I have spent a lot of time thinking about how much money I need to earn to build the life I want.

Lately, I have been thinking about a different question.

What if I build a life that needs less money to run?

I am not talking about living without money, or making everything free. There will always be things I have to buy and things I cannot produce myself. But how much a family needs every month depends a lot on how that family lives. That is what I want to change.

Dhaka is not the model

I live alone in Dhaka because of my job, in a shared room in a mess with two other people. A significant part of my monthly expenses goes to rent. Then there is food, transport, mobile internet, electricity, and other personal costs.

I manage to keep my own monthly cost around BDT 10,000 to 12,000, but that does not mean life is cheap. I am simply managing within what I have.

My family is in the village. I send around BDT 28,000 a month to them. Part of it goes toward the bank loan, and the rest covers their expenses. My father also has a retirement income, and there is some small family earning from the village. Together, we manage the household, but there is not much room for anything extra.

If my wife and children were living with me in Dhaka instead, the cost would look completely different. A small family would need a separate home, and rent alone could take a large part of the income. Add food, electricity, gas, transport, school costs, and medicine, and the numbers grow fast.

I do not think the answer is to keep earning more just to keep up with that. I would rather change what the life itself costs.

No rent for the house

My family already has a home in the village, so there is no monthly rent. The house still needs maintenance, and things still break and need repair, so it is not free. But maintaining a house we already own is a different calculation than paying rent every month just to have a place to live.

Rice from our own land

We already have agricultural land in the village. Right now, most of it is given to others to farm on a share basis, and I get a portion of what they grow. That share is not enough to cover the family’s rice for the year. We still buy rice for four or five months.

When I move back and take over the farming myself, that should change. The full harvest will go to my own family instead of being split with whoever is cultivating it now, and that alone should cover our rice for the whole year.

Vegetables, and less exposure to the market

I also want to grow vegetables for the household, according to what we actually need, not to fill every gap in our diet. Whatever the garden produces is one less thing we have to buy. The same applies to a pond, ducks, chickens, and fruit trees over time.

We will still buy meat, spices, and other things we cannot produce ourselves. We will grow what we can and buy the rest.

There is another side to this. Food prices in Bangladesh tend to rise over time, and rarely come back down for long. If I am buying everything from the market, every price increase lands directly on my monthly budget. If I am growing it myself, I do not need to track whether prices are up or down that month. I am not selling anything, so the market price stops being something I have to think about. I grow according to what my family needs, and use it for that.

I also want to grow at least some of our food myself, using organic material instead of relying heavily on chemicals. This is not about what is wrong with market food. It is about having more control over how my own family eats.

Water, cooking, and electricity

Our house has a tube-well, so we do not depend entirely on an electric pump for water. We already use a traditional clay stove with firewood and dry leaves, and LPG when we need it, so cooking is not tied to one option either.

I would like to add solar power eventually, if it makes financial and practical sense. That does not mean cutting off the electricity grid completely, at least not right away. It depends on the situation. If I can manage more of my own power at some stage, I may be able to depend on the grid less than I do now. For now, the goal is just to use less of it, not to cut it off completely.

Transport

In Dhaka, moving around every day is part of life. In the village, I will not need to travel daily for work, so there is less need for regular transport at all. We already have a motorcycle in the family. Later on, I may also get a bicycle for short trips, mainly when I actually need to go somewhere, not as a daily habit.

What I am not willing to cut

A lower-cost life does not mean a lower-quality one. I want my children to have a proper education, money available for medicine and emergencies, a decent home, and a stable income. What I question is the idea that a better life always has to cost more.

I do not fully trust the current education system. It is built to produce employees, not to develop a child’s actual ability. Since we live in a society that expects children to go to school, mine will go. But I plan to take on a large part of their education myself. We already have a small home library, and I want to keep encouraging them to read.

Two things matter most to me here. One is communication: Bangla and English, and beyond that, French, Chinese, or Spanish if we can manage the right support for it. The other is a practical skill they can actually earn a living with. I am less interested in loading them with every subject a school curriculum demands just because it is there. Their moral upbringing is a separate thing, and it comes from the family and the environment around them, not from a classroom.

The real reason

Spending less does mean I can save more, and that matters. But it is not the main reason I want a lower-cost life.

If my family’s basic life costs BDT 50,000 a month, I need to find at least that much every month just to keep things running. If our basic needs cost significantly less than that, I have more room to make decisions. I do not need to chase a higher income every year just to keep up with the cost of living. I can save more, take more time for other work, and spend more time with my family, without one missed salary immediately becoming a crisis at home.

This connects directly to the plan I described in the previous article. I want to leave my job eventually, but that depends on having enough income, savings, and security first. If the life I am moving toward also costs less to run, the amount of income I need to reach that point becomes smaller too. These two things support each other.

Not independence, just less dependence

I do not think complete self-sufficiency is realistic, and I am not trying for it. If I need a doctor, I will pay a doctor. If something breaks and needs a technician, I will pay for that. There will always be things I cannot produce and have to buy.

What I am after is smaller than that. A house that does not need rent. Some food that comes from our own land instead of the market. Water that does not depend entirely on an electric pump. Less need to be somewhere every day for work. None of it makes us independent of everything. But together, it means our life needs less money to keep running, and that matters more to me right now than simply trying to earn more.