What’s the boldest thing you’ve ever done that’s worked out for you?

I came out of university with 6 figures of debt. I decided that I was either going to be a slave to that debt, or I needed to erase it as fast as possible. So I lived intentionally homeless for a while, and after that still lived as far under my means as I could before causing serious self harm.

So many people from my cohort class celebrated passing their final tests by buying cars and houses. I bought a bike and a tent and headed off into a back corner of a national park and set up home somewhere nobody would find me. Biked to work, showered at the gym, grew my own food and did that as long as I could.

The first house I bought was a piece of junk that I fixed up as I lived in it. The first place I fixed as the basement so I could split it and rent it and live in the junk upstairs. Then just kept doing that until I was out of debt.

I would say it easily snowballed my life. I still live as minimally as possible, but I also have a wife and kids now, and they have less tolerance to minimalism than I do. I still try to teach that to them though. But if I didn't have a wife and kids, I'd probably be in a yurt in the mountains somewhere in BC.

I find there's more enjoyment in planting trees and making a food forest to forage off of, than there is in buying shit that I don't need and will just end up enslaving me and wind in a landfill.

TLDR: Living very minimally. One thing it helped with was finances obviously, but another is slowing life down.

/r/AskReddit Thread