I found it on his own blog, though it's almost impossible to locate now. Basically he inherited a family house, lived in it for a few years, and sold it for a large sum of money (in addition to holding a $100,000 + a year job and saving from it).

As for the paid advocacy, have a look at their financials. You'll see a non-trivial amount of income from advertising on the website and speaking.

EDIT: The house wasn't inherited - he got it from a failed house building business. It's unclear if the costs of building came out of the business funds or his own funds.

> I'm skeptical that being frugal implies some kind of deprivation or overwork.

OP was advocating working multiple jobs and living frugally.

>As for the paid advocacy, have a look at their financials. You'll see a non-trivial amount of income from advertising on the website and speaking.

Because as we all know MMM's plan was always

1. Spend 20's saving 2. Save $600k 3. Quit job 4. Make blog 5. Make millions.

Yes, MMM makes bunches and bunches of money but he is pretty blatant about admitting the "early retirement" was a lie.

He never wanted to retire. He just wanted the option to not work and choose to work on what he wanted.

He went into the house building business with one other business partner. This partner generally failed to meet his end of the obligations, and MMM took a big loss in the process. Getting the house out of the business was not a big win, it was merely a partial recoup of his own invested capital.

>> You'll see a non-trivial amount of income from advertising on the website and speaking

Fuck the modern web. Such a bunch of crap.

Someone needs to build a search engine for sites that don't carry any form of advertisement. charge subscription. seems worthy.

Micropayments were going to be the wave of the future back around 2000. It never happened. People want intangible stuff for what they perceive as free.

Not micropayments. just small subscription fees for that specialized search engine(or maybe even that isn't necessary).

But i want to read content from people just wanting to write, without perverse incentives, as much as possible.

They're the wave of the future today, just in cryptocurrency form. See eg. Brave & BAT.

I think when people describe 'the ideal way to live financially' they are looking at the problem as though they have to solve it all in one go, all at once. That's overwhelming, often leads to a sort of, yo-yo pattern of extreme frugality and extreme luxury.

Frugal living are habits that accumulate gradually, as are any other habits one aims to develop. Eventually you don't have to think about them, things converge naturally. Some people might enjoy working two jobs, because everything syncs together that way.

Is that yo-yo pattern bad?

Periods that are more frugal help you appreciate the pleasures of higher-end lifestyles while realizing that not having them isn't a catastrophe.

Plus the hedonic treadmill is a bitch. Someone earlier in this thread regretted his parents not having experienced certain things. Truly, it's a crying shame to die without having had truly fancy delicious dinners, for example -- that one time is almost priceless. But once a month is a nice, expensive habit. Twice a week you don't care anymore.

I think it's only bad when you don't feel like you have any control over it, and you feel more like it controls you. There's the long term goal you want, but the lack of having control leads to extremes, all of these things increase the number of variable you feel compelled to reason about, to control. With finances, food, 'stuff', that can lead to overload, stress, hence, oscillating between opposites, lacking self control, self direction, autonomy, etc. These are all things people need to feel secure and stable when they have to operate as mostly independent entities.

Nobody hired them for advocacy, but e.g. the MMM webpage makes a lot of money in ads. A lot.