The calculation
You can quit selling your time and toil for money and dedicate yourself to doing exactly what you want:
- If you are able to figure out a situation where you (and your dependents) can today live with an adequate quality of life for 500$ per month (= 33000₹ in 2016) [this is just an example – plug in any number you like],
- if you (and dependents) expect to live x years,
- if you have accumulated sufficient wealth, That is -
- 500*12x = 6000x dollars (eg. 420,000$ for 70 yrs) – or if you go by the 4% annual safe withdrawal rate logic – (6000/.04) = 150000$ (for how many ever yrs),
- or if you have productive land or property which can indefinitely feed you + dependents
- if you can grow that money at least at the rate of inflation in your place of residence
- (by investing in fixed deposits, index funds, gold, land etc..)
- if you are willing to either face a worse quality of life or are willing to terminate yourself if expenses rise unexpectedly high relative to resources.
Slavery and greed
What ever the calculation - it is important to do the calculation and quit.
Many wealthy people keep slaving off out of sheer habit and peer pressure; because they haven’t done the math.
They make excuse after excuse for why they need to do something other than pursue their real interest.
Beware!
What does an adequate quality of life mean to me?
- Clean air, clean water, nutritious food, comfortable housing, comfortable clothes (suited for the place of residence)
- health insurance
- physical security
- electricity, good internet connection, a tablet, smart-phone, computer, books
- freedom to openly pursue scientific, technological and aesthetic/ spiritual interests, and benign-according-to-my-worldview advocacy (PS: this eliminates Islamic countries)
- access to the sky, earth, trees and good people.
Additional notes
- This assumes, of course, that your valiant attempts at earning an adequate living doing exactly what you like have failed so far (eg: owing to family projects, rotten organizations etc.).
- Excellent education for children up to pre-university level: Even if you need to hire people to do this, this costs at most 1-2k$ per per year = 12-24k$ total in such places per child. Ideally, by that time, the child should have adequate skills to gather money for a similar lifestyle in the economy of its time. Or it should be able to acquire such skills by its enterprise.
Alternate calculations
- (USA specific) 25x annual expenditure = 7% growth – 3% inflation = 4% is annual expenditure rule money mustache article.
- This implies a 1,200,000$ savings in USA for a 4000$ monthly expenditure (as of 2016).
- Success rate can also be estimated here: http://www.firecalc.com/
- Places with low costs of living
- Silicon Valley’s FIRE movement (doing similar “geo-arbitrage”)
- Articles