Hermits, Thoreau, Retirement and the Essentials of Life

I’ve been reading an interesting book called Hermits by Peter French. I’m at the section of the book about Thoreau. I haven’t read Walden since high school, but I’ve just dug a copy out in my library here in Sumbawa. I want to go back and read it again after I finish Hermits. French writes that Thoreau, “…distinguished between the activities necessary o maintain life and those on which a free individual would choose to spend his time. The former were drudgery, the latter worthwhile. The good life should be organized to maximize free time and minimize drudgery. In fact his declared aim was to reverse the biblical injunction and labour for one day only, saving the other six for ‘free time’.

Additionally, he notes that Thoreau followed Socrates in seeing how many things he could live without so that he would not become a slave to working in order to purchase things which were really luxuries and comforts that had become to be seen as necessities.

So the point of all this - it’s related to a degree to my planned retirement. I’ve been working on paring my life down to what I see as essentials for me. The idea is to spend time with my family, friends, and myself to rediscover who I am and be available for my children before they are grown and gone.

The issue of what someone needs to retire on and how much that might cost is always a topic of discussion on expat forums. So what is my ideal of the essentials?

Books (this is about one book per month) 180,000

Internet ( I’m estimating this, I hope it’s less) 300,000

Website Server 144,000

Indovision (satellite tv so I can watch baseball) 300,000

Tech Stuff (software, hardware, ink, etc.) 250,000

Car registration (due yearly, saved monthly) 120,000

Motorbike registration (same) 19,000

Motorbike 2 registration (same as car) 19,000

School fees (for the 4 kids) 400,000

Visa (my retirement visa) 500,000

Clothes (for the kids) 500,000

Phone (my phone that I use for the internet) 120,000

Medical (whole family) 900,000

Insurance (me) 1,000,000

All this totals to 4,932,000 per month. It’s not exactly living like a hermit, but it’s what I see as living a fairly conservative lifestyle. My 7^th/8^th grade Social Studies class are just finishing a unit about economics and creating a budget was one of their assignments. They found my budget fairly barebones. More on budgeting for expats later.