I find driving pleasant and I'm good at it. Mostly it's a combination of low living expenses, decent salary, and getting to see the country. The independence and lightness (term borrowed from Go strategy) of the position were upsides as well. It's basically a good way to turn a year or two of my life into the roughly 40k it'd take to retire on a couple acres, a garden, and a yurt. I could even get the yurt before getting out of trucking as a fairly cheap minimal economic offering.
Also, I fully expect trucking to get automated into a much cushier job over the next decade with self-driving vehicles. Instead of driving a truck for 11 hours a day, you babysit a truck-driving machine and make sure everything runs fine and gets loaded/routed properly, which is essentially a desk job. Lowered accident rates and insurance premiums pays for the upgrade, even without an increase in the allowed hours of service regulations.
Not needing a college education is another huge plus, since it means I get working sooner and with less out-of-pocket expenses front-loaded onto it.
Anyhow, it's not something that makes sense as a long-term plan. It's something to do to loot roughly $100k over three years after living expenses and then get out.
turn a year or two of my life into the roughly 40k it'd take to retire on a couple acres, a garden, and a yurt.
Have you actually done the calculations that convince you you could retire on $40k? Because that seems awfully optimistic to me.
Let's make the following optimistic assumptions: (1) You will be able to invest the money so that it grows reliably at 4% over inflation. (2) You will only need the money to last you for 25 years (e.g., because after that some rich family member will die and leave you a big pile of money. Or because after that you will...
TL;DR: this is a repository for discussing income generation strategies optimized for free time
I hope I'm not cluttering up LW but maybe enough people are also interested in this? I graduated high school about a year ago.
I have a lot in common with Will Newsome's self description in this post
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2qp/virtual_employment_open_thread/
But it's a dead thread, and there's been some interest in early retirement extreme, (http://earlyretirementextreme.com/) and having repositories for stuff.
The upshot of it is that I want to optimize for free time and mobility. Need about $2,000 to live (1600 expenses 400 savings/buffer) 2nd EDIT: no I don't, I must have screwed something up when I was adding this it's more like $1600. ($1300 to spend $300 buffer). A 20 hour workweek or even shorter is what I'm going for here. Right now I'm barely functional. Even that much is a bit of a stretch for me as I am now. Plenty of advice abounds on optimizing my health and squashing akrasia though, and I'm sure that if I implemented it I could get to the point of handling part time work. But I think I would always find being a 9 to 5er unappealing.
I'd value spending that time reading texbooks or walking around town or lazing around on the beach more than I'd value extra money. I'm also interested to hear about some more conventional part time jobs if they pay enough. I'm ok with doing somewhat boring work if the hours are light and I have time to think.
I've generated some candidate strategies if anyone here has experience at these. I don't have much knowledge of what they would entail or how to break into them. Or they might give someone some ideas I dunno but anyway:
4hww style dropship business (but success at that seems hard to set up and sustain)
freelance work at a site like odesk or elance
Own a popular app or forum
Push carts at wal mart part time (but I don't think that pays enough)
Self employment doing massage therapy (I can set my own hours but I'd need to invest time and money to get trained)
Tutoring (I might like this one. Do I need a college degree? Can I make enough with part time hours? Is it hard to find leads for clients? How would I do that?)
Online poker (but it seems kinda hard)
Does anyone here live in a yurt? And has anyone tried living in other countries to cut down expenses?
edited to add: Did I make a mistake including numbers? They're what would be ideal for me, not strict requirements. I can work a little more or spend less. Err on the side of posting ideas, I'm sure some other people are interested in low stress work but don't value free time *quite* as much I seem to