Earlier this fall, I gave a short interview to robo-adviser/light advice firm NestWealth.com about financial independence, ETFs and the term I often use in Findependence Day: guerrilla frugality. You can find it here.
I first used the term “guerrilla frugality” in a personal finance column in the Financial Post. The idea was that early retirement (or findependence) requires a sort of super-frugality.
Guerrilla warfare and guerrilla marketing are both phrases already in the public lexicon. I reasoned that as consumers, we’re constantly besieged by the “guerrilla marketing” efforts of well-heeled advertisers and stealth marketers. So in order to spend less than you earn consistently, in order to save and invest the difference, you need to become super-frugal and practice “guerrilla frugality.” (Note, it’s not “gorilla,” which some readers have mistakenly used in their correspondence with me. Gorilla is the ape!)
In the book, we talk (in war terms) of donning the battle fatigues of the “Frugality Guerrilla,” which we shortened to “Frooger.”
I’ve used the photo of a brown-bag lunch to illustrate this blog, since the character in the novel starts to brown bag it once he decides he wants to be “findependent” by age 50. In his guest post here at the Hub last week, millennial Sean Cooper also describes how he “brown bagged” it (among many other frugal endeavours) to accelerate his mortgage pay down campaign.
Formal definitions in the Glossary of the new ebooks
In the glossary to two new e-books published earlier this month, we offer these two definitions:
Guerrilla Frugality: A term invented by the author to describe the “warlike” mentality of being super-frugal in order to resist the strong consumption messages of America’s markets and advertisers.
Frooger (Frugality Guerrilla): An invented term in this book describing anyone highly committed to being frugal and saving money.
US fee-only financial planner Sheryl Garrett used the term “frooger” in both her foreword to the US edition of Findependence Day, published in 2013, as well as the new US ebook. Because it appears near the front, you can read Sheryl’s foreword free by clicking on the “Look Inside” feature on either the full book or the abbreviated e-book edition.
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While more and more financial pundits seem more inclined to retire the term Retirement, it’s by no means clear what the preferred term should be. Obviously I’m biased since I’ve invested six years in the term “Findependence,” culminating in this web site, the Financial Independence Hub. Over the weekend, we linked to Roger Wohlner’s site and his reposting of a one-year-old posting by me arguing the case for Financial Independence over Retirement. And last week, we posted financial planner Jenya Rose’s piece making the case for Happy Money over Findependence.
