10 years of life without money or a salary – how an Australian woman survives

Australian Jo Nemeth has lived without money for more than ten years, having completely given up her salary and shopping trips. She grows vegetables, tends a garden and exchanges her labour for housing and food. The trigger was a book by Irishman Mark Boyle about giving up finance. The first step was a move to a farm in 2015. Today she measures success by the quality of relationships, not money.

Australian Jo Nemeth, a former community development specialist, has lived without money for more than ten years, having completely given up her salary and habitual shopping trips. Instead, she grows vegetables, tends a garden and exchanges her labour for housing and food. According to her, this step allowed her to shed stress and find a genuine sense of security. The origins of the decision lie in concern about the state of the environment. The trigger was encountering the story of Irishman Mark Boyle, who experimented with giving up finance. The first step was a move to a friend's farm in 2015 in exchange for help with the household. Later she settled with an old friend, cementing the model of natural exchange. The food question is resolved through community gardens, fermentation and processing of surpluses. Local residents regularly share food with her. The floods she lived through in 2022 in Lismore convinced her of the fragility of global supply systems. Nemeth is convinced that true resilience lies in community sufficiency, not isolated self-sufficiency. Today she measures life's success by the quality of human relationships, not by the numbers in a bank account.