BAILING YOURSELF OUT!
Here in Ecuador i do get directv and see what is happening back where i used to live, and where my daughters and the rest of my family still live. It upsets me to see what the government is trying to do to bail the economy out of a depression. And yes, i believe that they are trying. Everyone has their own ideas of what they think will bail us out, and they think that the ideas of everyone else are wrong. The truth is that no one really knows what will work and it  is all just an educated guess that may or may not work.
I beleive the thing to do in this situation, and actually even if we weren’t in this situation, is something that really works and in a way that you can control. I call it bailing yourself out. I have practiced this my whole life and i can tell you without a doubt, “it works”!
It is called, being frugal. I have told people proudly about what i practiced and what i called myself in that explanation was that i was cheap. They quickly jumped in with “you are not cheap, you are frugal”! And that stuck with me.
When i was a young boy ( i still am young at 56 with a 2 year old boy and working on another) i saw my father retired young in the upper 40’s with a couple of million in the bank. I saw that he had made his money in real estate investments. He wasn’t much for talking about how he did it or about how much money he had. If i asked a specific question of him he would respond with a few words of wisdom and then i would have to figure it out for myself.
Well, i think that i did figure most of it out. It doesn’t have as much to do with how much money you make, it has to do with how much money you save! When i analized how my dad retired so early, i saw clearly how he did it. Even though he had more than a  couple of million in the bank, he lived very comfortably on little. His homes were always  modest, but comfortable, he wore nice clothes which he bought new, but that he had bought on sale. He did take travel vacations every so often, and would buy a new car every once in a while as he loved to drive.  One day he showed up at my house in Tacoma Washington after driving up from his home in San Diego and proudly proclaimed that he did it on $6 worth of diesel! He had this oldsmobile with a diesel engine and had added some saddle tanks in the trunk that he had installed and went over the border to Tiauana, Mexico and filled up for 11 cents per gallon! He had fun figuring out how to save money and he enjoyed life…..
After my dad showed up with the proclamation of how much it cost him to make that trip in the late 70’s and i was in my mid 20’s, i decided to try and do what my dad had done with his life, except i set my retirement age at 35 years old. Interest rates were in the 16% to the 20% range on real estate loans and i was in the middle of the nothing down, nothing out of my pocket real estate seminars. During this time i was reading a book by mark o. Haroldsen, a real estate investor and seminar teacher. When i read it, it was more or less the same teaching that i derived from my take on how my dad retired early. That teaching still rings with me today. What they both said;  my dad with how he lived and Mark Haroldsen in what he wrote was that whatever we save is like giving ourselves a raise! Wow, that is too simple!
Yes, i invested in real estate like my father and made money on those investments, but the trick was to take care of that money.
I have never been one to out do or keep up with the joneses, or even to impress the joneses. I love telling people my story of how i retired when most of the people that i knew at my age were still working and didn’t know if they were ever going to be able to retire. Not to boast but to help them try and figure out what i already knew. I have always enjoyed helping people help themselves.
This is my short version of how i did it.
I made plans and stuck as close to those plans as possible. Without a plan, you are just drifting and unless you are a lot luckier than i am, you won’t get there without them. I made working on that plan, fun! Actually it just ended up being fun when i saw my debt going down and my net worth going up over the years.
I looked at all of my living costs and cut out what wasn’t nessesary. Little things like looking at my car insurance and seeing that i was actually paying double on different coverages that your agent doesn’t want you to know about. Things like getting rid of your land line telephone. Why have one if you have a celular? Using skype to callyour family instead of paying long distance. Buying an older home and fixing it up, instead of a new home with a huge mortgage. I did that many times, and never owned a new home until i built a new one here in ecuador where the costs were much lower. My wife and i love to go to garage sales and thrift stores when we are in the usa, and we buy all 98% of our clothes at these places and even look to see when they have 50% to 75% off sales. The clothes are new or like new and no one knows unless i tell them, which i do quite often because i like seeing their faces when i tell them that i paid $1 for this shirt or for these shorts! As i said before, i don’t care if people think that i am strange because i am frugal. I used to work for a concrete pumping company in kent, Washington for a few years. I was working half the hours of the senior operators and when we got our paychecks, they would look at mine and ask “how is it that you are getting more on your check than we are?” “well” i said, for one thing, i am investing what money that i have in rentals and i get enough write off that i pay no income taxes. But also when i drive home in the evening, after work and pass by the tavern and i see you guys sitting in the window and wave to you, i am going to work on those rentals. That is how i do it. A few of those co-workers have passed on and some of the rest are still working and making the same mistakes with their money. And thank god, some have figured it out.
Even the cars that i owned and drove daily were well known by the names that i gave them!  My favorites were; rinochaser, booger, ugly, snowball, etc. I very easily could have afforded a new car, but i couldn’t make myself throw 25% to 50% of what i paid for it in a hole called immidiate depreciation.
When we travel to the usa and we see what is on the curb being thrown away, we are sad for the waste. My ecuadorian wife who lived in an old warehouse all of her life with cardboard walls that she built to divide the rooms and then cut holes for windows with curtains  around them.  She was happy with what she had. There are very few things here in ecuador that are sold used as everything including clothes is used until it is dust. They are being ecological without even knowing it….

I live in ecuador, not only because we live very well on less than $700 per month, but also because the country and the people are beautifuland friendly; for the beaches, and for the adventures and quality of life!
The point is that a person can live on less and still enjoy life, as i have, and as my wife has, and as you can also do. You don’t have to be as radical as i, but just be aware of what you are paying for what you need to buy. This alone makes a big difference in what you have available to spend on what really counts the most.this will help you get to where you want to be in life.
Gary swenson
Remember:
"life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: wow - what a ride!"