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10 Inspirational People Who Live Kick-Ass Lives by Rejecting Lifestyle Inflation

10 Inspirational People Who Live Kick-Ass Lives by Rejecting Lifestyle Inflation

Real examples of how great life can be when you prioritize living over stuff

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Charlie Brown
Dec 13, 2022
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10 Inspirational People Who Live Kick-Ass Lives by Rejecting Lifestyle Inflation
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Welcome to “Simple Finances,” a series of Tuesday essays about exactly that - simplifying your money. This is a paid subscriber-only essay. If you want in on the fun, subscribe here with a 7-day trial, free e-book, essays, and weekly waste-reducing recipes all for $5 a month / $50 a year. That’s just $0.32 - $0.38 per essay (and it could save you a damn sight more than that) ⬇

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“Sleep-Well-at-Night Finance series” essay list

  • If You Want "Sleep-Well-at-Night" Finances, Stop Listening to The Noise™

  • Focus on These 3 Financial Areas and You're Golden

  • A Simple and Straightforward Take on the FIRE Movement

  • Buying Time = Buying Happiness

  • My Aggressively Simple Financial Strategies

  • You CAN Live an Incredible Life on a Relatively Small Amount of Money

  • Use the "5 Pillars Rule" to Change Your Relationship with Money Forever


For the last installment of this Sleep-Well-at-Night-Finances series, I was determined to talk about lifestyle inflation but I wasn’t sure how to approach it in a way that you won’t have heard before.

The usual “don’t inflate your lifestyle when you get a pay raise” schtick is important - perhaps the most important topic in personal finance - but there is already so much written about it all over the internet.

IMO, the most impactful way to prove a point is to use real-life stories. So I thought - who do I know who has made a success of their life — whatever that means to them — by rejecting lifestyle inflation?

10 of my friends and family immediately came to mind. People who have achieved everything from realizing their entrepreneurial dreams to traveling to giving their lives to the service of others.


Before we get into it…

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10 Inspirational People Who Live Kick-Ass Lives by Rejecting Lifestyle Inflation

1. Steve the all-American-boy-turned-Croatian zealot

Steve is the guy who during college assumed he would grow up and do the usual. Get married, get a job, have a kid, and move up both the housing and career ladder. After all, that’s what everyone else around him was doing.

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