Ask HN: How have you achieved financial independence?
I&#x27;m only responding because nobody else has replied to your thread.  Feel free to ignore me if you think it is irrelevant.<p>My favourite Dr. Who quote: &quot;Work for?  I don&#x27;t work for anyone.  I&#x27;m just having fun.&quot;<p>Describes me, even though I receive money every month.  My expenditures are considerably less than the money I receive every month by having fun.  If I didn&#x27;t receive money, then I would be in trouble, so I don&#x27;t really qualify for your question, but I&#x27;m having fun so I&#x27;ll answer anyway.<p>Step #1.  Reduce my expenditures below what most people consider reasonable.  I lived for more than 5 years on less than $10K a year.  It was much easier than I thought.  I discovered that spending more than this amount of money, I was no happier.  Who knew?  What really counted was having so much more income than outgo that money became completely irrelevant to me.<p>After I did that, I stopped worrying about working.  There isn&#x27;t a job in the 1st world that pays less money than I&#x27;m comfortable with.  I started taking jobs that interested me instead of jobs that paid me money.<p>Then I got married.  <i>That</i> threw a monkey wrench into the works!  But I&#x27;m slowly working thought that ;-)<p>Honestly, people tie themselves to a grindstone to make as much money as possible because they think it will <i>remove</i> stress and give them a nice life.  I don&#x27;t think that works most of the time.