I am inspired by the ERE journals here, all of them but particularly in awe of those who are still in their 20s and 30s and so disciplined about all this. Please keep at it the payoff will be fantastic. Please keep writing as I love to read all this. I have a 16 yo (still at school and planning to go to university in a couple of years) and am teaching him the tenets of ERE. I've loaning Jacob's book or passing along links to the blog to all those I know who would benefit. Yes, you guys have turned me into an ERE bore. Thank you.
Some context for my own story. I suppose one of the important advantages I have is that I never been in debt. In part because I am a worrier. So I want all the debt sorted asap (paid off mortgage early ... saving for the next car now (due for replacement in five years) ... went to university at a time when there were still grants and on top of this obtained an employer guarantee of employment in the holidays and a bursary besides ... extra contributions to pension for past 20 years). Unfortunately this does not mean that I have used money effectively. I have accumulated many missed credit card charges, overdue library fines, book club purchases that I forgot to cancel and was too busy to return. I have also bought loads of things that seemed a good idea at the time but I did not end up using much/at all. All because we were too busy or distracted to pay attention to what we were doing. You need time and some sort of incentive to be frugal. We have just wallowed around for decades now in a relatively wasteful state. Not a great thought.
On the plus side I quite like frugal living (the challenge, the creativity, the ethos) and have some experience there from the early days of living alone and our marriage. For example when DH was a student and I was working in the charitable sector (job satisfaction great, pay rather less so) we took in lodgers, this was considered well weird by work colleagues (mutterings about privacy and sanctity of home life). I saved money when I was a student and was the only one I knew who did this. Having a bursary helped but I made clothes or bought from jumble sales and charity shops and my bean stew was legendary
DH was frugal and taught himself to sew before I knew him (this was a big draw - the only guy I knew who would not be asking me to mend or customise his clothes). It is easy to fall out of the habits of economy when you have no plan and no 'need' to be frugal. So although when we paid off the mortgage in 2005 we thought it might be a good idea to buy a property to rent out we were too busy to pursue this and we just wasted that money on little things to ease life (two cars, more holidays, even more stuff). I would say that we were wasting money on simply not thinking very hard about what it was being spent on. It did not feel like a priority as we were already saving more towards pension and in better financial position than most people we knew. We drifted. There was probably a sense that we were 'entitled' to waste money as we'd worked hard for it. Often - for me anyhow - too hard and too long to get much time for pleasures other than spending online at the stores that never close.
When DH was made redundant in 2011 at 55 we had several months advance notice so I started acting like our income had plummented by 40% before this actually happened. I cancelled plans for a trip to visit neice in Japan in 2012 only to find that I had managed to save enough to cover this well before DH's job disappeared. So we went and had a great time. We found that the economies that we had expected to need were not necessary to survive. We could survive on one income with small amounts of consultancy on top. Eventually just on one income.
I like metaphors and would say that at this stage we had shut off the obvious waste, so almost eliminated the water pouring in bucketloads from the tap we forgot to shut off. But we were far from conserving water or thinking about ways to reduce the number of times that we opened up the tap. Not exactly frugal then, but a lot less wasteful.
In the past two years a happier DH has been living at his own pace and with time to do things he's put off for years as well as starting up new interests. I on the other hand have been working more manically and unhappily and unhealthily (putting on weight, teeth grinding and general stress). We've explored various options for me to work part-time (I am not sure I could work part-time in current job even if paid part-time so probably best that this plan did not work out). What has eventually (unexpectedly) happened is that I am able to take my pension in 2014 instead of waiting to past 2023. By 2023 that pension would be worth a lot more, but I don't reckon we need a lot more and I don't see more money as making me happier than more time would.
The pension I will be drawing in a few months time is equivalent to 49% of my current take home pay. It will be the only guaranteed income but I expect - by being a lot more frugal - we three can live on this alone. I know that my son is worried about how far this economising might go but as we also have sufficient savings to buy some rental property that is an extra buffer. An important one as son will be off to University in a couple of years and two households will cost more than one. We also don't intend that he carries loan debt forward from that so will try and stay clear of student loans. DH and I have sufficent craft skills (and also consulting skills if need be) to make income on top of this and we have a houseload of clutter to sell on eBay. As we have further pensions (state and small work pension for DH) coming on-steam over the next 10 years we will not need to carry on working beyond mid-60s but we hope that by doing at things we love and taking our time over them (no more rushing!) we will be able to live and work comfortably for a couple of decades. Retiring in a 'do nothing/live without effort' sense has no appeal and we will delay that as long as possible. Working at least some of the time in the charitable sector holds appeal once the finances are settled and I've taken on an unpaid large project for 2015 already.
I expect this journal to be one where I share little discoveries about living frugally for the long term while having a much better quality of life. Finding income generating things to do that we really enjoy, without having to make income that more than covers the costs of doing the thing. Hobbies that more than pay for themselves as Jacob would put it. We both find investment very scary so not sure that one is for us. But we finally have time to research that topic so that we can reach an informed (not gut) opinion on that one. Property rennovation/management is something we should be able to do as we've done this on past two houses (we love bringing a wreck of a building back to being somewhere desirable to live). With 4 acres of land growing much of our own food should be very possible. Balanced against that is not having public transport so having car costs. One of those decisions we need to make in the coming years.
I suspect that all my posts will be quite long ones ...
I'll be pretty busy getting the rental projects up and running (project manager), decluttering the house including via eBay sales, tackling my big crafts-based voluntary project and fighting to minimise every cost. 
