When you think about how much your lifestyle costs per day, you may realize you are pissing away your freedom on stupid things. Freedom isn't really all that expensive, but you do have to pay for it.
A friend of ours was talking to us and said something about making mortgage payments. "We have no mortgage" Mark replied, and you could see our friend's brain melting down like one of those robots on an early episode of Star Trek. "But everyone has a mortgage.... the television says you have to have a mortgage.... you never actually pay off your mortgage.... DOES NOT COMPUTE!"
But you can winnow down your lifestyle and as I noted before, we've figured out (so far) how to live on $100 a day or less than $36,500 a year, which sounds scandalous to some of our friends. After all, they are making "six figures" or close to it, and yet their lifestyle isn't much different than ours. But if you subtract $36,000 in annual mortgage payments, and the $8,000 a year in annual car payments, you realize that their actual income is pretty close to ours, they just pay banks a shitload of interest instead.
Mark just got a check from the Arts Association for $97.50 for the sale of some of his pottery. It isn't a lot of money in the greater scheme of things, but it is close to $100 or basically buys us another day of freedom. When you start to look at things that way, you realize that (a) freedom isn't all that expensive to obtain, and (b) spending money on dumb things basically is selling your freedom for a pittance.
$100 on a restaurant meal doesn't sound like much these days. But from my perspective, that is a day of freedom - a day I don't have to work in order to keep my financial head above water. A $36,000 car represents a year of my life, or if you are still working, think of it as another year you have to work before you can retire.
Hey, but this is America, you "have to have" a car, right? Maybe so, but I can count on two hands the number of cars I bought that were not really necessary and in retrospect, not very satisfying. On the other hand, I can also count a number of cars I could have kept for a few more years than I did and thus negate the need for those other cars. But at the time, I didn't think about money in terms of my freedom, I thought of money as something to be spent as quickly as possible, to buy shiny trinkets and restaurant meals.
This is not to say you should live like a Monk, of course. We stopped by a nice Thai restaurant in Alabama the other day. We were going to just make a sandwich for lunch and we saw the place in the parking lot we were in. Well, $48 later we were quite satiated - it was excellent food. But then again, that's a lot of money to spend on lunch - at least on a regular basis. You'd be surprised how many do just that - and can ill afford to. They blow money on restaurant food and then complain about being broke all the time. Pick one - you can't do both.
Yet the Internet abounds with "memes" about how it is "impossible to save" and that saving money is for chumps. I think that is just people telling themselves what they want to hear, quite frankly. The game is stacked against you, so you might as well give up, get that tattoo and smoke some meth. YOLO! Right?
There are two approaches to this game, of course, and it can be played at any level. If you are living on $150,000 a year, then a day of freedom costs you $400, which is probably what someone in that income level spends on a good restaurant meal (or at least I did, back when I thought I was wealthy). Or, you could reduce that daily "nut" and pocket the difference, on day of freedom at a time. When you accumulate enough money, there may be enough to "live off the interest" or at least have enough to last you the rest of your life.
In either case, though, it pays to cut back that daily requirement. It is a lot easier to live on $100 a day than $400. It's a lot easier to save up that smaller amount of money, too!
