Feed items

You don’t need a high income to achieve Financial Independence.

Making more money helps, sure, but if you’re diligent about cutting costs, it’s possible to reach financial freedom on even an average salary.

I want you to meet my friend, John. John is an 81-year-old retired shop teacher. He’s a millionaire — but you’d never know it.

John started life as a carpenter. In his thirties, he went back to school to become a teacher. He spent the next twenty years teaching shop at a junior high school in a poor part of town. He retired to financial freedom at age 58. He never had a huge income and he didn’t inherit a fortune.

So, how’d he get rich? He pinched his pennies and doted on his dollars. John achieved Financial Independence by ruthlessly cutting costs.

In this week’s installment of Get Rich Slowly Theater, we’re going to look at a real-life money boss: Earl Crawley, a parking attendant from Baltimore. Mr. Earl (as he’s known) was profiled on the PBS show MoneyTrack. Here’s a six-minute segment about this super saver:

Mr. Earl has worked as a parking attendant for 44 years — at the same parking lot! He’s never made more than $12 per hour. He’s never earned more than $20,000 in a year, yet he has a net worth over half a million dollars.

Like many successful folks, Earl started working when he was young. At age 13, he got a job at a produce market to help pay the family bills. His mother took most of his income to help make ends meet, leaving her son with just a few cents out of every dollar. This forced saving plan was the start of a life-long habit.

In order to survive and thrive, you need to earn a profit.

You already know profit is the lifeblood of every business. It’s like food and water for the human body. Although proper nutrition isn’t the purpose of life, we couldn’t exist without it. Food and water give us strength to do the stuff that matters most. So too, profit isn’t necessarily the purpose of business — but a company can’t survive without it.

Here’s a secret: People need profit too.

In personal finance, “profit” is typically called “savings”. That’s too bad. When people hear about savings, their eyes glaze over and their brains turn to mush. Bor-ing! But if you talk about profit instead, people get jazzed: “Of course, I want to earn a profit! Who wouldn’t?”

Profit is easy to calculate. It’s net income, the difference between what you earn and what you spend. You can compute your profit with this simple formula:

I’m generally an even-keeled guy. I don’t get worked up about much. I understand that different people have different perspectives, so I try to be respectful when others disagree with me. Having said that, there are indeed certain things that piss me off.

For instance, I get mad-dog lathered up at traditional advice about how much to save for retirement, such as this article at Business Insider (echoed here at The Wall Street Journal):

So how much are you supposed to be saving in order to finance 20 to 30 years post-work? The commonly accepted rule of thumb is that you’ll want about 70% of your former annual income — at least — to continue living at or near the style to which you’ve been accustomed.