Early Retirement Extreme Forums

This is a great thread. Unlike most of you I came here from a different background. The details are in my journal, suffice it to say I was the antithesis of ERE or maybe it was a different ERE,Extremely Rediculous Expenses. I like to pride myself (or feel sorry) that I was the guy Jacob wrote the book for in the first place. You know the one, the guy chained in the cave watching the shadows on the wall thinking that was life.
Jacob gave me the tools to go about changing my thinking and thus my behavior. The emotional trauma of having my life fall apart a few years ago was impetus that it was time for change. Jacobs message gave me the philosophy of life that I needed to make it work and that is what is most appealing, the philosophy of life. I flirted with ERE in the beginning and then FI (still the main focus), but now those things are just side effects from living differently. The forums have offered an amazing support system and way of bouncing ideas off of people. The accountability helps to. As others have said, there really is a great group of articulate and thoughtful people here.
Ok, FFJeff said brag so here it is, one year ago this month I still had over 40k in debt and even with a bit of savings had a networth of (-)13400. Right now I have no debt and at the end of this month will have just under a 90000 networth. That's progress boys and girl and I plan on doing even better this year as I become a better practitioner of this philosophy of life.

I have to agree with akratic master. Seeing the math laid it out as being totally possible. Before that I always knew I had a problem with the 'work 40 years then retire' plan, but I didn't know what to do about it.
Also I had trouble explaining what I was after to others. Anytime I would say I wanted to just not have to work they would automatically interpret that as me saying I wanted to be mega rich. I would try to tell them I just needed like 1 to 1.5K a month but the idea of early financial independence never got through. Everybody just treats you like either a dreamer who thinks they are going to win the lottery, or a bum who just doesn't want to work.
Finding out there are (a lot of) other people with the same goal helps a lot.

FFJeff-- yes, 90,000. When I see where I have come in such a short amount of time I'm nothing short of amazed. The higher income has cetainly helped, but it's not the only thing. My first year of working overseas I had the higher pay, but just increased my spending to match it. This past year I made the changes I so desperately needed to make. The exact number will be just shy of 90K. At the end of the month I will have the exact numbers and hopefully will get the graph to format in my journal.

"five years and I'm out"