How to Survive Without a Salary

We stopped at the library last night and I picked up a book - How to Survive Without a Salary. The premise of the book is how to live on low stress temp jobs instead of a stressful full time career. Not a lifestyle for everyone, but it gave some good ideas on how to live more conservatively. One idea that I found very helpful was that when you are faced with the problem, often the most widely used solution is the most expensive. When you look at the root of the problem, you are often able to find more creative (and less costly) ways to solve it. For example, the author's wife came to him and said she wanted to buy a clothes dryer. She had dried her clothes on the line for years and often commented on how much she liked it better than a dryer, so the author was surprised at this request. When he asked about the root problem, she said it was that in the winter, the clothes would sometimes take days to dry and then everyone would run out of clothes. He proposed the solution of buying more clothes. She said that would work, and they spent $100 in clothes instead of buying a $500 dryer.