The beauty of ERE to me seems to be it's hedged nature, it's ability to deal with living the best life possible in an eternal growth scenario or it's ability to deal with the implications of peak oil, a very real possibility of low/negative growth future and an end to the highly specialised work and industrialised monetary economy (by way of implementing renaissance man ideals.)
Hypothetically, if your faith in the monetary economy had been rocked, how would you go about prioritising the building of capital in the absence of money, might you place equal importance on some or all? Depending where you are in the ERE-Wheaton scale, I imagine the following may shift around in interesting ways.
Financial Capital
Living Capital
Material Capital
Knowledge Capital
Emotional Capital
Social Capital
Cultural Capital
Time Capital
I'm going to be lazy and not define the above, I assume everyone has a good appreciation of these. Over the last couple of years I noticed a continual shifting of priorities in accumulating these forms of capital. Maybe there's lots going on to influence these changes, ranging from which book I'm reading, to how much I have in the bank, or what my next life milestone is, etc, etc. Having found ERE after reading MMM I went through the typical optimisation of expenses, followed by shifting away from buying solutions to my problems on the market. I now realise that if taxes and mortgage were non-existent*, I could live perfectly well spending essentially nothing at all. In fact, taxes aside, most of my spending now feels like complete and utter luxury. Soap is no longer a need for me, but a 100% luxury, in fact unless I get oil on my hands, I generally prefer to go without.
Naturally, basic FI blogs and forum's prioritise financial capital, but as I become 'wiser' I'm starting to realise that this should perhaps be at the bottom rung of the ladder, and all of the other forms of capital should take priority. Maybe what I'm saying here isn't particularly insightful, and plainly obvious to those already FI (ERE style) but I guess I'm interested in seeing how others react to prioritising capital in the absence of money.
I know I could be FI sooner, if I placed higher importance on being mortgage free, vs. say sooner having a place to learn to grow my own veggies, or a carpentry space in the garage, or forsaking that second bicycle purchase, but to me, accumulating financial capital seems more pointless every day**.
So for me, I would order them like so:
Time > Living > Social=Human > Material=Knowledge > Cultural > Emotional > Financial
= implies similar or equal importance.
** This stems from my recent reading of The Moneyless Manifesto, and inspiration to curb basically all spending that won't land me dead or in prison, damn taxes!
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