By Sheryl Smolkin

You are back to work after your summer holiday. You have used up all your vacation days for the year. It’s dark outside when you have to get up for work. You’d like to retire early, but life is expensive and forever is a long time.

What are you willing to give up both now and later to achieve your goal? Do you have what it takes to live very frugally? Here are some blogs and blog posts that may give you some ideas if packing it in really early is at the top of your bucket list.

Engineer Tim Stobbs who lives in Regina, Saskatchewan is the author of Canadian Dream: Free at 45. While his objective initially was to retire at age 45, he’s pushed that date back to age 40. His ultimate goal between investments and home equity is a net worth of around $1 million. With a net worth in August 2016 of $883,000, he is getting close to meeting his target. He has some Dark Fears but has come to realize it is impossible to cover off every possible contingency in advance.

Freedom 35 is written by two married engineers in their early 30s living in sunny California to document their journey to financial independence and early retirement. Their Progress to Freedom 35: 2016 Q1 Update reveals that depending on the following projected withdrawal rates, they are less than three years away from bidding adieu to their employers:

Projected retirement date at 3% withdrawal: May 2022
Projected retirement date at 4% withdrawal: Sep. 2019
Projected retirement date at 5% withdrawal: Jan. 2018

Mr. Money Moustache was a thirty-something retiree when he started his blog. He and his wife retired from real work back in 2005 to start a family. “This was achieved not through luck or amazing skill, but simply by living a lifestyle about 50% less expensive than most of our peers and investing the surplus in very boring conservative Vanguard index funds and a rental house or two,” he writes. “Yet the whole country seems to be living ridiculously expensive lifestyles while thinking they are completely normal, and then being baffled when they have no money left over to buy their own freedom.”

Living a FI describes himself as a 38-year old happily retired dude (formerly a software engineer) living in Boston. He says that if you are close to the end of your early retirement journey, what you need to do is Build a Vision of Life Without Work. His favourite approach to managing the transition between work and retirement was created by Ernie Zelinski, author of several early-retirement lifestyle books.  He named the technique the “Get-A-Life-Tree.” (see above). “If you follow this method, you’ll easily wind up with tons of stuff to do, scattered over a few pages,” he explains.

And finally, ThinkSaveRetire is Steve’s blog about financial independence and taking control of his life. He figures that if he is still working at age 43 he has done something wrong. Here are several of his “must reads” if you want to get the most out of his journey.

• We meticulously budget our expenses, though I also admit when budgets  don’t work
• We are not minimalists; we simply live below our means
• Attitude is everything, and thinking positively is a powerful force

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Do you follow blogs with terrific ideas for saving money that haven’t been mentioned in our weekly “Best from the blogosphere?” Share the information on http://wp.me/P1YR2T-JR and your name will be entered in a quarterly draw for a gift card.