“Hola, lo siento, no hablo bien espanol. Uh, quieriro ir a Barcelona?“
I'm trying to get to Barcelona today. I’m in Malaga, about the halfway point of my eight day journey from the South of Morocco to the French Pyrenees, near Foix.
“Quando?”
I give the ticket agent a blank look.
He sighs. “When do you want to go?”
“Oh, right, uh, today please.”
“The trains today are all full. Tomorrow... ah.... yes there is available tomorrow.”
What the hell? “Okay, I guess I can do tomorrow. “
“Okay. The price is 180 euros.”
“What?!”
“Yes… everyone is traveling now, so most lines are nearly full. When so many people want to travel, the price goes up.” He shrugs.
Yeah. Supply and demand. I get it. Man, capitalism is such a buzzkill sometimes.
“Okay, thanks anyways,” I say, and walk away. I'll figure something else out. I'll walk instead, for that price.
My new hobby: spending almost nothing
In April I decided to begin Project TTM5k. “TTM” is accountant lingo for 'Trailing Twelve Months'. 5k means five thousand dollars. The aim of Project TTM5k is to get my annual cost of living down to $5,000. That works out to $417 a month.
So far Project TTM5k is off to an unpromising start; in April I spent $678, and in May I spent $821. I’d be doing all right if I’d called it Project TTM10k. But that’s all right. I didn’t expect to be nailing it from the start. Now that I’ve got two months of data, I can analyze how I spent my money and think about how to get closer to that 5k line.
I want to be close to the green line.
I made a couple of sloppy spending mistakes these past two months. I bought a carpet in Morocco that I didn’t want to buy, and I got hustled for some baksheesh. But those mistakes are minor and don’t account for my overage. The majority of my overspending is strategic in nature.
The solution isn’t to just try harder to not spend money on dumb stuff, because that’s not the issue. Besides my rug, I only spent money on food, accommodations, and travel. I don’t have Netflix, Spotify, or even a cell phone subscription. When I’m in hostels I book the cheapest options available. There’s almost no fat to trim.
Near the end of my 2,300mile journey, at the border between Spain and France in the Pyrenees.
No. To achieve my goal of a five thousand dollars a year cost of living, I have to improve strategically. Luckily, making strategic modifications to my lifestyle thrills my nerd heart to no end. The most obvious improvements I can make are to:
Travel long distances less frequently. What really sent me over the edge in May was traditional long distance travel. I traveled from Tangier down to Zagora, and then up all the way to the South of France, via bus, train, and ferry. Bus tickets really add up over 2,300 miles (3,700 km).
Not travel last minute. I got used to the fixed cost bus tickets in Morocco, but in Europe they are demand charged. Hence the 180€ train day-of on a busy weekend. (I wound up getting an overnight bus ticket for ‘only’ 100€.) I can avoid this by getting my plan together earlier and booking in advance.
Find even cheaper travel options, like rideshare. I attempted to find some last minute on blablacar when I ran into the atrocious train ticket prices, but nothing came through in time. This would work with more advance planning, I’m sure.
Have smaller gaps in between workaways/free accommodations gigs. I spent a lot of nights in hostels over the past month, waiting for the green light for my desert workaway, and then on the long journey back up. Better planning will reduce 10-20$/night hostels that I don’t even particularly enjoy.
Those are the conventional strategic improvements I can make. But the benefit, and the whole point of an audacious project like TTM5k, is to open the door to non-conventional thinking. Other ways to get my costs down are:
To hitchike. I’ve never hitched. I tried once in the States and got nowhere, literally. It’s pretty far outside of my comfort zone. I looked in to it to cross Spain, but hitchwiki said it was difficult to get long distances in Spain and I was on a tight time schedule, so I didn’t try.
To walk, or ride a bike, and wild or stealth camp. I’m very comfortable wild camping, but I’ve never stealth camped. Jean, my French roommate at the Portugal workaway, bikecamped from Marsailles to Istanbul. He said that he would ride into a village, and ask people if they knew a good place he could camp for the night. More often than not people would invite him into their homes and feed him. This is far outside of my comfort zone, hence I very much want to do it.
Um. Why, though?
Absent an appropriate philosophy, a goal of spending only five thousand dollars is miserly. It's Scrooge McDuck territory. It’s a scarcity mentality for no good reason, and it’s a fine way to miss out on a lot of neat things the world has to offer. Like Scotch, say, or sturdy shoes that fit well.
But I do have a philosophy of postconsumerism, an ideal of becoming a Renaissance Man, a notion that I ought to collapse now in order to beat the rush... and a hunch that I can do all this and, with skill and effort and a bit of luck, live a better life as I define it than if I'd just played along with the status quo consumer society expectations.
Scrooge McDuck doesn't like to spend money because he wants to win the Money Game as he defines it.
I don't like to spend money because I don't want to play the Money Game. I want to play a different game, a game where money is decentralized, just one more resource flow among many. Or, put another way, I want to win the Money Game as quickly as possible by cheating, and then forget about the whole thing forever.
So, I want to
Kill my unconscious belief that money is the only tool to solve problems with.
Become adept at managing non-financial problem solving methodologies in my life.
Walk my anticonsumerism talk.
Force myself to have novel postconsumer experiences.
I grew up in a society where money is intensely central to our mindset. Money is the air we breathe. Our minds unconsciously centralize money even if we’re critical of the way money works in our societies. So I need to figure out how to reprogram my brain to solve problems - to live life - without money as the unconscious default solution.
Project TTM5k isn’t about $5,000. It’s about changing how my mind works.
Why’d I pick $5,000? How do I know that’s the ‘right’ number?
I don’t. It’s just a nice round number that’s low enough to force me out of money-centric thinking. Once I achieve it, I’ll probably forget about it.
But the point is that the effort required to achieve this project will change my thinking and my habits, so that after I drop the formal pursuit of the goal my habitual, effortless cost of living will be dramatically and durably lower than it was before. I’ll be a different person.