Early Retirement Extreme provides a robust strategy that makes it possible to stop working for money in just a short number of years. It provides a paradigm shift in economic perspective from consuming to producing. Your value to society is not how much you earn or how much you buy. It is what you create and produce for yourself and for others. It is what you leave, not what you take. Consumers are often locked into expensive options, but producers have the flexibility to create appropriate solutions at a quarter of the cost. The resulting savings (the difference between income and expenses) is one's monetary contribution to society. When savings are put to work through investments, society will pay dividends which cover the remaining expenses resulting in financial independence. The strategy can also be used to pay off debt, travel the world, volunteer, go back to school, or work on otherwise nonprofitable endeavors without worrying about the next paycheck. It offers a compelling alternative to the default choice of graduating high school, getting a college degree, buying a car, getting married, buying a house, filling it with furniture, clothes, TVs, washing machines, lawn mowers, and electric egg boilers, and then spending the next 40 years working 9-5 to pay it all off.
Jacob Lund Fisker was born in Denmark in 1975. He got his first computer when he was 12 and subsequently trained himself to sit in front of a screen for up to 16 hours a day. This was good preparation for what was later to come. At 24, he moved to Switzerland and spent 4 years researching certain details of neutron star physics which are immensely interesting to about five people in the world. During that time he became interested in strategic resource shortages and ran a very popular website on peak oil. He also became a bit of an anticonsumer. After getting a PhD in theoretical physics, he worked as a researcher for another five years while giving talks at places like CERN, Princeton, Los Alamos, Notre Dame, etc. Having saved most of his income he found himself financially independent at 30. A couple of years later he started a blog on earlyretirementextreme.com to show others the way to financial freedom. The blog quickly proved to be interesting to more than five people in the world and so he retired from science at 33 to pursue his writing.
He enjoys really spicy food and making predictions about the fall and decline of civilization (not necessarily related) and other complex systems like the financial markets. He only eats one time per day. He practices Japanese sword arts and yacht racing, doing an occasional ocean race. He also finds it a little bit weird to write about himself in the third person.
