gitter-badger/thrifty

Cashflow Lifestyle

Welcome to Thrifty

Our mission is cashflow lifestyles.

Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.

> - Calvin Coolidge in his *Address Before the Annual Convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation, Chicago, Ill.*

Greener Pastures

Why good is never good enough.

I grew up playing video games. Whatever was the most recent and fashionable on the market I owned it. First was the Super Mash Bros. series that I played on the Nintendo consoles; starting with Nintendo 64, Nintendo Gamecube, and Nintendo Wii. Second was the Halo franchise I played on Microsoft's consoles; starting with the original Xbox, then Xbox 360, followed by Xbox One. The greatest time sink was World of Warcraft, which required a subscription of $30 per month; a game I played on my first custom built PC. The winding point here is I followed the trends when selecting what games to play and I spent the majority of my savings to do it. For the last four years I've played one game, Dwarf Fortress, which asserts "Losing is fun!". Dwarf Fortress is a part construction and management simulation, part roguelike, indie video game created by Tarn and Zach Adams. It's free, donation-driven development, and is one of those rare games with unlimited replay value. In other areas of my life I want to do the same; making purchases that optimize for long-term happiness and are not driven by short-term market forces.

New Rich

Avoid the deferred-life plan.

Tim Ferriss, author of the 4-Hour Workweek, offers an alternative path for the 9 to 5 workaholic questioning why they'd wait for retirement to live their dreams. His approach to joining the new rich includes four activities; definition, elimination, automation, and liberation. The process, coined DEAL, begins with defining your ideal lifestyle and worst case scenarios. Next he focuses on the 20% of activities generating 80% of the desired results and eliminates the 20% of activities causing 80% of the headache. Once effective, the next step is to become efficient by applying degrees of automation to critical activities. Lastly is liberation from environment-restrictive productivity through modern remote practices. The end goal is to increase the number of options available and reduce the costs to change.