​Side A: "Stop worrying about lattes. Focus on the big wins!"

​Side B: "Every single dollar counts! "

​It is amazing how strenuously people debate this sorta thing. Who’s right? The annoying answer is... both.

(Yeah, I know. Boring assed answer.)

​The Big Heavy Hitters

​If you want to dramatically pull in your “freedom date” the biggest wins come from your largest expenses: Housing, food, and vehicles. Seriously, America... we spend a ridiculous amount of money on cars! ( Another post for another day). Make a 20% cut on those and invest it and you can retire many years earlier. No doubt about that. Focus there first.

​Why "Tiny" Savings Actually Matter

​Where I think people miss the point on small expenses is focusing strictly on the dollar amount instead of the percentage.

​Take shampoo.

​I have a brand I like. It’s not even fancy—you can grab it at Walmart. But right next to it sits a generic version that costs less than half as much.

​Can saving five bucks on shampoo change your life? Of course not.

​But it’s 63% cheaper. And that's the important part. It's not the 5 dollars. It's the percentages. It's all about the percentages!

If you can make just one change today, I suggest you decide from here on out to think in terms of percentages rather than dollars.

​Imagine if you could pull off a 63% discount across everything you regularly buy—without depriving yourself, just swapping for the equivalent generic. If you saved 63% on everything you would retire decades earlier.

​Obviously, nobody actually does that. At least, I don't. I'm lazy. Let's say you're more like me in that you're just slightly lazy. (It’s ok to admit and give yourself props for being self aware.)

What if you only found ten purchases like shampoo? You can do that. Trust me — it won't even be difficult . Just ten everyday items—toothpaste, canned tomatoes, laundry detergent, paper towels—where you swapped to a generic and saved 50–60%.

​Doing the "Lazy" Math

​The funny thing about math is that it doesn't care whether your savings came from a car payment or laundry detergent.

​If you swap 10 regular household items to generic brands, you might save roughly $30 to $40 a month. And here's the thing that percentage you saved that month will happen over and over again like a subscription. Except not the evil kind of subscription that’s draining your credit card, Let’s call this the the “Superstar Subscription”. You do the work one time by making this change and it keeps reaping benefits for you year after year.

Invest that difference over a typical 30-year career while your bestie “compound interest” flexes her badass muscles turning that Superstar Subscription into $56,000!

​For the median American household, that’s enough to retire around ten months earlier.

​Ten months, people!

​That’s roughly 200 mornings where your alarm doesn’t drag you out of bed to do work you stopped enjoying years ago. And yes, I hear you. Maybe you absolutely love your job right now and great for you. But there may come a day when you would rather choose NOT to work a specific 10 months span in order to do some of the following:

• ​Ditch your job to travel and help raise your first grandchild

• ​Hiking national parks

• ​Learning a language -- in the country where it is spoken

• ​Building furniture from scratch

• ​Reading on a rainy Tuesday afternoon

• ​Taking a spontaneous road trip just because it’s sunny

​That’s the real trade-off. It’s not Brand Name vs. Generic Shampoo.

​It’s Shampoo vs. 10 Months of Freedom!

​The Real Question

​If you blindfolded me for a taste test (definitely not a taste test—that’s disgusting), I’m not even convinced I could tell the difference between the two shampoos.

​And even if I could... would I care enough to willingly work an extra ten months for it? Not a chance.

​Everybody gets to decide what matters to them. If your expensive shampoo genuinely brings you enough daily joy to be worth trading away ten months of freedom, buy it with zero guilt!

​Just make sure you make that decision consciously. Because almost every purchase is secretly asking the exact same question:

​"Would you rather have this... or a little more freedom later?"

​One bottle of shampoo won't retire you early. But hundreds of small, conscious decisions repeated over decades?

​Those absolutely can.

(I spent this weekday morning playing pickleball with friends while 99% of my peers were at work stuck in some meeting that could have been an email…)

I coach financial freedom, but if you opened my workshop today, you'd probably question every bit of that advice.

While I consider myself an expert when it comes to the Financial Freedom journey, I am most definitely a complete noob train wreck—when it comes to minimalism.

I’ve had a few half-starts in the past when sharing my experiences and advice for Financial Freedom and the FIRE movement. (If you want advice on the topic I actually have confidence in, check out my Field Guide to Financial Freedom) With any luck, a couple of years from now I will have that same level of confidence to write a field guide for minimalism.

Sucked Into the Over-Consumption Trap

The funny thing is that financial freedom eventually led me to a different question: if buying more doesn't make us happier, why do I still own so much stuff? Somewhere along the way, I realized I had optimized my finances far more than I had optimized my life.

I’ve had a passing interest in minimalism. Up until now, that has mostly looked like clumsy half-attempts at decluttering. My sock drawer improved thanks to Marie Kondo - but my workshop remains a hoarding nightmare.

Am I the only one? I doubt I am alone, given how much American cultural norms center around over-consumption.

We have raised a big family in a big house. Our basement shelves are lined with "just in case" purchases. The garage has projects I swore I'd finish someday. Closets hold clothes I forgot I owned.

While we don’t waste money if we can help it, even the average American household is bursting at the seams with stuff we don’t need—stuff that most certainly does not make us happy! I am growing to appreciate more and more that this excess is actively sucking the happiness and time from my life in little ways that I was conditioned to ignore or accept as just the way things are.

The Plan: A 6-Month No-Buy Challenge

Like almost all ventures in my life, I set out to read and (over) research. A recent read of The Year of Less inspired me to test myself to a six-month no-buy challenge.

To be clear: I will still buy the absolute necessary things (weekly groceries and wedding/birthday gifts are allowed) but I will strive to all but eliminate the steady stream of Amazon boxes arriving at our door. Will my UPS driver miss me?

I want to avoid the purchase traps, like:

“While we don’t need this now, it is an amazing deal and we might need it someday soon...” (Damn You Slickdeals!) or buying things for some fantasy, future version of me that I am not right now.

For someone who prides himself on questioning norms and the status quo, I am increasingly embarrassed by my cluttered life.

Decluttering along the way…

Coupled with that, I am going to embark on a parallel journey to declutter and purge our house. Seeing the over-consumption all around me as I declutter should make the 6-month challenge easier (another assumption...). I also recently finished The More of Less, which goes hand-in-hand with this mentality of challenging the status quo. I hope to try several different approaches and share how well they work (or not) here as I go.

Keeping It Real (and Scary)

I will attempt to share my journey here as honestly as possible. I am sure this will be a humbling process as I account for my progress and failures along the path.

As I start, I am both excited about the possibilities and benefits, but more than a little overwhelmed at the mountain of work and a lifetime of accumulation and habits to overcome. I am not some twenty-something with a one-bedroom apartment here. We have lived in this big house for more than 20 years.

I worry about the physical work ahead—the mountain of stuff we've accumulated. But what worries me even more is whether I'll actually follow through.

It is kind of frightening to put this down in words where people can read it. However, my hope is that by doing so, it will help me stay accountable and motivated.

Six months from now I'll know whether minimalism is another self-help fad—or whether it changes my life as much as financial independence did. Either way, I'll share the whole story.