Despite living in one of the country’s most expensive cities—San Diego, where median home prices have skyrocketed to nearly $1 million—bartender Alicia Rice routinely saves $2,000 a month and has no debt.
Despite living in one of the country’s most expensive cities—San Diego, where median home prices have skyrocketed to nearly $1 million—bartender Alicia Rice routinely saves $2,000 a month and has no debt.
“People think living like this is deprivation or I’m suffering, but I’m completely content with what I have,” says Rice, who earns $70,000 a year. “It’s very liberating not to want things all the time. We’ve been sold this idea that more is more.”
Rice, 40, who chronicles her adventures in what she calls “ultraminimalism” on her YouTube channel Exploravore, estimates she has saved tens of thousands in the five years she’s been an extreme minimalist.
Depending on whether she’s traveling, Rice stashes away $500 to $2,000 a month in a savings account. (She does not invest in the stock market.)
Compare this to the $1,000 a month she figures she used to shell out on nonessentials while living like a maximalist in Las Vegas, with at least 1,000 items in her wardrobe.
“I had a gigantic walk-in closet filled with every kind of clothing you can imagine,” she says in a video. “The irony is, I didn’t wear most of it.”
Despite working two jobs and having a cheap $600 monthly rent, she says she was living “paycheck to paycheck” and “not saving anything.”
After a breakup, the former swimming coach moved to San Diego and began a decade-long process of shedding most of her possessions. Even as a child, she’d had a natural inclination to not want things. (“Why would I want more than one doll?” she asks in a video. “You can only hold one at a time.”)
Somehow, that philosophy had gotten buried under rampant materialism.
She became more committed to minimalism after seeing the hit 2021 Netflix documentary “The Minimalists,” featuring minimalist gurus Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus.
Rice isn’t alone in her desire to live with less. Interest in minimalism has risen sharply. In the past 20 years, web searches for the term “minimalist design” in the U.S. have been steadily increasing, according to Google Trends.
Similar movements that have taken hold in recent years include decluttering (Marie Kondo is the reigning queen), frugalism, no or low buy, the circular economy, and zero waste. All have a similar goal: to mitigate the damage that mass consumerism—running wild since the 1940s—has done to bank accounts as well as 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 journey took a turn toward the extreme in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when she was forced to spend much of her time at home with her possessions. Then, in 2021, she wanted to drive up the West Coast and didn’t want to pay to store her things.
So she got rid of most of them.
The Spartan lifestyle has been a boon for 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 owned a credit card.
“That’s a prison system,” she asserts.
Besides her $2,300 monthly rent (which includes utilities) for a one-bedroom (she could not find a studio), she has only five bills each month: cellphone ($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 charitable program for $40 a month.
Despite frequently uploading videos to her YouTube channel, she has no Wi-Fi, instead using the free connection at her local library.
But even extreme minimalists have to eat. Rice, who is vegan, figures 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’d previously given away and decided to try living without most of it.
Instead of shelling out for a mattress, box spring, frame, and headboard, which could have easily run her thousands, she bought a $170 Japanese tatami mat on Amazon.com.
A friend gave her a vintage lamp, and she reclaimed a folding chair she’d lent another friend. She does without a couch, chairs, tables, a desk, a TV, and any decor. (The apartment came with an air conditioner, which she hardly runs, and a microwave.)
In the kitchen, she has one pot, one pan, and one wooden bowl. Her beauty routine consists of one product—coconut oil soap—which she uses for her face, body, and hair. She buys no makeup except lip balm. Her wardrobe is pared down to 23 items, including shoes.
Compare this with the average of 176 items of clothing an American woman owns, according to Capsule Wardrobe.
“You just have to be smart about what you buy,” Rice says. “When I was in the mountains of Oregon, and it was 20 degrees and snowing, I was still warm because I layered two coats.”
The world’s most famous minimalist, Steve Jobs, wore a black shirt and jeans every day, but Rice loves bold colors and crop tops.
“You can have a colorful wardrobe as a minimalist,” she says. “You can wear whatever you want. The idea is to not have too much of it.”
Probably most shockingly, the content creator doesn’t own a computer (a brand-new laptop runs around $2,000) and uploads everything via her iPhone and Dropbox.
Her determination to own as little as possible also extends to homeownership.
“Thirty years of paying off a mortgage so I’m finally debt-free at 70?” she asks in a video. “That sounds like absolute prison to me.”
Because of how little she owns, Rice can fit everything into her Volkswagen Beetle and take off traveling whenever she feels like it. (She spent months tooling around the West Coast.) Her goal is to live out of a backpack in various countries. Eventually, she’d like to build an off-grid eco-friendly cabin or tiny house.
“This isn’t about an aesthetic or ‘look at me, I’m so cool and different,’” she says. “It’s about the bigger picture of doing better as a human. The amount we consume is outrageous and unsustainable to the planet.”
As to whether she will one day want to return to owning a bunch of stuff, she says, “Absolutely not. It feels normal and natural to live this way.”