One of the things that attracted me to MMM was the similarity between his lifestyle and my father in law. My FIL, who has a master's degree, essentially retired from his "real job" as a social worker at age 35 or so, and then made his living restoring older homes that were in foreclosure and sold or rented them out for income. Now, he isn't fully MMM style since he had to have the rental income stream and do physical labor on the houses in order to survive, so he was technically "working", but he never worked a job for wages after that point, so in that sense, he retired from the 9-5 job. He also eschewed things like eating out, buying new cars and other consumer goods. I had a hard time understanding why he made those choices, but I think he has a similar mentality to MMM. He wanted the freedom from a typical job schedule, is anti-consumerist, and is a renaissance man who knows how to fix anything. My FIL stopped doing any hard physical labor about 10 years ago, and is now fully retired.
