It's rather a provocative title on what others think of me.

In my eyes I'm already wealthy because I can satisfy all my needs without having to earn more.

And I'm not frugal at all.

You see, this is all subjective. Be satisfied with what you've got and don't fall for the never enough mentality.

I'm from eastern Europe. In the soviet era noone could own private property, everything was belonging to the state. Then, the state rationed food to you, allowed you to use one of their homes in exchange for labour, allowed selling produce on government-controlled prices, and buying in predetermined quantities.

So let me ask a question. When you buy a home with all your life savings, does it become yours? What makes it differ from the soviets? I mean, obviously they recorded your rights to the building on paper, and now they record it in digital databases. But is it REALLY that different? You don't truly own either. It's all the government's promise to let you access it and keep away whomever should not access it, until they don't.

The only thing you truly own is bitcoin. The rest are promises.

I'm trying to reply to multiple comments here.

I'm spending money just not on things that people consider measures of success.


Owning a car here in Europe is not a necessity. Public transport is magnitudes faster and cheaper, especially in major cities. I still have a driving license, and rent a car for a couple of days if say I move stuff or we go to a vacation (but still prefer plane if possible).

Average home prices here are 200 to 300 times the average monthly net salary. An average home loan is issued for 20 years with high upfront costs, 6% p.a. rates and 2% wealth tax on acquisition.

I'm not saying you should never own a home, I'm saying if I bought one as soon as I could get my first loan, I was stuck in the hamster wheel for 20 years at least. This is a huge opportunity cost.

Again, the moral of the story is, buy stuff when you can afford it. Otherwise, you just accumulate debt forever.

So I moved back to my rural hometown after long years of building a career in the capital city, met up some friends I haven't seen for ages. Hanged out, got to my story and their first question was where did I buy my house. I told them I didn't, I'm in a rental property like I've always been. It was strange at first but then I realized I was their idol, the "rich guy who made it". Then got on to other topics. "So what car do you have?" I told em, I dont have a car. "Fuck it bro, at least did you travel the world?" - Not yet. With 3 questions and 3 answers, I made their whole world view collapse. "Are you even wealthy bro?" Yessiriam. I consider myself wealthy. What makes a man wealthy? Having options. If I'd like, I could buy the house, buy the car or travel the world. I didn't because it's not financially the right decision, at least it wasn't at that moment.

There was a question a few days ago here, someone coined what could be the biggest problem with economies. This is one of them, for sure. People can't differentiate assets and liabilities. They think they own the house, they claim they own the car, and in the meantime they're in utter debt. People strive to take on liabilities instead of building wealth which consists of assets (favorably hard or income-generating assets). They discount their time, become corporate slaves just to keep up with the illusion of their lifestyles they ought to show to the outside world.

And I see this everywhere. The four of us in the room all came from the same school. Same age. Same opportunities. Three wheeling in heavy debt, trynna keep it up with side hustles. One with a positive balance who never needs to be a corporate slave again.

Nah man, dividend investing is dead. Altria, 6% yield, 3% after inflation, with price risk? I doubt anyone here would rush to the brokerage firm after reading this.

You forgot to mention that governments require you to use banks for opening a business, purchasing a house, or accessing the financial system in general. Once you start living off bitcoin ATMs, you'll easily become enemy of the system, the source of your funds will be questioned, you wont be able to make large purchases, and you'll be treated as a money launderer forever.

ps: bank lobby in the US made into the GENIUS act even, forbidding stablecoin yields

I don't believe in frugality, but at near $0 you gotta be frugal. Here's how I would do it. You instantly start looking for better paying jobs, apply everywhere, relocate if you need to even if it means going down to $0 and even if it needs help from friends / government / whomever. Then set aside as much as you can from your paycheck until you reach one goal: that you can comfortably live for a couple of months if you lost your job. In the meantime, you build your options: learn new skills, sales, programming, whatever suits you. There's not much competition at the bottom. You'll easily find yourself in the average earners once you put in the right amount of effort.

Only then, you start investing.

Most of the resources on Earth are practically unlimited even if limited in theory. Humans only ever tried to extract oil and minerals from the outermost 1% of Earth's crust, why? Not because they couldn't. They are already providing the right supply for the current demand. If demand increases, they'll dig deeper.

The concept of marginal utility which was mentioned here before is also important. "Unlimited demand" in your terms is not true, it's an ever-decreasing demand as one's needs get filled.

That you decide what responsibilities to take and who to deal with.

There's no universe in which you'd monetarily profit from having a child even if your government heavily subsidizes families. I hope money was not your only consideration.

I tried both, and never fully settled.

Owning a business is better if you are dedicated, have the right idea, and got connections. If you don't have the right connections, you'll end up doing multiple times an average employee's effort for less income. The proper way to do this is being laser focused on passive income, as time passes you'll realize that time is the most valuable after all.

On the other hand, the peace of mind that comes with being an employee is also invaluable, no legal hassles, scams, evaporating customers, upfront costs, competition, corruption, regulation. That's also something to consider.

I said I never fully settled. By that I mean that being a contractor for a company that provides stable income in part time, while aiming to maximize passive income in the rest of your time is the best of both worlds.

All roots tie to former colonizers who still extract resources but through more sophisticated ways and having built dependence. This applies to the entire Africa and Middle-East regions. You can overthrow the government but nothing will change as long as all your economic activity is fully dependent on producing a limited variety of resources for foreign giga corporations.

ps: these corporations / foreign countries usually have exclusive rights to extract specific minerals, build and tax ports, or straight out own the land itself

corruption therefore, is not the root cause, it's the symptom

You can ALWAYS save some, even with the lowest incomes

I've been there, I know.

It just takes a bit longer to build your wealth.

I'm pretty sure that if there's any malicious actor with quantum power,
that canary will be in tradfi as there are much weaker links there.

Just made the calculation. 2 cents per day with free electricity
Stuck it behind your boss' desk and you might earn back your investment in what? 20 years?  

Soaking the HDD even once could render it useless - you wont be able to mount it, but rain or dust or contact with non-chemical waste in general will not erode the magnetically stored data itself. With the proper tools, it might still be recoverable.

Most banks will eliminate themselves without ask

You can enter your xpub in certain block explorers and see everything, but in return you eliminated your privacy.

Better play is to run your own node, import xpub to (a checksum-verified version of) Sparrow Wallet, and connect to the node via Sparrow.

With this amount and no tech skills, I'd suggest hiring someone to recover it directly from your laptop without sending them any files. With a signed contract, with your supervision.

All cities you listed are expensive af. I'd rather move to an abandoned beachfront in a 3rd world country and pay my dimes for it.