Seems like I either need to never retire, or set up a trust for myself so I have a guaranteed allowance. (Or deal with the implicated fear....)
1) Go for a period of time (I did a month) living off of rice and beans (as far as I can find, the cheapest way to get close to a complete meal)[1]
2) Pare down everything in your life that isn't absolutely necessary. I put my bed in storage and lived in a hammock for a year. Cut out hot water for a period, stuff like that.
Once you do some of those things and realize that you can do it, living on a small income (or savings) in order to work on something becomes a lot easier.
I'm really lucky in that my runway is infinite, and a big part of it is because of the things that I listed. I know exactly how much the minimum I need to live off of is, I know what its like to live on that amount of money, and I know that it isn't scary.
[0]: A lot of the world lives off of this. I'm not saying that this is a path to complete nutrition. It isn't. Everyone should eat a balanced diet.
I'm always tempted to do something like this anyway; the minimalist approach really appeals to me.
It's almost more about making sure everything's in the rest of my life, rather than where I sleep, if that makes any sense?
Once in a hammock there is no 'swaying', the feeling is more like being in a flotation tank. If you have enough duvet, pillows, blankets and the like you can sleep in other positions and move with relative ease.
I badly pulled a calf muscle once and spent a fortnight getting back to strength, given the option of a normal double bed or a hammock slung above, I found at the hammock provided me with the sleep I could not get in the normal bed below.
Sadly I had to move from that attic room and I lost the anchor points needed for the hammock. I believe a hammock offers better support and comfort for a back.
Can you find a pic demonstrating what you mean?
Anyway, that's interesting. Thanks!
If so vote for politicians who support better welfare systems and free healthcare (if you don't already), it would help take the edge of this stress.
Unfortunately voting in America doesn't really do squat. We're first past the post and the corruption runs so deep no politician can stand against the health care industry. Elections here are a joke.
* It is gerrymandered districts, setup over decades to guarantee seats go to one or the other party. The number of actually competitive elections is at historic lows every cycle.
* Representation per person is at historic lows. The population rises, but the seats in state and federal houses doesn't change. Even in the best case scenario, Wyoming still has over 250k people per senator. Nobody can actually represent the interests of that many people (albeit, given the original intent of senators they shouldn't, but that is a different can of worms). House seats are no better.
The information era has siloed people into ideological extremes. Coupled with the fptp disaster you pointed out, the corrupt media owned by centralized interests keep the poor at war with themselves.
* The obvious loopholes and exploitation of the constitution is blatant and apparent. Either anti-corruption clarification amendments are required, or a modernized rewrite maintaining the principles of separation of power and explicit rights and liberties but updated to insure things like freedom of privacy are necessary.
It is a chicken and egg problem to fix, of course. Regular people cannot rewrite laws or constitutions without the ample resources to wage a revolutionary war. However, the powers that be won't either, because the current rules set them up for power and give them their legitimacy. They are a product of the system as it exists and will fight to protect it, not change it.
Historically the best answer was to sail or caravan to the unsettled and unclaimed lands and try it over again, but we have run short on those options.
Without fail, every single state and federal representative today is representing on the orders of tens of thousands to millions of people per elected official. It is unreasonable to expect them to act in the will of their constituents when they have no way to know them as people and not figures. It is a fundamental fault I have always seen in democracy the world over, and think it is where the pressure from many people for direct democracy comes from, albeit misguided.
(EHBs are maligned as government interference, but I really have trouble believing that people want to buy health insurance that doesn't cover things like hospitalization and emergency care. You know, the sorts of rare, expensive events that one buys insurance for. There's probably a little bit of room to argue about what the national baseline should be, but standardization is a positive government intervention to make it easier to select a policy and to make sure that the policy will actually cover care)
http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/
..and I'm about to take another one:
http://penguindreams.org/videos/taking-a-sabbatical/
I think I'm in better shape this time. I'll take a tech job if I drop below $10k (just savings, not retirement). Last time I was on fumes.
I mean why wait till you retire? You could be hit by a truck or slip in your tub and die (or with my luck die of liver failure). Better to spread a year break ever few years.
I quit a falling apart job a year ago, and was staying above break even on odd opportunities and contracts. At first i pretty much stopped spending anything extra at all, and it was rather unpleasant. A few months in, it kind of passed - as an engineering person it was quite fun for me to make things on minimal budget and fix broken stuff off cheap garage sales.
So, it takes some time to adapt to the change.
Part of this was definitely the issue that the items for purchase were either so hugely out of budget, or so very much not worth it, that there wasn't any point to spending the cash.