I don’t think most families would want to consume just $25,000 per year, but he does lay out how they do it, and he admits that they’re helped by low property taxes in Colorado.

I don’t think the goal is to copy his plan, but to learn from it.

Which is why he’s out there making money hustling his personal-finance shtick.

It was only after I turned 30 and had enough money to retire from real work that I started getting these incredulous comments from friends and coworkers, like “What do you mean you are retiring? How will you get the money to pay your car loan and your mortgage? I’d be sunk within a month if I lost my job.”

To me, their stories were much more amazing than my own story of early retirement. They were the same age as me or older, and had equal or higher salaries. I couldn’t imagine having a shortage of money in such amazing conditions. Then I looked even higher up the income scale and found the same phenomenon. It turns out that humans are capable of blowing almost any amount of money, without realizing they are doing it.

Again I ask, how on earth would these people pay for health insurance for the rest of their lives?

They also would not get full Social Security.

Oh yeah, he’s going to be OK with “retirement”.

He hammers away at two points again and again in his writing. The first is that retiring early comes at a cost–you are trading material goods and a high standard of living for freedom.

His second point is that every purchase should be analyzed on its ten year cost–e.g., if you did not buy that starbucks cup, but put it in a 7% a year return investment for ten years, how much money would you have? From this perspective each starbucks cup o’ coffee is actually a 80-90 $ purchase.

This adds up when you get a starbucks everyday.

Even bigger savinngs when you choose your car, house, etc.

He paints in extreme detail how his family was able to do what he did. Learn from it instead of bashin’ folks.