How To Retire 6 Months Every Year
(Page 11 of 22)
May/June 1970
By Irv Thomas
Let's say you have a piece of country property now, about 50 miles out of town, and you drive the distance and return daily. If you take the bus, it's $2.00 each way - $88.00 a month - plus the agony of the daily trip. Other than that, you can get along on $250 a month and your take-home pay is $500 per month. This means a basic work requirement of six months per year.
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But there's another way: You could share an inner city rental close to your job with friends at $50 per month for the five day work week. This cuts your commuting to one round-trip a week at a cost of about $17.00 a month. That's a total of $67 - which is high - but still lower and easier than the straight commute bit.
What would this actually do to your six month work plan? Six times $67 is $402 . . . or one more month of work. Seven months of weekend farming, and five months of full-time country living!
I vary it occasionally with something healthy and inexpensive like liver, fish or ham and eggs. But in all honesty, the price and quality keep me coming back to the cheeseburgers. My weekly dinners are less than $12.00, even including the indulgence of a good $2.00 chinese meal every weekend. Where is the housewife who can keep a dinner budget much below that level?
Lunch is a passable hot meal in the company cafeteria and costs about $1.00. On weekends I try to avoid a mid-day meal because I usually have an earlier and somewhat larger dinner. The only thing I eat at home is breakfast. During the week this is simply a bowl of dry cereal with a rich mix of milk and half & half, and a glass of orange juice. On weekends, I sometimes switch to soft-boiled eggs with melba toast and fresh grapefruit. All breakfast supplies cost, perhaps, $1.50 per week. I used to bring home cookies and pastry for the in-between hours but that tapered off. Hard candy - a good, cheap energy source - and seven-up are my only pacifiers now.
I made one small start at setting up a kitchen six months ago, and it taught me to let well enough alone. I'd gone fishing with friends, and brought home 8 or 10 'free' trout. Well, that meant a frying pan with spatula, one dinner plate, silverware (other than my one spoon), butter, bread, lemon and who ever heard of fresh fish without fresh tartar sauce, so mayonnaise and pickles, and such a dinner would need a salad, so two kinds of lettuce, tomato, vinegar and oil! My free trout dinner cost me nearly $10.00 plus an hour of preparation and cleaning up. The pickles, oil and vinegar are still sitting on the shelf.
One cannot, of course, call food an addiction. But the creative preparation of food can be an extremely expensive hobby, with literally no end to its possibilities. In the old days I used to follow the 'live to eat' school of thought; but I have reversed my field, and I think I have lopped another few weeks off my working year in the process. If I were to try and draw generalized rules from my experience, I would make them these:
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