In January 2020, I was making a fine salary for an HVAC engineer with a few years in the industry.
In July 2020, I kind-of sort-of volunteered to go to 8 hours a week, because Covid. My salary dropped by 80%, and I no longer am on normal benefits.
...And my life is better than it's ever been. Luckily I’d been working on decreasing my expenses before my income dropped, so I didn’t have to “tighten my belt” or anything. I didn’t have the experience of all of a sudden having less of something. I had the experience of having more of something - time.
I really enjoy the kind of work I do for my job, but 40 hours of anything is difficult to maintain excitement for. Now I can just wait until my stoke to work on a project is higher than my stoke to do anything else, and then I go do that. That approach gets me to 8hrs a week without ever thinking "Ugh, I have to go to work now".
I think of wealth in terms of being able to spend time however I want. The more time you spend doing whatever you want, the wealthier you are. If you spend 100% of your time doing whatever you want and have enough money to meet all your needs, I say you're 100% wealthy . By this metric I'm one of the wealthiest men in America at the moment.
In fact, c'mon, let's go have fun with spreadsheets for a sec.
Let's say you sleep 8hrs a night. That leaves 112 conscious hours a week. Let's define time wealth as Autonomous Hours / Conscious Hours. At a standard 40hrs/wk, you are at best 63% wealthy (and that doesn’t include commute time or any other secondary effects of working so much). At my 8hrs/week, I'm 93% wealthy.
The trick was to realize how little money I actually needed. I’m still going through this process, and have the suspicion that I haven’t found the end of it yet. Realizing how much money you can be happy with is difficult to do because if you are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week of a stressful job, you do need to spend more money to be able to tolerate your life.
When I was an overworked and underslept workaholic stressbunny, my coping mechanisms were beer, travel, working out in a fancy gym, buying lots of books and reading 30% of them, music and entertainment subscriptions, eating out, work clothes, outdoor gear, and buying whatever looked tasty at really expensive grocery stores. I also spent lots of money eating out because I didn't have much time or energy to cook, and paying other people to fix my stuff (like my fancy mountain bike) when it broke because I didn't have time to do it myself. It seemed to me then that there was no way I could live on <$1,000/mo, and in a way I was right.
But when I dropped down to 8 hours of work a week, what I had time for changed. I now cook every single meal myself, because I enjoy it and I have the time. I don't drink beer much anymore because I'm not trying to drown out the caffeinestress buzz of a tense day at work. I read every single book I buy. I work out with mostly bodyweight exercises and just a couple pieces of equipment, so I don't have any use for a gym these days. When my stuff breaks, I take the time to fix it myself, and I enjoy the process, because I’m not rushed.
Because I actually have time to think now, and because I'm not trying to offset a really crazy stressful life anymore, I just don't need to solve problems with money as much as I used to.