Anatomy of a semi-automated lifestyle

In July, we talked about ways to reduce your overhead so that you could free up your budget to invest a little bit of money into your business. Today I’m going to delve a little deeper into that idea, and I’ll talk about what I think is the main ingredient to the recipe of creating a lifestyle that allows you to focus on building a business, whether it’s on or off the web.

Since I’ve launched this blog, I’ve given you glimpses of ways that I personally remove distractions from my lifestyle. I don’t pick up my mail from the post office, and I don’t call in to check voice messages. Incidentally, I also don’t watch network television. I refuse to enslave myself at a scheduled time every week just because a show is on that I’d like to watch. I’d rather record it and watch it later, catch it online, or wait until the season comes out on DVD.

However, there’s one thing that I don’t do that I haven’t shared, and I believe that it’s the one thing that’s contributed to my peace of mind and has allowed me to have the mental capacity to start a business outside of my 9 to 5 job.

I don’t pay rent. I have absolutely no housing expense.

I work as a “resident” hotel manager. My apartment and utilities are provided by the owner of the hotel I work for. I found an advertisement for this job online… I was actively looking for a job that provided housing at the time. This type of job can be difficult to come across, and probably very competitive when you do come across one, but I’ll attest that it is so, so worth the trouble it can take to find it.

Of course, there are other ways to eliminate or reduce your housing expense. Here’s a Google search for “ways to live rent free“.

What happens when you no longer have to pay for rent? For most people, housing is the single biggest line item in the budget… eliminating that expense is almost equivalent to getting an $800 to $1,000 a month raise at work. This unique situation affords you a couple of options:

• Aggressive debt repayment if you’re behind the eight ball financially
• Aggressive saving or investing if you’re already free from debt
• Buy your time back by removing more distractions, once you’ve done some saving

Do you have a unique living situation or way that you reduce your overhead or housing expense that you can share in the comments?

Check out part two of this article!