Intro

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
-Henry David Thoreau: Walden -

INTRO

Whether you had it coming or not, bouncing from wealth to poverty can take a nanosecond. Fires, tornados, earthquakes, corporations, governments, the economy, street crime, all can take everything you've got without a moment's notice, and suddenly you find yourself a rich man without a penny, forced to learn the secrets of the streets to survive.

American society has split into two classes, ultra-rich and ultra-poor, those with nothing and those with everything, with a phantom in the middle called the middle class who have taken on enough debt to look like they own things but who are actually just as poor as the poor. The plummet from rich to poor rarely includes a stopover in the middle.

You've only officially reached poverty when you don't have a penny for your loafer, a nickel for your thoughts, a dime for a dozen, or a quarter for a phone call. It's called absolutely zero, and it can be a moment of clarity as well as panic. After all, if you can get by on nothing, absolutely nothing, everything else is gravy.

The first thing you learn at absolute zero is how far you can stretch a dollar. Chances are that whatever you spent supporting yourself for the past five years could have lasted at least ten, so you've only got your reckless spending on things like mortgages to blame.

The second thing you can't help but notice upon arriving in the land of the poor is you never really owned anything and the entire system is rigged against you.

But don't get depressed. There's very good news. You no longer have a nut. The only minimum you need to survive every day has just gone way down. Once you're past your first day at zero, you now have the ability to go one entire day without spending a penny, a skill you definitely need to develop.

And remember, only the ultra-poor have a shot at becoming ultra-rich. After all, they're unemployed and have time to sit around getting stoned and thinking of things like Google, whereas the middle class have got jobs and are far too busy making ends meet to worry about where their lives are going. They know precisely where their lives are going, to paying off debts, whereas the lives of the ultra-rich and ultra-poor could lead anywhere. Being free from debt (other than Karmic, but we'll get to that), is a wonderful thing, and the rich man can exalt in his newfound freedom from financial obligations.

Just accept, right now, that you not only don't own anything, you never did. The bank owned your home, the finance company owned your car, and pharmaceutical companies actually have patents on sections of your DNA, so you don't even own your own body. Try selling your DNA to a foreign competitor and you could get sued, which is actually no problem when you're poor. Poor people never get sued, which should be a major relief if your crime was corporate fraud or even murdering your ex-wife.

Follow this simple guide and you'll find you can not only survive but thrive with absolutely nothing.