When I was fifteen—half boy, half reckless apprentice to adulthood—I’d just left home and rented a tiny room near my workplace. My first stumble into independence. My father, always ready with a hard-earned fragment of wisdom and, when he could spare it, a discreet injection of cash, told me something that stuck with me like a tattoo: “Every Schilling I don’t spend is one I don’t have to earn.”
Back then we still had Austrian Schillings, not the drab, bureaucratically deodorized Euro. But the principle travels across currencies and centuries. The less money you need to be content, the less you need to bend your back to earn it. The fewer obligations you chain yourself to, the more freedom you retain to choose your work, your hours, and the terms on which you tolerate other human beings. If you burn money like a drunken aristocrat, you will suffer accordingly. If you’re frugal, life opens up like a forgotten side door.Fast-forward to today: you supposedly need two incomes just to keep a family from slipping under the waves. Yet my wife is a full-time housewife, and we live on my income alone—comfortably, even. Not because we won the lottery or because I’m some Silicon Valley demigod, but because we learned the old arithmetic my father tried to impart before the world lost its mind: spend wisely, live sanely. It’s shocking how far that still gets you.