and resources to build and maintain bubbles viz. homes, offices, and means of transport that like bubbles completely isolate modern humans to the point that they become dependent on the isolation. Having forgotten how to live with the environment, forgotten how to dress for the rain, wind, and sun with sweat glands atrophied from disuse, they are fully dependent on maintaining the bubbles they live in at enormous costs both to the frogs (which are dying out) and the environment but also in terms of personal costs having substituted hard work for something that their bodies were once capable of doing naturally at less cost overall. Maybe it is time to relearn how to live right and more efficiently.
Originally posted 2009-03-20 16:03:44.