You CAN Live an Incredible Life on a Relatively Small Amount of Money
Reframe what success means and life gets really, really good, really, really cheaply
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I have a hypothesis for you.
I posit that people who intentionally live on a relatively small amount of money (rather than people who are unfortunately forced to do so through circumstance) have better standards of living — and more fun — than people who live with more.
Why? Because they have chosen their lifestyle.
The older I become the more I realize that our relationship with money — and whether it’s a healthy or unhealthy one — isn’t just down to how much we have. It’s whether we are master of it, or it is master of us. Who controls who?
Living a smaller, simpler life is taking control. And with control comes an opening to experience an awesome life.
***
I, like most of my Millennial generation, grew up worshipping money. I wanted a job that paid for it all. Vacations, a big house by the sea, a closet full of clothes, bottle service at the bar.
I turned 21 in 2005, the time when celebrity culture reached — in my opinion — its most toxic. Money, status, fancy cars, and even fancier houses, it was all we knew to aspire to.
Being a student, I had no money but my boyfriend (who eventually became my husband) had landed a bonus-based sales job and was rather good at it. So as a household, we had some money. It wasn’t a stupid amount but it was a lot for a 20-year-old. And we spent it all every month, almost without exception.
It was only when I reached my mid-late twenties that I realized how freaking unhappy I was with my relationship with money. How unhappy I was full stop. How stressed I felt living paycheck to paycheck. And how I had very little to show for all the money I’d earned and spent.
I won’t bore you with the next 10 years because I’ve talked about them a lot in my writing (but for newbies to S+S, the highlights are my husband and I moved to a small town, opened a wine store and bar, became minimalists, sold the business and all possessions and left the UK for good for a life of travel and writing). But at 38, exactly a decade after choosing to live an intentional life, my husband and I spend less than half what we did in our early twenties.
Yet we are infinitely happier.
No one told me that would be possible, and yet here we are.
***
I wish more financial “gurus” — the ones with the clout — would write about how much more fun it is to have a lower standard of living. I think even many of us lifestyle-finance writers forget to talk about how freaking good life can be on a small amount of money.
So much of the standard discourse is about slashing budgets, penny-pinching, and how to mentally prepare yourself for a life with less. Moreover, lowering your cost of living is always framed as a temporary state, not a long-term lifestyle.
Downsize until you can spring for the bigger house.
Save until you get out of debt.
Keep the smaller car until you can afford a more “appropriate” one for your lifestyle, age, status, or whatever.
No one says actually, you might like living with less.
People around me — especially the ones who are still chasing some version of the American/British dream — certainly see my living with less as temporary. They think I can’t possibly live in one-bedroomed apartments for the rest of my life (just you watch me).
The fact that I love my life is dismissed as, well, wrong. A naivety I’ll grow out of one day when I realize how much better my life would be with more.
They don’t know what I know. What most minimalists, simple living advocates, and intentional-living lovers all know. That more isn’t where the happiness and contentment lies (if it did, all billionaires would be happy).
We know different.
We know that living with less could well be the secret sauce to a good life.
The best life.
***
There’s something deliciously weird about enjoying life on less, like you’re party to an illicit secret few others know about.
At the heart of it all is a reframing about what we previously thought of as the root of happiness and success. Small over big. Less over more. Buying time over buying stuff.
Every day I get to drink great coffee, write, listen to music, read, walk, run, relax and explore. I get to eat and drink my way around Europe.
That’s success for me. That’s a really good life. A satisfying life. And it’s done on a relatively small amount of money. My husband and I spend around $40,000 per year between us for our lifestyle (and it would be far far less if I was more like a “normal” person and didn’t have such an obsession with food and wine).
If someone had told me how fun it can be to live on less, I might have done it years earlier.
This article is intended for information and entertainment purposes only and should not be considered investment or financial advice