Mr. Money Mustache did what many dreamed of: He retired when he was 30. Yet he's not what most people would call rich. Instead, he's just remarkably adept at living well below his means.

The success of his eponymous blog has helped, but Mr. Money Mustache (he prefers not to give out his real name) mostly achieved his financial independence by living a lifestyle about 50% less expensive than his peers. By avoiding car loans and a high mortgage, and keeping spending down on clothes and restaurants, he and his wife managed to save $4,000 a month and later $7,000 a month. They ended up retiring with around $600,000 in the bank. Funneling that extra money into "very boring conservative Vanguard index funds and a rental house or two," the pair eventually had enough income from capital gains that they didn't need full-time jobs anymore.

See also: 15 tips on turning your finances around in 2015

A former tech-industry worker, Mr. Money Mustache now spends much of his time raising his children, and taking a three-week vacation each month. If you're thinking "that must be nice," you're not alone. Beware, though: As Mr. Money Mustache himself has noted, he's the kind of guy who would — even if you gave him a million dollars today — "still be riding his old bike to the grocery store tomorrow, and bringing home the organic produce in a backpack from 1999." In other words, his lifestyle may not be for everyone. Mashable recently spoke with Mr. Money Mustache about his unique take on personal finance. Check out some of the highlights, below:

Q&A with Mr. Money Mustache

Mashable: Your philosophy seems a bit hardcore. Do you think most people would be happy living an extremely frugal lifestyle, or is this just for some?

Mr. Money Mustache: I think you must have me confused with someone else: My so-called frugality is really lightweight — just shaving the very tip off of the enormous iceberg of unnecessary flab that makes up the standard American lifestyle. But since our starting point in this country is so inefficient, it is really easy for most people with middle-class or above incomes to cut their spending in half, and still end up with a better life. So yeah, I think anyone could be happy living the life my family leads.

It is possible to go many times further than I have, but it takes more skill and dedication as you go further down the path, and the returns decrease the further you go. So I tend to focus on the low-hanging fruit.

Image: Mr. Money Mustache

Did you always think like this, or did you have some sort of epiphany that made you see money differently?

For better or for worse, I was probably born this way. I tend to see the inefficiencies of systems, and they yell out at me, so I can't help but try to fix them.

As a kid, I used to streamline my paper route with a stopwatch to try to get the work done faster. Then I did the same hacking of the menial chores at all my minimum wage jobs as a teenager and the study material in high school. This made me realize I should go into engineering, and when I graduated, I noticed that the career world and paychecks are just the same thing: a game which you can play at all different levels of efficiency. As it turned out, it doesn't take much tweaking to cut the length of your mandatory working career down by at least 50%, or 75%, if you do it with a little bit more gusto.

Can someone live the type of frugal lifestyle you advocate, and live in an expensive location like New York City or San Francisco?

Yeah, definitely. In fact, places like that are where it works best because you have a wider spectrum of available incomes and lifestyle costs to play with. To make the housing affordable, you need to work harder with Craigslist, personal connections, friends, roommates, etc. Food is affordable anywhere in the U.S. as long as you get it in a grocery store instead of the restaurant. And in the city, you can generally get by without a car, which cuts out the largest expense for many younger people.

But the key is that you should only live in an expensive location if you are taking advantage of it: climbing quickly up the income ladder, or making high-powered connections that will help you out for the rest of your life. So you need to devote 10% of your time to getting ahead, so that you actually take advantage all the great people and opportunities of the big city. If you're just going to be a generic five-figure cubicle worker, there is no need to compete for overpriced housing in NYC or D.C. — head west or south to any of the beautiful and less crowded cities the U.S. has to offer, with better weather as a side benefit.

What's your take on vacations? It seems to me that no matter what you do on vacation, you end up spending more than you think you will. And what if you really enjoy traveling to expensive places like Europe?

I spend a lot of every year traveling, but we usually spend very little on the experience. Sometimes, we even turn a profit if I rent out my own vacant house while taking longer trips. But it may be because my idea of fun is unusual: I like living and working with people who actually live there, rather than just breezing through as a tourist. For example, one time I spent the winter in Hawaii building a vacation suite onto the back of a friend's house, in exchange for free housing and some good meals.

If you develop a network of good friends who live in various nice places around the world, everyone can visit each other for amazing vacations, and yet nobody has to spend much of anything beyond the bare air-transport expenses. This sounds silly as a standalone tip for frugal vacationing, but if you live a rich life of meeting people, volunteering and working in various places, you can end up with friends scattered around, and this is a great thing.

What's the one standard piece of personal-finance advice that you don't abide by?

The most surprising one for some people is that I have never used a budget. Instead of planning out the spending each month, my strategy was always just to make every category as efficient as possible. As long as your spending is far less than your income, you'll never run into trouble this way.

As a student, this idea had to be pretty strict since I was paying for my own education, and didn't want to go into debt for it. So house parties instead of the fancy clubs, no car, photocopied textbooks, thrift-store corduroy — the whole thing. After graduating and getting a real job, I was able to let the rules slide a little — buying a nice house, doing restaurants occasionally and having a car that didn't burn too much money. But carrying over the starving-student ethos for the first bit of adulthood is really helpful — it keeps you from getting ahead of yourself.

And most people get way ahead very quickly. For example, buying yourself a car when you don't even have the spare cash to pay for it easily without a car loan? Complete financial suicide!

What's your advice on technology? For instance, Windows PCs are cheaper than Macs, but Macs tend to have fewer problems. Do you lean one way or the other?

I have always been a bit of a technology addict, from my first Commodore 64 back in the early 1980s, all the way through my working career as a software engineer. So I probably collect a few more gadgets than I should. My whole house is automated with various phones and tablets controlling nerdy DIY energy-saving and web-monitoring stuff, and fancy streaming audio through really good sound systems. So there are a bunch of different operating systems and bits of hardware in use.

However, for getting real work done these days, I am in the Google camp: Android for the phone, open source and configurable things whenever possible, and Windows 7 with Chrome and Google Docs for my blogging desktop PC and laptop.

No offense to Mac users — I love the hardware, but the software pisses me off to no end by trying to hide the technical details from me. I need to know where my sh*t is stored, and move it around between various devices quickly. None of this "iTunes," "library," or "gallery" nonsense — software and digital media consists of files in directories on a storage device, and nobody should pretend otherwise. The fact that Apple stuff costs much more just makes the decision even easier.

What do you do for health care?

We try to combine a mixture of do-it-yourself health care (staying as healthy as possible) with minimal health insurance, just to protect us in the case of emergency.

So I use a bike, walking or running for most of my transportation year-round, and try to spend several hours outside doing physical stuff every day. Stay away from sugars and breads, and keep lean; enjoy a beer or wine occasionally, but not to excess, and lift weights at least a little bit every day. This feels great, but at my age [40], it also starts to have a significant financial effect, since you rarely need to go to the doctor, and will end up with fewer joint and back injuries, less chance of hypertension, diabetes, stroke, heart problems and all the other old-man ailments.

Then we maintain a minimal health insurance plan with Golden Rule that has a $10K deductible — this costs us $237 per month for our family of 3. The more financial cushion you have, the better it works out to have a high-deductible plan. So far, we've had no real health care costs since moving to the U.S. 15 years ago, except the birth of our son.

Can you offer three simple tips that the average person can use to be more frugal?

Of course, I have hundreds of them, but for the big three to get started:

Live a local life: If you design the right life for yourself, your friends, work and favorite things to do can all be within a few miles of where you live, and you can get to them all without driving a car. This will save you hundreds of thousands of dollars, but also improve your health, focus and general life satisfaction because you'll develop a real community, and spend more time outdoors. Luckily, you can make this adjustment one step at a time: Maybe start by prioritizing the local stuff a little more when planning out your weekends.

Muscle over motor: Whenever you have a choice between doing something with your real body or a lazy shortcut, choose the more badass way. This includes biking instead of driving, walking instead of a taxi, exploring nature instead of tourist attractions and even stairs instead of elevators. It's deceptively simple, but it serves as a filter to rule out much of the nonsense that has crept into modern life.

Become a producer rather than a consumer: Instead of searching for ways to be entertained, find out how entertaining it is to design and create things of your own. Creating great food saves you from depending on restaurants. Writing, music or photography make a great replacement for watching TV. Developing your own fitness and athletic ability is much more useful than being a dedicated sports fan. Building and maintaining your house, car or garden is an upgrade from paying others to do the same thing. You end up with a rich, busy and interesting life, which miraculously costs far less than your previous life was burning up.