He also offers an exceptionally broad look at the alternative economythrift stores, auctions, dumps, and barter, to name just a few of the places he shops.
Survive Without A Salary Charles Long Free At 45Tim at Canadian Dream: Free at 45 reviewed it a few weeks ago and didnt seem especially impressed.Most readers wont want to duplicate Longs lifestyle exactly, but all of us can learn from him.The chapter on Needs is some of the most useful personal finance writing Ive ever read.
For anyone working towards early retirement or simply trying to live below their means, this book is invaluable. Some of us will be able to translate his ideas into a way to quit or downsize our own jobs as he did. The Strengths Charles Long quit his salaried job early in life and eventually moved to the Canadian countryside with his wife and two children. Their lifestyle is based on reducing costs and material needs as much as possible (conserving) and using casual income to meet their remaining need for cash. Snowflaking as popularized by Ive Paid for This Twice Already is similar to the idea of casual income, but Longs family uses their version of snowflakes to pay for essential needs rather than to reduce debt. Long and his family make extreme frugality sound normal, even fun. They may not have indoor plumbing (really), but they do have, as he describes it, a standard array of offspring, pets, and bulky appliances that signal a rather ordinary middle-class household, as well as a sizeable country house and an abundance of homemade wine. The beauty of this book is that it helps you realize how you, too, might be able to adjust your needs without giving up quality of life. Survive Without A Salary Charles Long How To Get TheIts easy to misinterpret this book as a back-to-the-land guide to country living, especially when the author keeps throwing in examples like how to get the best deal on roofing felt. Its also not a step-by-step guide to quitting your jobhe mostly describes what he and his family did after he quit his job. But the techniques he describes would certainly help anyone still on their way to building up a nest egg. He has an impressively broad and colorful circle of acquaintances and introduces us to characters ranging from perfectly conventional careerpeople to a nomadic salesman. I loved reading the details of how these vastly different people live frugally but well. Amy Dacyczyns Tightwad Gazette books introduced me to the idea of creative frugality. Dacyczyns books will give you lots of examples creative frugality. The list of questions he gives us for examining a possible need, his thoughtful analysis of the true costs of owning things, and his extensive exploration of secondhand and barter economies teach us how a conserver thinks, which is more valuable than any number of examples. Specific thrifty techniques may or may not work depending on needs, wants, resources, and location, but a new way of thinking can be universal. Long shows that the principles of creative frugality can be applied to any need, no matter how obscure or how complex.
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