Retirement and independent living

So many people wonder how they can get out of the ratrace and start doing the things they love. As a believer in doing the work that you love for a living, I find this sad in itself. Obviously it often requires huge financial compromise, and utter resourcefulness.

Here is a creative look at retirement and reducing your environmental footprint by David Lipschitz:

How to retire relatively early:

1. Pay off your car - or share
2. Pay off your house - or share
3. Make your own electricity - or share
4. Find / make your own water - or share
5. Make food in your community - and share
6. Make and repair clothes in your community - and share
7. Buy an electric car and charge it with your own electricity - or share
8. These 7 will bring your costs down by 50 to 80%
9. Find a doctor, dentist, lawyer, plumber, electrician, garden services, pool maintenance, etc, to be part of your community.

All these together will almost eliminate your costs and your environmental cost will also approach zero.

Big business doesn’t want you to do this, because they want you to be dependent on them.

New car or your own electrical system?

If you are thinking about a new car for R100,000, say, and you keep your existing car and rather buy your own electrical system, in 5 years (the same time as you would have taken to pay off the car), you have paid for your electrical system. For the next 20 years you have (almost) free electricity.

If you want to retire fast you need to work in community. If you want to retire and your neighbours don’t understand then you work “alone” and pay off all your debts and make your own electricity, find water, share food, etc. This is our current approach. The slowest and worst way to retire in my opinion is with retirement savings. I don’t know anyone with retirement savings who has been able to retire at the same level of comfort they had before they retired, unless they had other sources of income or unless they continued working after “retirement.”

Note for me, retirement doesn’t mean having R10 million in the bank (although that might be nice, but it could be stolen by inflation or other ways, e.g. taxing the “rich”); to me retirement means reducing my cost of living each year. Simple, but our society is so brainwashed into believing you need the latest car, or toy, or holiday, or holiday house, or yacht, or whatever, that we have forgotten that the “cheapest” electricity is the electricity we make ourselves (no load-shedding; no worries); the “cheapest” food is the food we make ourselves with the best nutrition.

Channel money the new way and drop the stress

If we can find a way to change the way we think, then if we channel your new car money (just once) or whatever into our food garden, or our electrical system, or our Community Power Station. That’s hwen our cost of living goes down quickly, our stress levels and health costs go down dramatically. Even though you might not be getting above inflation increases at work, it doesn’t matter and you don’t have to go on strike because your costs are going down.

This is one place that Unions don’t understand. If they can get their members to work together to go on strike, which damages jobs and damages incomes and damages the economy, and rather use their power to work together and buy and organise things together, their living costs, and food costs, and electricity costs and other costs would come down. And best of all? They would be able to sell all these things and their incomes would go up at the same time.

By David Lipschitz.

• For for info, check out David’s blog here.