Despite living in one of the country’s most expensive cities, San Diego, where median home prices have soared to nearly $1 million, bartender Alicia Rice routinely saves $2,000 a month and is debt-free.
Despite living in one of the country’s most expensive cities, San Diego, where median home prices have soared to nearly $1 million, bartender Alicia Rice routinely saves $2,000 a month and is debt-free.
“People think that living like this is deprivation or that I’m suffering, but I’m perfectly happy with what I have,” says Rice, who earns $70,000 a year. “It’s very liberating to not want things all the time. We have been sold this idea that more is more.â€
Rice, 40, who chronicles her adventures in what she calls “ultraminimalism” on her YouTube channel “Exploravore,” estimates she’s saved tens of thousands in the five years she’s been an extreme minimalist.
Depending on whether she’s traveling, Rice stashes $500 to $2,000 a month in a savings account. (She doesn’t invest in the stock market.)
Compare that to the $1,000 a month she thinks she spent on non-essentials while living like a maximalist in Las Vegas, with at least 1,000 items in her wardrobe.
“I had a giant closet filled with every type of clothing you can imagine,” she says in a video. “The irony is that I haven’t worn most of it.”
Despite working two jobs and making $600 a month in rent, she says she lived “paycheck to paycheck” and “didn’t save anything.”
After a breakup, the former swim coach moved to San Diego and began a decade-long process of getting rid of most of her possessions. Even as a child, she had a natural tendency to dislike things. (“Why would I want more than one doll?” she asks in one video. “You can only hold one at a time.”)
Somehow, this philosophy was buried under rampant materialism.
She became more committed to minimalism after watching the hit 2021 Netflix documentary The Minimalists, featuring minimalist gurus Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus.
Rice is not alone in her desire to live with less. Interest in minimalism has grown significantly. In the past 20 years, web searches for the term “minimalist design” in the US have steadily increased, according to Google Trends.
Similar movements that have taken off in recent years include de-cluttering (Marie Kondo is the reigning queen), thrift, no-buy or low-buy, circular economy and zero waste. All have a similar goal: to mitigate the damage that mass consumerism, rampant since the 1940s, has done to bank accounts and the planet.
There are currently more self-storage units than McDonald’s, Subway and Jack in the Box restaurants combined. And the average American carries $8,674 in credit card debt, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Rice’s minimalist commute took a turn for the extreme in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was forced to spend most of her time at home with her belongings. Then, in 2021, she wanted to drive to the West Coast and didn’t want to pay to store her stuff.
So she got rid of most of them.
The Spartan lifestyle has been a boon to her savings account.
“I have a ton of money in savings,” she says.
She was able to pay off her car loan in two years and is completely debt free. She has never had a credit card.
“This is a prison system,” she asserts.
Besides the $2,300 monthly rent (which includes utilities) for a one-bedroom (she couldn’t find a studio), she has just five bills each month: cell phone ($130 for an unlimited data plan), car insurance ($50), gas ($240) and a Dropbox subscription ($12). She also sponsors a child in Uganda through a charity program for $40 a month.
Despite frequently uploading videos to her YouTube channel, she doesn’t have Wi-Fi, instead using the free connection at her local library.
But even extreme minimalists have to eat. Rice, who is vegan, says she spends about $600 a month on groceries and treating herself to a weekly dinner out at a Thai or Indian restaurant. (This bartender also stopped drinking alcohol a few years ago.)
After moving into her new apartment four months ago, Rice was faced with whether to replace all the furniture she had previously given away and decided to try living without most of it.
Instead of looking for a mattress, box spring, frame and headboard, which could have cost her thousands, she bought a $170 Japanese tatami mat on Amazon.com.
A friend gave her a vintage lamp, and she took a folding chair she had borrowed from another friend. It does without a sofa, chairs, tables, a table, a TV and any decor. (The apartment came with an air conditioner, which she barely uses, and a microwave.)
In the kitchen, she has a pot, a pan and a wooden bowl. Her beauty routine consists of one product – coconut oil soap – which she uses on her face, body and hair. She doesn’t buy cosmetics except lip balm. Her wardrobe is divided into 23 items, including shoes.
Compare that to the average American woman owning 176 items of clothing, according to Capsule Wardrobe.
“You just have to be smart about what you buy,” says Rice. “When I was in the mountains of Oregon, and it was 20 degrees and it was snowing, I was still warm because I was wearing two layers.”
The world’s most famous minimalist, Steve Jobs, wore a black shirt and jeans every day, but Rice loves bold colors and T-shirts.
“You can have a colorful wardrobe as a minimalist,” she says. “You can wear whatever you want. The idea is not to have too much of it.â€
Perhaps most shockingly, the content creator doesn’t own a computer (a brand new laptop costs about $2,000) and uploads everything through her iPhone and Dropbox.
Her determination to own as little as possible extends to home ownership.
“Thirty years of paying a mortgage so I’m finally debt free at 70?” she asks in a video. “Sounds like absolute prison to me.â€
Because of the small amount she owns, Rice can put everything in her Volkswagen Beetle and leave for the ride whenever she feels like it. (She spent months working her way around the West Coast.) Her goal is to live out of a backpack in different places. Eventually, she’d like to build an eco-friendly off-grid cabin or tiny house.
“It’s not about an aesthetic or ‘look at me, I’m so cute and different,'” she says. “It’s about the bigger picture of making you better as a person. The amount we consume is wild and unsustainable for the planet.â€
As for whether she would one day want to go back to owning a bunch of things, she says, “Absolutely not. It is normal and natural to live this way.â€
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Image Source : nypost.com