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I’ve been reading “The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” by Tim Ferriss lately. It’s the first time that I have read a book that always says “you’re not going to believe this” or “you’re going to think I’m crazy for saying this”, and never actually thinking it. It’s as though my views and goals in life fall in line with everything that he is preaching. Ok so maybe not all of it – I do still have my own opinions and don’t agree with some here and there, but essentially I have the same goals:

• Don’t get tied to a physical location
• Work as little as you can
• Actually do what you want to do in life

This is all good and well, but you really need to financially support the lifestyle that you want. If you have read any of my other posts on this site, it’s probably obvious by now that I’m not a very materialistic person. I’m no Amish, but I’m not very driven to have a lot of “stuff” either.

By not having the need to own a lot of posessions, I personally have a huge advantage – I can get away with earning less in order to have the lifestyle that I want. Of course if you do have a lot of needs by way of posessions, it’s all possible, you just need to raise more income.

How do I plan on doing this? There are plenty of ways, but essentially I am working on projects that require little to no work from myself after the initial setup. I’m not quite at the “outsource everything” stage, so I’m doing a lot of work myself (since I actually enjoy it), but maybe one day.

For instance, I run a website called “Eco Update“. The idea of the site is to aggregate content – basically it pulls the relevant content from other sites and then displays it on mine. The aim is to collect content on a few related topics, making it a “hub” of eco friendly/green living news and information. From the income generating point of view, the site also features Google Adsense advertising, and generates a minor income stream for me which requires little to no effort after the initial setup.

It goes to show that while you can make smart investments to generate passive income, there are also other little projects that can do the same for next to no cost. Some people like me create websites and use affiliate programs and advertising banners to generate income while others will start a dropshipping business. There are plenty of options and you are only limited by your imagination.

Think about it, then do some planning, and make it happen. Start small if need be and aim for the stars.

We went to my dad’s place for dinner last night and sat through another eventful evening of listening to him and his wife bicker over trivial crap. For a change, a topic came up and they were actually happy to hear what I was trying to tell them.

Dad and his wife have been wanting to “escape” the world for years now, and despite all of the opportunities sitting there staring them in the face, they just can’t see how they can do it.

Their latest plan is to buy a block of land (yep, but more devaluing land) near the Murray River, and live there, self-sufficient. They could pull it off – it’s completely possible, but they are thinking too much like people from the suburbs. They went to the local display home village and checked out the houses they had on offer and fell in love with one floorplan.

My dad is a really handy person. I have no doubt that he could build his own house. Straight out I told him to “build a strawbale house”. His wife interrupted us (as she does), and ranted like crazy (as she does) about the price. People are so blind. If you build with something different and pay someone else to build it for you, of course it’s going to cost you more. The builder doesn’t know what he is doing and as a result prices the job accordingly – to account for the errors he may make along the way. Build it yourself and a strawbale house is very cheap.

Of course there are more options than just building with strawbales, but I think it’s something that they should look into. As I went on we talked about thermal mass, good insulation and proper orientation for the house amongst other things. They took it all on board but in the end I think they want to take the easy way out and just pay for a cheap, poorly built transportable style house.

I think they, like a lot of people have a misconception about self sufficient living. The whole point is that you work for yourself. You build the things that you need. You collect your own water to drink and water your vegetables. You do everything. Even nowadays when it is a challenge to remove yourself from society, you should be looking at minimising your expenses as much as possible.

Dropping a transportable house on a block of land to favour the view (and not in the proper orientation) is going to result in having a hot house in summer, and one that is going to cost a lot to heat in the winter.

Living self sufficient means putting the effort in to do it right the first time, saving you hassles down the track. It doesn’t mean expensive, it means quality.

About two months ago I read “The China Study”, and came to the conclusion that I should be eating a lot more fruit and vegetables. While I try and eat as well as I can, I believe that one of the main reasons why I don’t eat as much fruit and veg as I’d like is because of the quality that we get at the shops here in Adelaide. What concerns me is that apparently we have it pretty good here! It must be very hard for some people to eat well in places like London.

I came to the conclusion that starting my own veggie patch was the go, so my family can eat that bit healthier and hopefully we can grow some better tasting food too.

I found a spot in the yard that has three retaining walls around it, and purchased some straw-bales to lay across the front to act as another retaining wall. After filling it with organic loam we now have a raised bed. For the past two months I have been composting all of our organic waste with some straw and soil and that is going quite well. Unfortunately the rain got into it over the past few days but I have since sorted that out to keep it a little drier and warmer during the heavy rain season. While a slow process, composting your scraps will produce a great organic fertilizer for your plants and is well worth the effort.

Last week I bought some seed trays and planted broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts in it. After just one week I have some very strong looking seedlings. After another couple of weeks I will transplant these into the vegetable garden. Direct into the ground I have now sown carrots, lettuce (mixed), silver-beet, spinach and snow peas. I will encourage the snow peas to climb up the fence using wire.

My tips for starting a veggie patch are:

• Unless you have great soil, starting with a raised bed is much easier. Buy some organic loam to get you started.
• Compost all of the organic waste you have. It’s free fertilizer and is made by nature. It’s the best for your crop!
• Do some research as to what to grow and when. Gardenate is a great website for this.
• Start small and enjoy the process rather than feel the burden of a massive veggie patch. Go bigger when you are ready.

Sort of following on from my post the other week, “The Great Outdoors”, spending the time outside in the garden has been really enjoyable. Maybe because as a kid I was always outside – my dad was a landscaper and loved working in the garden – I would always be outside helping my parents in the garden.

Working with the environment just charges me up and gives me so much energy. Watching the plants grow is an exciting process and very rewarding too. It’s little “wins” like this in life that makes me a happy person. Try it for yourself. It’s a bit of work getting setup but well worth the effort.

How much do you need to earn to sustain your lifestyle?

My mates pull figures out of thin air. On the weekend one of them said that if he could earn $100,000 he’d be happy, and he’ll do anything to earn that sort of money… “Even work 80 hour weeks!”

But to me, I think we’ve all got it a bit wrong sometimes. Why is it, that when I earned around five grand a year working for McDonald’s, I never had enough money, yet now that I’m earning over ten times that, I still “don’t have enough money”. Well, to be honest, that last bit is a lie.. I do have enough money, but only because my lifestyle has changed. My change of income hasn’t changed my situation, but rather my change of mindset. For most people I know, and most people I don’t know, they simply never have enough money because they always spend the extra money they earn on more “stuff”.

It’s not our fault that we always want more “stuff” (it’s what we’ve been taught for a long time), but it really locks us into our working life. Put simply, I have no intentions of working for my whole life. I am working full time now while I’m “getting set up”, but later in life I hope to be able to have my wife as a stay at home mum (as that’s what she wants), and ideally I will just work a few days a week.

I think the biggest issue with being able to do this is the ongoing costs that come attached to almost everything in our life nowadays. Mobile phone contracts, Internet contracts, pay tv contracts, petrol, car rego, club membership, insurance, etc. We’re committing to more than we realise. Now obviously some things you can’t live without, and obviously most people need to spend money to make themselves happy sometimes. For instance, I enjoy using the Internet, and I spend more than most people I know on it, but it’s a genuine interest of mine. I don’t have pay tv, because I don’t really watch much TV. I feel as though I can justify that expense.

The issue is that most people don’t really think before they commit to things (eg, $99 a month on their phone), and before long they are so used to having it, they “need” it. Now when you stockpile all of these weekly, monthly, yearly financial commitments up, plus the combination of getting into the habit of buying things regularly (eg, DVD’s, clothes, even expensive food), you end up broke. (Once again, I’m not saying “you should never buy a DVD”.. Some people love collecting them, it’s their hobby. Good on them. But so much stuff is thrown at us, that we just don’t think sometimes and that pay packet ends up spent.)

I tried to explain to my mate that if he earned $100,000 a year by working an 80 hour week, he wouldn’t have the time to service his car. He’d have to get someone else to paint his house… And so on. Heaps more outgoing funds, so his massive income would be eroded.

I’m actually starting a veggie patch at the moment. I intend on having a big one eventually, but I don’t really know what I’m doing so I’m starting small. A veggie patch is a prime example of an area where time means money. Later in life, my family could end up being self sufficient, but it would take a lot of time to do that. I don’t believe you could work full time and be self sufficient. But even having a small veggie patch, and working on it after work would save a family quite a lot of money. If you work an 80 hour week it’s the last thing you’d want to do in the dark when you get home, so inevitably you’d just end up buying more from the shops. More outgoing funds that erodes the huge pay packet.

I link to a blog by a dude that calls himself durianrider. He’s pretty “out there” for a lot of people, but I admire the guy. He’s stoked on life, yet works very little and just earns enough to eat and live. Now I’m not saying that I want exactly that, but I think it’s a perfect example of the other extreme. How can one man that earns next to nothing, be so happy, yet others that earn more than most of us can comprehend be so depressed that they have to be on drugs daily, and often end up killing themselves in the end because “it’s all too much”.

It gives me hope that in a financial sense, there IS more than one way to live your life. I intend on “playing the game” for the next few years and getting setup for life, but after a few years I intend on scaling back work so I can enjoy life with my family.

I work to live, and I only ever want it that way.