A less drastic version of this, if you are in the US, is to do remote work from a thinly-populated rural state with a low cost of living, and ideally with lower state taxes.
But the problem with that is that you have to live in rural America.
I've been thinking about exactly this. The town where I live is on Kiplinger's top ten best (American) towns for cheapskates, and I've researched the cost of living and such, and it'd be easy to live comfortably on $2000/month (or $1000 or less, if I didn't have student loans to pay). It helps that this town tanked the recession rather well and is constantly growing, so anyone more competent than me can probably find something to exploit for living expenses.
But the culture, the wildlife, the weather, and the logistics of traveling anywhere at all (I'm at l...
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.