I don't remember most of those details off hand, but I'll try to ask him and look for any that might be in some of our email correspondences (most of the details were in phone conversations, though). I know that his work schedule is pretty intense; I think one of the main reasons we don't communicate more is because it's hard to determine when opportunities will arise without us both knowing to look in advance. He still has time for recreation and exercise, from the sounds of it, but I can't get more specific at the moment.
I think he has an approximate timeline in mind, but I don't know off hand. I know he went with Vanguard because of the low risk and low commissions, and compared mutual funds to basic stock trading (stock being short term with high risk/pay off, mutual funds being lower risk, but longer term before a good payoff, on the order of years). I think he set a goal of having a million in about 5 years, and then did the math on the current rate of things and expects to meet or beat that, but I could be remembering wrong (that sounds absurdly high).
I know he isn't afraid to pirate most of his entertainment, though; he's paying relatively low rent, living with a middle-aged couple who has plenty of room in their house, and can afford food/gas/etc without difficulty. It's worth adding that he lives near Littlerock, AR; I'm not sure how the cost of living there compares to the rest of the state, but it seems to be generally lower than in Silicon Valley or NYC. I also expect he managed to avoid amassing too much debt with college, but we haven't discussed that in particular. The only real risk to his plan that came up in our conversations is that of car trouble (either mechanical or due to contract wackiness, since there's some confusion there involving who's paying what, since his primary vehicle came from his parents). I get the impression that he keeps his social circle small, but he's still good enough at dealing with people in authority to get better-than-minimum-wage jobs with relative ease. ... Come to think of it, I should probably try to harness his charisma for my own diabolical purposes at some point.
I found the original message, and I got a couple of his goals mixed up. He planned to have a stable emergency fund and financial security in 5 years, and the math works out so that he can actually have this by the end of one year. By the time he told me this, he already had 6 months worth of money in his emergency fund, no consumer debt, and was working on getting up to 5 figures in assets completely under his control. His new years resolution was to finish the emergency fund and start investing in mutual funds by the end of the year, which seems pretty we...
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.