Any Mustachians read this guy and have comments?
I read the book last summer, a few months after coming across MMM.
James81 is right. It's not really a get rich quick book so much as it is a primer on rethinking how to make money so that you can reach financial independence (i.e. in his words, become a "fameless millionare") earlier rather than later. He present's a Pascal's Wager-like argument which maintains that starting a low-overhead, scale-able business that addresses a genuine need is a better means of attaining FI than the "get rich slowly" approach of lifelong savings and frugality. There's obviously risk involved in both approaches. If you take the entrepreneur approach, you might fail, but if you succeed, you'll have financial freedom even while you're young. If you take the get rich slowly approach, however, you might succeed, but it'll take way longer, and your financial freedom will be limited to your twilight years. If you fail, you'll be dead, and therefore won't get to enjoy your wealth. Better, then, to roll the dice on entrepreneurship than spend your best years rotting in a cubical and spending your "free time" couponing.
His outlook emulates many of the values of Mustachianism: a sensitivity to exchanging time for money, a disdain for consumerist treatment of money merely as "something that's meant to be spent" rather than as a vehicle for creating wealth, and a healthy streak of self-sufficiency & DIY, among other things.
Probably the biggest difference is that he appears to see no value in leveraging cost-cutting measures to increase savings rate. His concern, and the concern that he thinks his audience has, apparently, is with figuring out how much one will have to make in order to maintain a lavish lifestyle without having to work. Many of his ideas don't presuppose this, however, and he acknowledges that.
If I had to place it on a spectrum of FI ideas, it would occupy one extreme pole, with the Early Retirement Extreme book occupying the opposite position.
Fastlane Millionaire promotes seeking FI by ramping up one's income, with minimal attention to cost-saving measures; on the other hand, ERE promotes extreme frugality as the primary engine to power one to FI, without much consideration of income-increasing.
For the Mustachian, probably the weakest point of the book will be what it's missing,
viz. a sustained consideration of frugality as a shortcut to FI. The Mustachian approach has nearly the same window of time as
Fastlane Millionaire-like entrepreneurship would have (and very well may include some of its own entrepreneurship), but with much less risk. I suspect that Demarco would appreciate this more than the "slow lane" of "get rich slowly," but he'd ultimately be down on it, since the Mustachian/ERE/YMOYL approach won't really allow for mansions and Lamborghinis in one's FI future.
It's definitely a worthwhile read, if only for the different emphasis that Demarco places on things. It'll be most helpful for Mustachians who have already made many of the significant cost cutting measures and are looking for ideas/motivation to boost their savings through an increase in income, espeically
via some form of entrepreneurship.
Also, the writing is pretty good, overall. He often falls in love with adjectives at times, which makes for quite a bit of hyperbole, but it also helps keep the reader engaged.
