Mr. Money Moustache is the alias of a Canadian expatriate named Peter Adeney, who saved enough money in his twenties, working as a software engineer, to retire at age thirty. He calculated a way to make these early pay cheques last using a strategy of sensible investment, and a rigorous, but manageable, frugality. Living with intention is his life’s work. “I’ve become irrationally dedicated to rational living,” he says.

Mr. Money Moustache defines retirement as the freedom to do what he wants when he wants. He retired in late 2005, with six hundred thousand dollars in investments, and a paid-off house worth two hundred thousand. He figured he could rely, conservatively, on a return of four per cent per year. He determined that the family could live on twenty-four thousand a year in expenses: so he needed to save twenty-five times that amount.

“Ten Bucks is a lot of money,” he writes, “So you need to respect it. It is a critical brick in the early retirement castle you are building. If you save $796 per week, for ten years, and get a 7% compounded investment return, after inflation, you’ll have $600,000 sitting around ready to party for you. . . . Let’s say you’ve got two income earners working together. Now each one has to save only $398 a week. There are 112 waking hours in each week. Each person has to make 40 successful $10 decisions each week—or one $10 decision every 2.8 waking hours.”

In his blog, his goals are to: 1) To make you rich so you can retire early; 2) To make you happy so you can properly enjoy your early retirement; and 3) To save the whole human race from destroying itself through overconsumption of its habitat. You can learn more about his work through listening to this great interview hosted by Tim Ferriss.