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.
The “spousal problem” in this context refers to the problem of finding a partner who is as frugal as yourself, preferably not too frugal (crazy frugal) but also not not frugal enough (relatively wasteful). Many have expressed frustration over this in the forums.
Fact 1: The majority of readers on this site are women.
Fact 2: The majority of people who say they can’t retire extremely early because their [potential] spouse would never go for it are men.
How do you explain that? Lets find out.
I’ll post the results here as soon as the sample is statistically “significant”, that is, 1/sqrt(N) for any given category is a small number.
Okay, here are the results.
12% prefer to stay single while 26% are interested in men and 62% are interested in women. This conflicts with fact 1 above.
Out of those who prefer to have a partner, 61% have already found one. Out of those who are looking and think they will have a hard time finding someone, 79% are looking for women. Out of those who have already found someone or think it would be easy to find someone, 62% are looking for women. This suggests cause for optimism for the frustrated. The ratio of trying hard/found for people looking for men is 1 to 2.92. When it comes to looking for women, it’s 1 to 1.24.
The raw percentage numbers for the questions in order of appearance are: 26%, 6%, 33%, 20%, 12%.
To make some real conclusions as to whether frugality plays a role, I’d need control data from a nonfrugal sample which would be hard for me to get.