He retired in late 2005, with six hundred thousand dollars in investments, and a paid-off house worth two hundred thousand. He figured he could rely, conservatively, on a return of four per cent per year. He had determined that the family could live on twenty-four thousand a year in expenses. So he needed twenty-five times that amount.
There was a bump along the way—his so-called Big Mistake, more costly than a cheap Rubik’s Cube. In 2004, he started a real-estate venture with a work friend. They built two spec houses in a New Urbanist development on the edge of Longmont, called Prospect New Town. With smaller streets and lots, it was a rebuke to car-dependent sprawl. The first house sold in 2006, for the asking price. The second, completed in 2007, got marooned in the housing-bubble collapse. A bruising fight with his partner ensued. In the end, the ordeal cost Adeney several hundred thousand dollars and untold hours of sleep. He finally closed on the sale of the second house last summer.
Retirement, in his hands, is a slippery term. It doesn’t mean playing golf or sitting on the porch. It is merely the freedom to do what he wants when he wants. He likes some kinds of work, when they aren’t jobs—carpentry, home improvement, the blog—but he disdains the idea of spending another minute of his life in a cubicle, in order to afford a dryer, or a Tesla. Some people have questioned his definition of retirement and argue that his premise is flawed, in light of how rich he got to begin with, relative to most Americans. Others cite the rental income he and Simi earned for many years from their first house, after they’d moved into another, or even the money he earns from the blog. He has now accumulated enough in additional savings to spend much more than twenty-four thousand dollars a year. But the point, for him, is to live lean and free.
In the days I spent with him, we went for a few hikes, visited a puzzle factory, ran errands, had meals, hung around the house. “I operate like a stoner, because I kind of am one,” he told me. One evening, he walked down to the marijuana dispensary. “It’s a retirement drug,” he said. He calls his vaporizer pen “my health stick.” He said that thirty dollars of sativa oil lasts him half a year. It was time for a reload.
In some ways, his gig is just being Mr. Money Mustache. “I wouldn’t even mind having a job someday,” he said. “I could be director of Mustachianism at Google.” For now, his ambition is to be “a proper life-style guru.”
Why “Mr. Money Mustache”? He delights in giving nonsense answers. “I used to have a nice roster of origin stories,” he said. In one, he was having trouble sleeping, on a hot, sweaty night, so he got out of bed and ran to the top of a nearby mountain, where, during a thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning left a mustache logo on a chunk of granite.
Really, it’s the result of “stoned musings.” He said, “‘Stache’ rhymes with ‘cash’—you stash your cash. Mustaches are for bankers and gunslingers and Magnum, P.I.” Adeney had a modest handlebar when I visited. “It’s Movember,” he said. He recalled a math teacher from eleventh grade, named Mr. Vail: “You could see his mustache from behind, when he was at the blackboard.”
He needed to create a persona that conveyed extreme confidence. “Nobody listens to me in real life, but on the Internet everyone does,” he said. “People need to be told to get to work on things. They need a boss so they stop making excuses.”
David Adeney compared his son’s persona to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard, an aphoristic embodiment of humor, sense, self-reliance, and thrift. “It’s moral instruction with a light touch,” the elder Adeney said. Other antecedents abound. There is Aesop, and Stoicism, which Adeney recently discovered in a book of pop philosophy. (Adeney boiled Epictetus down to: Learn to want what you already have.) There’s Thoreau and Keynes (who advocated a fifteen-hour workweek), and Joe Dominguez, a co-author of the 1992 best-seller “Your Money or Your Life,” whom Adeney calls “the original early retiree.”
“What should I tell the Andersons—twenty minutes?” Link copied
In the grand scheme, Adeney’s idea of deprivation is secular and mild. “I’m pro-gentrification,” he told me. “If people say the world isn’t getting better, they haven’t looked at the beer aisle recently.” He’s no modern desert hermit, like Suelo, the so-called Man Who Quit Money, who has forsaken society to live in a Utah cave, or latter-day Mother Ann Lee. Not for him the abandonment of family, property, and sex. Nor is he into the extreme home craft of The Tightwad Gazette, the newsletter from the nineties, which recommended that readers make their kids’ Halloween masks out of dryer lint. (For one, he’d need a dryer.)
“I’ve been mischaracterized as a cheapskate,” he says, or “cheap as f*ck,” as another life-style-guru blogger, A. J. Kessler, charged. Kessler snickered at Mr. M.M. for rotating his bike tires and stocking up on rolled oats. He also wrote a blog post entitled “Being Frugal Makes You a Loser.” Provoked by the L-word, Adeney posted a Trump-ish response in Kessler’s comment section: “You forgot to mention my $400,000 paid-off house and my 3 months of annual travel. Or my two cars, fleet of six nice bicycles, or the fact that I give a few tens of thousands of dollars of my time and money to charity and helping people out each year. But yeah, you are correct that I do like rolled oats.”
“It’s supposed to be a bit of a cult,” Adeney told me. “The rest of society oppresses us. We have our own symbols. The bicycle, the hatchback.”
About ten years ago, Adeney started writing out his thoughts in Word documents. He sent them to his father, who encouraged him to keep going. He launched the blog in April, 2011. Under a photo of himself, taken from below, so that his forearms looked huge, he declared, “WAKE UP DRONE PEOPLE.”
“I’d never heard of personal finance,” he said. “I didn’t even know there was a category. ” At one point, after Adeney’s blog had a substantial following, he Googled “early retirement frugality” and came across a Danish nuclear astrophysicist named Jacob Lund Fisker, who lived in an R.V., on seven thousand dollars a year. Fisker is the author of a book, and a blog, called “Early Retirement Extreme.” “It’s super-analytical,” Adeney said. “I read his whole blog and offered him a guest post. It gave his site a giant boost.”
Adeney had errands to do. We set out on foot, crossing the street to stay in the sun: free heat. A storm the previous night had left a few inches of snow, and the streets dripped and gleamed with snowmelt. First stop, on the other side of town, was Wibby Brewing, a new craft brewery and pub, in an outbuilding of a decommissioned Butterball turkey plant. He had a plan to host a Mustachian meet-up there, a few nights hence. (He’d recently returned from an annual weeklong meet-up in the Ecuadorean Andes.) He had hired a local band he liked, the Interstate Stash Express—the pun was a happy coincidence. He needed to talk band-and-beer logistics with one of Wibby’s owners, who was from Chicago, and who, it emerged, subscribed to many Mustachian principles, even though he’d never heard of Mr. Money Mustache. Adeney had a late-morning lager.
Afterward, we walked north along a broad avenue to a two-story clapboard house he was rehabbing with some friends, in a gentrifying neighborhood on the east side of town, fronting unfenced train tracks. Freight trains groaned by, night and day. The truck for the job, parked out front, was a friend’s 1984 Nissan pickup, which Adeney had often used and made the subject of several blog posts. “I’m specializing in the plumbing and electric stuff,” Adeney said, as he walked through the gutted house. “Mainly, I like doing whatever the other people are finding difficult.”
The owner, a friend named Luc, used to live next door to Adeney and had encouraged him to go full Mustache. “He helped me move out of my caution shell,” Adeney said. Luc was technically an entomologist, but his latest idea was a venture called Nature’s Caskets: coffins made out of reclaimed wood from forests devastated by the mountain-pine beetle. “He’s a guy who likes getting filthy and working hard,” Adeney said. “I’m more a whiny, nerdy everything-is-terrible-I-can’t-sleep person. I spent a lot of my life building up the protective structures to keep me from worrying.” Still, he’s Panglossian, by East Coast standards. When I made a sour remark about being in one’s forties, he replied, “You may need to tune up the Optimism Gun.”
Back home that afternoon, he and Simi made coffee with steamed milk and put out bars of fancy chocolate and nuts that had come from bulk bins at Costco. The sun poured in. “How could it be more luxurious?” Adeney said. A monitor by the sink indicated that the house was burning three hundred watts, or about three cents an hour. “It’s still a lot,” Adeney said. He blamed it on the refrigerator. He hadn’t been able to devise a work-around for that.
Adeney has the behavioral-economics view that we should set our policies to encourage sensible behavior—the obvious example being a carbon tax. “It’s libertarian paternalism, or maybe it’s paternalistic libertarianism,” he said. “I am trying to improve the commons.” On his blog, he dispenses deep thoughts, product recommendations (credit cards, brokerages, laser printers), and D.I.Y. work-arounds (“How to Carry Major Appliances on Your Bike”—“It is absolutely ridiculous to buy even your first bottle of wine or restaurant meal if you do not yet have a good bicycle and a bike trailer”).
Being an enginerd, he runs the numbers. Once, after his bike was apparently stolen (it turned out he’d left it at a friend’s), he ruminated on the wisdom of locking one’s bike:
This was the first theft in many, many years of very carefree living. The Craigslist replacement value of that bike was probably about $500. What value do I place on a decade of the fearless freedom of leaving sh*t happily unlocked and not worrying about it? How about the value of my time saved in not spending my life fumbling with an enormous keychain? 90 seconds a day for ten years is 91 hours, or at least $4500 of my time at $50 an hour. I was still coming out way ahead.
