Book summary “Living well on practically nothing”: summary

Introduction

You face constant pressure to consume, borrow, and spend just to maintain a basic standard of living. Rising costs and heavy debt leave you vulnerable to economic shocks and trap you in endless labor.

Edward H. Romney presents a practical path to financial freedom through extreme self-reliance and low-cost resourcefulness. You can achieve financial stability and personal freedom by eliminating all debt, cutting living expenses dramatically, and mastering low-cost resourcefulness and repairs.

The book guides you through restructuring your habits, finding alternative housing, producing your own food, and maintaining older vehicles and equipment. You will learn how to build micro-businesses, acquire cheap land, and eliminate recurring utility bills.

The following questions are answered within the text:

• How can you eliminate debt and avoid consumer traps?
• What methods lower daily housing and utility costs?
• How do you maintain vehicles and equipment yourself?
• Where do you find affordable land and shelter?

1. Maintaining Dignity and Avoiding Debt

Losing wealth often results in social isolation from former peers. You can maintain your dignity by shifting your social circle and avoiding bitterness. Friends from country clubs or professional circles often become distant. Neighbors or in-laws may become critical. The hurt lessens over time if you disconnect from the old environment. Find new acquaintances who accept you as you are.

You must preserve your self-respect during financial hardship, avoid all debt, and resist the consumer mentality to secure your future.

Relying on government welfare programs can trap you in perpetual dependency. Bureaucratic procedures consume your time and break your spirit. Some guidelines induce you to move into high-crime areas or force family separation. Two young men with poor job prospects were induced by an FHA-guaranteed loan to buy a $60,000 house in a declining high-crime area. They used a $2,000 down payment borrowed from their parents and faced $1,500 a year in taxes.

Citing A. Hollingshead's study of Elmstown, the author distinguishes between the upper-lower class and the lower-lower class. Resorting to crime, heavy drinking, or drug use leads to permanent economic ruin. Many poor people pay $1,500 a year or more on lawyer's fees, fines, and bail bonds.

Avoid all debt to achieve financial stability and freedom from banks. Borrowing money steals from your future to fund present consumption. A credit-card debt of $3,000 at 18 percent interest wastes $540 every year. Charles Bristol, a retired Wyoming bank vice president, explained that bankers survive by lending money you do not need. If you really needed it, the loan would be too risky.

You can stop impulse buying by evaluating purchases against a rigorous mental checklist. This stops you from accumulating expensive clutter and wasting money on non-income producing depreciating assets.

To maintain your stability, follow these practices:

• Live within a tight budget.
• Don’t lower your moral standards.
• Keep your religious faith.
• You are never too poor to help others.
• Do not gamble.
• Learn the difference between wants and needs.
• Keep neat and clean.
• You and your family must stick together.
• Avoid all debt.

Practically doubling the lifespan of everyday goods cuts your expenses in half. Careless people replace a car after 3 years or 50,000 miles. Successful people keep cars running for 6 or 7 years and 100,000 miles or more. Clean and maintain your belongings so they last.

2. Crafting an Extreme Low-Cost Routine

You can radically cut annual living expenses down to a fraction of normal costs by restructuring your daily habits, housing, and budget.

Edward H. Romney models his own philosophy by waking at sunrise and wearing thrift or mail-order work clothes. You can shave with 3 cents each for flea-market razor blades and use a $15 Kmart room fan used to make an attic fan. For work and travel, you carry a $5 briefcase bought at a yard sale and listen to a $35 Marantz stereo bought at the Kiwanis flea market while paying $21 a month for Internet fees.

Implementing a series of dramatic lifestyle cuts across transportation, housing, entertainment, and habits can save a couple up to $37,500 a year:

• Cut out smoking to save $1,500.
• Sell medium-priced car and replace with a 10-year-old car to save $4,000.
• Drop all country clubs, gyms, and professional societies to save $1,000.
• Stop going to fancy restaurants to save $2,000.
• Stop all credit cards and charge accounts to save $500.
• Stop all newspapers and magazines to save $500.
• Stop buying beer or liquor and limit coffee to save $500.
• Stop commercial haircuts and grooming to save $1,500.
• Stop paying for movies, stage shows, or athletic events to save $1,000.
• Cut out the phone and use a used citizens band radio to save $1,000.
• Stop hired yard work and snow shoveling to save $1,000.
• Buy all clothes used from flea markets or thrift shops to save $4,000.
• Sell $250,000 house and rent at $300 a month to save $15,000.
• Cut out luxury foods and raise a garden to save $1,000.
• Cut out electric power, water, gas, and oil by heating with wood to save $1,000.
• Camp in state parks instead of resorts to save $2,000.

A two-person household can live comfortably and well on $12,000 a year by carefully budgeting essentials such as food, low-cost rent, and modest utility and transportation costs.

Achieving this low budget requires a $3,500 annual food budget and $3,600 annual rent in a smaller city or town. You also allocate $1,200 annual utilities budget and $500 annual used clothing budget alongside a $1,200 annual transportation budget. This leaves $2,000 remaining for personal items, gifts, donations, and medical care.

3. Alternative Housing and Primitive Survival

You can find free or ultra-cheap shelter through estate caretaking, summer rentals, and rural squatting while mastering classic woodcraft skills.

Owners of large summer estates often leave their properties vacant for most of the year. Caretaking duties such as mowing the lawn, cleaning, and doing small repairs take very little time and provide free rent.

The author's cousin, Wilder Tenney, lived for free as a caretaker for a millionaire's summer estate near Deering, New Hampshire, a giant 1600s farmhouse. He saved enough to start a mink farming business and later bought a local telephone company.

You can secure similar positions through active outreach:

• Place want ads in local weekly newspapers and shoppers or upscale regional magazines with classified ad sections.
• Be ready to move and produce good references.
• Ask around locally and write owners of vacation homes directly to offer services.

You can also capitalize on high seasonal demand in resort areas by renting out your primary residence. Dad's friend Wayne Tuttle built a home on a lake in New Hampshire, living in it 10 months of the year and renting it for about $1,000 a week in July and August while living in a woods camp.

Working as a companion to a sick person provides free room and board. A 75-year-old woman who faced forced retirement from an insurance job enrolled in LPN training and continues to happily work as a nursing companion.

If you choose to live primitively in national forests, you must master long-term independent survival. Vietnam veterans lived in a camouflaged house built on tree roots deep within a gulf state swamp, receiving provisions via a flat-bottom boat with tunnel propellers.

Strict concealment strategies prevent detection on public lands:

• Use streambeds as trails for a distance before cutting off cross-country to prevent burning a single visible path.
• Climb about 200 feet above a road on high ground or hillsides to make camp.
• Use war-surplus olive drab pup tents or jungle hammocks instead of bright civilian camping gear.
• Enter hideouts after dusk and leave just before daybreak without using flashlights.

4. Profitable Businesses and Millionaire Economics

You can build high-profit micro-businesses using low-overhead manual trades and high-volume inventory rollovers rather than speculative asset holding.

Avoid starting hobby or luxury-related businesses during hard times because people restrict spending strictly to necessities. Romney's father tried to become a photographer after losing his job in the Great Depression, but poor people had no money for pictures, resulting in a dismal experience.

House painting and home improvements offer high profitability with minimal overhead when properly organized and scaled. Romney's friend Bill Kallio makes at least $100 an hour by using rented high-pressure washers and airless paint-spraying machines to paint houses exclusively in gloss white.

You can organize this trade using specific steps:

• Dress well and carry a clipboard when calling on prospective customers.
• Rent a high-pressure washer to spray the house and remove flaked paint.
• Rent a Sherwin Williams airless liquid paint-spraying machine.
• Buy high-gloss white paint and refuse to paint houses any other color.
• Refuse to paint window frames or mullions, or hire someone else to do them.
• Mask windows down to the glass on the outside.

Welding provides income surpassing many college degrees because low social status deters competition, while poor operators are legally insulated from liability. You can establish this trade following exact operational practices:

• Take a short course at a community college or technical institute.
• Mount an electrical and a gas welding outfit on the back of an old truck.
• Travel around welding broken farm implements, autos, trucks, and factory machinery.

Buying entire household estates quickly after a death allows dealers to acquire valuable antiques cheaply, discard junk, and profit through specialist resale. A dealer buys an entire house's contents for a small sum like $1,000, sorts the load, keeps valuables in a garage or mini-warehouse, and sells specialized items to different collectors.

You can succeed in this market by executing standard procedures:

• Contact owners of all mini-warehouses, lawyers, undertakers, and bank-trust officials.
• Learn values from antiques price guides sold at newsstands and flea markets.
• Buy the entire contents of a house for a lump sum before heirs strip it.
• Sort the load, discard absolute junk in a dumpster, and store remaining items.
• Sell valuable items via the Internet, trade publications, or to specialist dealers.
• Check pockets and linings of old clothing, mattresses, and attic insulation for hidden valuables.

True wealth is built through rapid stock turnover and high volume rather than holding speculative appreciating assets for decades.

A man who bought a commemorative Winchester rifle for $500 ten years ago thinking he made a killing actually underperformed a business rolling over inventory annually at a 50 percent profit, which would turn $500 into $28,000. Holding collectibles, rare items, or luxury cars for long periods while ignoring inflation and opportunity cost is termed redneck economics.

A specialized mail-order and publishing business can be operated out of a residential garage with minimal overhead by leveraging targeted display ads and desktop publishing tools. Edward Romney wrote a 24-page camera repair pamphlet, expanded it into a book, used targeted display ads in photography magazines, and later transitioned to a Macintosh computer and Canon copier before moving entirely to a website.

You can launch this operation through concrete actions:

• Identify a niche informational product or specialized book to sell.
• Design hard-fighting display ads and typeset them on a personal computer.
• Run ads in specialized national hobby or trade magazines.
• Produce book copies using a laser printer and a high-speed office copier.
• Transition sales operations to an Internet website to eliminate print advertising costs.

Industrial recycling businesses like repairing wood pallets can be started with minimal capital from a truck and grown organically into a million-dollar enterprise. Romney's son Edward bought a pallet recycling business for $2,000, replaced his old truck with a U-Haul van, hired workers, and built Ed's Pallet World into a $1.5 million gross enterprise with a steel factory and semi-trailers.

You can build this factory enterprise using direct methods:

• Source discarded wooden pallets for free.
• Knock out old nails and reassemble pallets using new pieces of wood.
• Transport and sell repaired pallets using an old truck or van.
• Reinvest earnings to acquire automatic machinery and larger transport trucks.

Older, inexpensive computers provide fully adequate capability for remote work, digital publishing, and internet business without requiring frequent costly upgrades. Edward Romney used a Mac IIsi for five years before replacing it with a Power Macintosh in 1995, which he continued using into 2001 to compose manuscripts and operate his website.

You can equip a low-cost office with specific choices:

• Buy working older computers or surplus units cheaply on the market.
• Upgrade older computers with larger hard drives and more RAM memory from specialty internet surplus firms.
• Use free e-mail services and free web hosting platforms to minimize operating costs.

5. Relocation and Ultra-Cheap Land Strategies

If you live in high-cost areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, the D.C. area, Connecticut, Westchester, northern New Jersey, and Long Island, ordinary houses are $350,000 to $750,000 or more. In low-cost places you can buy a house or doublewide for between $40,000 and $75,000.

You can fund a debt-free transition by selling high-cost real estate and relocating to low-expense regions or buying tax-default land.

Relocation should be carefully researched and motivated by specific life changes. You can sell your home and buy a low-cost house or doublewide elsewhere, then invest the difference.

Aroostook and Washington counties in northern Maine feature declining populations, severe winters, and very low crime. Real estate is inexpensive, but finding local employment is nearly impossible.

• Have an explanation for why you are relocating so local people will accept you.
• Never criticize locals or call them quaint.
• Never gossip among locals since you may be badmouthing a relative.
• Join local clubs which are easy to enter if you seem sincere.

The Rust Belt provides low-cost small cities and rural areas where self-employed individuals can thrive. Many workers exhibit a labor-union mentality and hostility toward management, which creates openings for competent self-employed workers. Volkswagen tried to locate a factory in Pittsburgh but was driven out by workers hostile to management.

The rural South offers exceptionally low living expenses due to mild winters and inexpensive construction.

• Plant crops successively on the same plot of land from April through November.

The Southwest desert features vast expanses of low-cost land where you can live affordably using alternative housing. A bookstore owner in San Diego who was robbed and beaten moved his entire stock-in-trade to Truth or Consequences in three U-Haul trucks.

• Make friends with local people to become desert-smart to avoid survival risks.
• Use four-wheel drive if driving on rangeland, dry streambeds, or off-road.

Acquiring ultra-cheap land requires targeting government tax-default auctions or abandoned properties. Edward Preston reported in his book How to Buy Land Cheap that one reader bought eight building lots in Montana for a total of $25 and another bought a fix-up home for $750.

6. Frugal Food, Wardrobe, and Shelter

You can drastically reduce your spending on nutrition, clothing, and housing by adopting traditional staples, secondhand goods, and DIY building methods.

Eating traditional low-cost Southern soul food provides a remarkably healthy and inexpensive alternative to modern high-fat diets. You can return to a diet of dried pinto beans, corn bread, collard greens, onions, molasses, and watermelon. Dried beans cost 45 cents a pound and swell up significantly while offering complete proteins. Woodsmen doing hard winter work consumed 3,500 to 4,500 calories daily.

You achieve substantial grocery savings by buying cheap bulk staples and avoiding convenience items:

• Soak dried beans overnight, changing the water twice.
• Boil soaked beans for about three hours or half an hour in a pressure cooker.
• Add a teaspoon of baking soda while boiling.
• Season with salt, pepper, spices, and a piece of pork to suit.
• Buy food in quantity at discount markets like Sam's Wholesale Club.
• Purchase older bread from Dead Bread Stores and avoid advertised name brands.
• Raise food through a garden, fruit trees, or keeping small livestock.
• Forage for wild greens such as dandelions and check back doors of restaurants or Dumpsters for free food.

Raw, unprocessed bulk foods offer the lowest cost per pound, whereas heavily packaged items carry massive markups. Potatoes cost $0.30 per pound, flour is $0.32 per pound, navy or pinto beans cost $0.43 per pound, and chicken costs $1.20 per pound. Cheerio cereal costs $4.08 a pound, while cooked oatmeal is about 68 cents a pound and Underwood deviled ham reaches $5.30 a pound.

Purchasing clothing secondhand from charity stores and yard sales drastically reduces annual clothing expenses. You can target a $600 a year clothing budget for a couple by shopping at the Salvation Army, St. Vincent DePaul, Morgan Memorial, Goodwill stores, flea markets, and yard sales.

The author's wife bought a 100 percent camel's hair coat for under $10 and a denim dress for 98 cents at a DAV thrift shop. Used men's suits cost $10 in thrift shops and leather coats cost $35.

• Shop at Salvation Army, St. Vincent DePaul, Morgan Memorial, Goodwill stores, flea markets, and yard sales.
• Invest in classic clothing styles that will not go out of fashion.
• Buy underwear, socks, and durable work clothes new.
• Cut soles from the tread of a well-worn tire using a sharp knife or saw.
• Glue new soles onto shoes using heavy contact cement and clamp them or drive a car wheel over them to set.
• Combine damaged pantyhose by cutting off the bad leg of one pair and wearing them on top of each other.
• Wear an inner layer of long underwear combining cotton inside and wool outside.
• Use traditional heavy wool flannel plaid shirts for outdoor cold weather wear.
• Insert layers of newspaper inside trousers and between coats and shirts if completely broke.

Basic two-bedroom apartments in lower-cost regions offer affordable shelter without the financial risks of homeownership. A basic two-bedroom apartment costs $350 a month, whereas fashionable apartments cost $1,200 a month or more. An 80-year-old woman lived in a garden apartment for over 20 years, enjoyed the pool, and left $2 million to her favorite college upon her death.

Small one-story ranch houses or bungalows under 1,000 square feet provide the best real estate value and investment security. Great quantities of good small houses sell for $45,000 or less in low-cost areas. Edward H. Romney was offered a livable Pennsylvania house for $8,000 in 1989, and a 3,000-square-foot brick Victorian home sold for $62,000 in 1996 in a rural location.

Building a small house piece by piece using secondhand materials and sweat equity drastically reduces costs and avoids debt. Contractors charge $75 to $100 an hour, but you can build a basic 768-square-foot house measuring 24 by 32 feet for less than $10,000 in materials.

Working men known as Cellar Dwellers built their houses from scratch over years of weekends during the Depression and WWII while working full-time factory jobs.

• Use 2x8-inch studs further apart for better insulation in northern climates.
• Look for used building materials in Dumpsters, construction sites, and used building material stores.
• Store excess items in cheap unheated temporary buildings or old truck bodies instead of paying for indoor closet space.
• Raise the body of any wood house a foot or more off the earth on cement or stone pillars.
• Nail screen wire over the outside of window frames and reinforce with heavy fence mesh to prevent vandalism.
• Put sheet tin on the floor under a sheet-metal wood stove and fill the bottom with sand.

7. Off-Grid Utilities, Transport, and Vehicles

You can eliminate recurring utility and vehicle financing bills through solar power, 12-volt systems, fully depreciated cars, and self-maintenance.

You can build a highly effective, low-cost solar-heated shower and water heater using basic lumber, plywood, and a double layer of plastic with an air gap. The system relies on radiant solar heat passing through two transparent plastic layers with a hollow air gap that traps heat like a storm window. It works best with about an inch of water in a waterproofed wooden box painted or insulated outside. The water frame is cantilevered on four poles, and the system can be filled via hose, pails, or rainwater.

• Select a sunny location free from shadows from trees or buildings.
• Place four strong poles into the ground in a four-foot square using a post-hole digger.
• Build a 4x8-foot frame of 2x6-inch timbers or flattened logs about 7 feet up.
• Floor the structure with boards or exterior plywood and build a 2x3-inch timber box sides.
• Waterproof the box like a boat or line it with plastic sheeting.
• Create a cover using two sheets of Mylar or Lexan plastic with a 2- to 3-inch hollow air gap, tied down securely.
• Install a central pipe leading to a faucet and showerhead, along with a hole for filling and overflow.

Warren Taylor’s son answered an ad in a New Hampshire shopping publication for a 1972 Ford LTD wagon listed as suitable for parts for just $25. He started it up easily, drove it home under its own power, and found it to be a very fine car.

• Buy a fully depreciated 10-year-old car or an antique vehicle instead of financing a new one.
• Drop fire, theft, and collision insurance completely on low-cost older vehicles and keep only minimum liability.
• Inform your insurance company if you no longer commute to work to qualify for reduced rates.

8. Entertainment, Investments, and Health Care

You can enjoy low-cost leisure and protect your savings from economic panics using vintage electronics, disciplined stock strategies, and generic health remedies.

By purchasing old console stereos or car stereos and pairing them with 12-volt power supplies, Walkmans, or cassette players, you can play modern media without buying expensive retail equipment. The author owns a high-grade 1960s Marantz stereo bought for $35 at a flea market and listens to shortwave on a 10-year-old Sony set.

• Buy an old Magnavox or RCA console stereo in a wooden cabinet in a thrift shop for about $30.
• Mount a new or used CD Walkman inside the record storage bin and run cables to accessory inputs.
• Power the Walkman with a small 12-volt power supply.
• Add Radio Shack super tweeters if treble sounds weak.
• Mount an accessory tape player removed from a junk car inside the cabinet to play cassettes.

Open-ended mutual funds carry severe systemic risks during economic panics because they are forced to liquidate sound assets at rock-bottom prices when shareholders demand redemptions. All open-ended mutual funds perished in the Great Depression. Starting with about $60,000 in 1966, a millionaire investor built a portfolio by buying undervalued blue chips like General Motors, Telmex, and the Baby Bells during crises, vastly outperforming the Dow Jones average.

• Watch the stock of your bank in the financial pages.
• If the bank stock drops significantly, withdraw all your money immediately.
• Avoid open-ended mutual funds advertised to the public.
• Opt instead for closed-end funds that trade on stock exchanges like regular stocks and cannot be forced to liquidate assets by redeeming shareholders.
• Buy investment-grade stocks paying good dividends.
• Remain flexible and buy in the face of bad news when fundamentals are good and media advisers say not to.
• Resolve never to take a loss and sell immediately if you made a mistake.
• Stay out of U.S. markets for long periods if conditions warrant.
• Pay all your taxes.

Significant savings on health care and personal maintenance can be achieved by utilizing generic alternatives, home remedies, and preventative care. Generic vitamins are of equal quality to name brands like One-A-Day, and generic aspirin combined with soda mimics products like Alka-Seltzer.

• Use generic vitamins sold by mail-order firms instead of name brands.
• Combine generic aspirin with a teaspoon of water and soda as an alternative to Alka-Seltzer.
• Use prune juice as a laxative and Epsom salts as both a laxative and foot soak.
• Apply cold water immediately to treat burns.
• Cut down on salt and sugar and drink many glasses of water daily.
• Use drug-store reading glasses if you have standard middle-aged farsighted vision with no astigmatism.

9. Mechanical Mastery and Repair Economics

You can eliminate repair bills by fabricating your own parts, using structural epoxies, and maintaining total emotional calm during mechanical work.

Taking complex items like cars down to the bare frame rarely improves reliability and often makes reassembly less precise. On antique auto tours, expensively restored cars costing $25,000 frequently broke down, whereas simple low-cost mechanical restorations performed much better. You should evaluate older equipment based on functional performance rather than standard depreciation, calculating whether fixing an older vehicle for 20,000 miles is cheaper than replacing it.

Repairing mechanical items requires complete emotional calmness because getting frustrated leads to poor workmanship. You can equip your workspace with a small Unimat lathe to machine custom pins, shafts, keyways, and bearings instead of buying unavailable replacement parts. Industrial epoxies made by the Devcon company can permanently repair cracked engine blocks, torn gas tanks, and worn components. A Vermont engineer repaired a frozen, cracked Mercedes water jacket using screen wire and epoxy mixed with iron filings for $150 total car cost. Another epoxy repair on a Plymouth head stud held up under a 60 foot-pound torque load for over 80,000 miles.

Modern chemical solvents allow you to clean complex assemblies in place without complete disassembly. You can use Gumout or Liquid Wrench to clear up sticky valves and rusty bolts. You can also cannibalize parts from ruined equipment to restore functional units. The author regularly purchased professional Speed Graphic cameras with ruined lenses for $25 and combined them with lenses salvaged from broken Kodak cameras for $5 to resell them profitably for $200 or more.

• Make the parts; do not buy them.
• Repair parts with machine-shop work and epoxy.
• Flush-clean assemblies with good, modern chemical solvents instead of taking them apart and often lubricate with sprays or dips, too.
• Cannibalize and use junk parts.
• Analyze a device with a systems approach; do not be a slave to manuals and parts lists and do not let the so-called experts intimidate you and make you give up.

10 Key Ideas

1. You must preserve your self-respect during financial hardship, avoid all debt, and resist the consumer mentality to secure your future.
2. You can radically cut annual living expenses down to a fraction of normal costs by restructuring your daily habits, housing, and budget.
3. You can find free or ultra-cheap shelter through estate caretaking, summer rentals, and rural squatting while mastering classic woodcraft skills.
4. You can build high-profit micro-businesses using low-overhead manual trades and high-volume inventory rollovers rather than speculative asset holding.
5. You can fund a debt-free transition by selling high-cost real estate and relocating to low-expense regions or buying tax-default land.
6. You can drastically reduce your spending on nutrition, clothing, and housing by adopting traditional staples, secondhand goods, and DIY building methods.
7. You can eliminate recurring utility and vehicle financing bills through solar power, 12-volt systems, fully depreciated cars, and self-maintenance.
8. You can enjoy low-cost leisure and protect your savings from economic panics using vintage electronics, disciplined stock strategies, and generic health remedies.
9. You can eliminate repair bills by fabricating your own parts, using structural epoxies, and maintaining total emotional calm during mechanical work.
10. You can achieve financial stability and personal freedom by eliminating all debt, cutting living expenses dramatically, and mastering low-cost resourcefulness and repairs.