Ideally you won't even have running water, you can collect water when you are away from home for these purposes.
..what? How would you collect water away from home, and how would you cart it back home?
I'm assuming your whole post was satire.
My part of the post wasn't satire.
I'm assuming they meant to bring water in as needed. For example -- you collect rain water in a cistern like in the old days. You can recycle grey water (sink, shower, washing machine through a very simple sand, reverse osmosis and ultra violet light treatment system.
You may be a bit uneasy about drinking recycled grey water so it would make sense to keep a 5 gallon water bag in your car and fill it up as needed for home drinking water.
We have about 24 inches of rain per year in our area, so just the roof on our house (about 2,000 sq ft of roof) would provide 15,000 gallons of water per year.
No need for toilet water as I am assuming you would use a humanure type toilet system. These are extremely mustachian. Basically you take a 5 gallon bucket and put a toilet seat on it. You use aromatic cedar saw dust in the bucket. Do your business. Add a layer of sawdust. After it is full to your liking it goes to the compost heap and is turned into free food. Google humanure for a gander.
If one is crafty enough they can avoid the need to be hooked up to city water at all!
Why go through the effort?
Well do the math ---
Up the road from us one town charges $65 for their basic water and sewer. (goes up if you use more than 5000 gallons) So if you save $65 per month that is $780 per year. (you could put together the system I mentioned above for less than that DIY). So let's say you save $780 per year. At the oft quoted 3 -4% SWR that would be 25,000 less dollars you would need to save. Figuring the average reader here earns 45K and saves at a 40% rate that would mean you could reach FIRE 1 - 1/2 years sooner.
Now I know we pride ourselves on not be too hippy like here, (sarcasm intended) but it would seem to me to be worthwhile to at least look into this possibility and do a little creative research.
Let's say you spend 10 hours researching how to make your daily water usage uber efficient and how to put a home recycling system in place. (of course you would post your findings here!) Then lets say you spend 40 hours putting the parts together and building out the system. (I know we have plumbers reading this post!)
So for 50 hours of your time you earn 1 - 1/2 years off of work. That is a huge return on investment!
When we look at a budget (as mustachians I think) we should ask ourselves how can we get that budget category to zero or close to zero?
Every dollar less required per month in retirement equates to 3 less days you need to work to get to FI. (
Math 1 dollar per month times 12 months = 12 dollars, at a SWR of 3% ish you would need to save $360 to generate that 12. 360 might be the average income for 3 days for the average reader)
So if you can learn to cut $1,000 from your monthly budget you can retire 3,000 - 4,000 days sooner. That is 12 - 16 years sooner! As always, ymmv depending on your savings rate.