How To Live With (Almost) No Money

An 18-year old wrote a best-selling book on simple living in 1978. Some of her advice still holds up.

Dolly Freed had just turned 18 when she wrote an unlikely bestseller on a broken typewriter.

The young woman lived with her father, a former factory worker, at the time.

Wanting to leave the rat race behind, her father chose to quit his job and live with his daughter off $1,500 per year.

They did it by growing most of their own food, and not spending anything on what they considered luxury goods (almost everything else). It worked at least for those five years when they lived together on a rural property they owned, 40 miles outside of Philadelphia.

When Dolly’s first book Possum Living was published in 1978, it became an unexpected success. Her story resonated with drop-outs, hippies, students, artists, stoners, activists, and other freaks that rejected hypercapitalist values.

Dolly Freed in a TV documentary in the late 1970s (source: YouTube)

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The book got forgotten, rediscovered, and forgotten again.

More than three decades after it first came out, a magazine writer tracked down the woman who’d called herself Dolly Freed (which wasn’t her real name).

A former NASA engineer looking back on a varied career, she now lived in Texas and worked in environmental education. Recounting her life story, she said soon after writing the book she felt the urge to go to college and start a family, so she took up regular work and had a bad fallout with her father.

Still, her overall views on life, nature and society didn’t change that much. Now close to 60, she wasn’t quite as radical in her beliefs anymore – as she told the writer, her family of four was “half-possuming” now.

Intrigued by her story, I bought a used copy of the 1978 book for less than $5. (I’m sure she would love that.) It’s written in a fun and light-hearted way. I read it in one session.

There are two bad chapters – one about laws and guns, one about medical aid and insurance. Here, 18-year old Dolly sounds naive and precocious, even ignorant. She added an afterword to later editions of Possum Living saying she feels ashamed about certain portions of her book.

Despite these little missteps, much of the advice she typed up as an 18-year old in rural Pennsylvania is still applicable.

Let’s look in detail at what made Possum Living connect with so many readers over four decades, and how the Freeds saved so much money.