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Comment by rflrob | Hacker News Reader

For those of us who don't follow this site, is there a suggestion as to where the initial half million dollars comes from? That's not always an attainable goal for someone under about 40...

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It comes from a 50%-90% savings rate. The focus of the site is on how to live a nice middle class life on very little money. Here's how he did it: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-of... . Or if you want to get extreme: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-yea...

It's also worth noting he's not actually retired, he's actually a self-employed handyman and also says in the article his wife works too and plans on working more when their boy is older.

How do you define retired? His passive income from investments exceeds his total expenses + inflation so he doesn't need the part time income. Maybe you want to call it financially independent, but I'd say I was retired if I didn't have to work.

Actually I think calling it 'financial independence' would head off a bunch of knee-jerk reactions and make it a lot easier to have a real discussion about.

It's not a knee-jerk, he's just using a very well known term that has a specific meaning. It means to cease all work. All. He hasn't. He even admits it in the linked article but justifies it because it's doing what he wants. Retired means not working. He works.

If you're working for money you're not retired. There's even a whole spiel in the link above about how they tried to become property developers which failed when the market collapsed, which is actually a lot of work.

I'd buy semi-retired. Or he works part-time. But retired has a very specific meaning that he is ignoring. He just seems to be confusing 'I enjoy my new job' with 'I don't work' just because he didn't like working 9-5 as a programmer or whatever it was he did.

Retired as meaning not working at all is not a universal definition. Most people in the financial independence circles define it as not having to work for a living. As long as you can choose whether or not to work, you can say you're retired.

You find you are going to spend that unneeded money on yourself, it is disingenuous to say you are retired.

Mr. Money Mustache defines "retired" as being able to do whatever he enjoys, including work he enjoys. From what I can tell by reading his blog for the past couple of months, he has no desire to sit around on a beach or play golf all day.

And the rest of us define retired as not having to work to pay our bills. I like my job, but if I got hurt or laid off I would have trouble.

True, most of us define retired that way. I don't think Mr. Money needs to work anymore either, but he/they do.

In his case, it was a combination of frugality, a decent paying job, and good investing, esp. in real estate (note the "Eventually both rentals were sold and the gains were put elsewhere.") in the "Brief History of the Stash" article. Having gains on real estate probably means he sold them pre-crash.

I'm a fan of the MMM blog because it describes an attainable alternative lifestyle for talented people who aren't already wealthy. It may not be a lifestyle that many people want, but at least it's a change from the high college debt, two income trap, expensive city lifestyle that seems to be the norm for lots of young families.

I don't aspire to live on 20K per year, but thinking about how lowering your personal "burn rate" can give you more freedom in your life is a great mental exercise.

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