Man lived for an entire year without spending any money after coming up with clever idea

At around the time the first public rumbles of the global economy going to s**t were happening in 2007, Mark Boyle decided he'd try and live for a year without money.

At the time he'd been living in Bristol and managing a food shop, but he was heartily worried about his environmental footprint.

Deciding to be the change he wanted to see in the world (he got the idea from watching a DVD about Gandhi) and after talking things over with a friend, he decided that the reason why there were so many problems with the world was because people could no longer see the impact of their actions.

Mark decided he'd flip that around and live a life where he spent no money, thinking he wouldn't waste food he'd grown himself or water he'd taken the effort to purify.

Step one in his effort to live for a year without money was to find somewhere to live and got a free caravan from people who didn't want it any more.

Mark Boyle, pictured in 2019, spent years living without spending money. (Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images)

He then started volunteering at a farm in exchange for being able to plonk the caravan on their land, and he kitted it out with a wood-burner, compost toilet and homemade stove.

He wasn't able to completely go without money, as he spent £360 on a solar panel to power a light, laptop and phone which he could only receive calls on.

Mark brushed his teeth with cuttlefish bone and fennel seeds, went through newsagents bins for their papers to wipe his backside with and grew his own food, as well as scooping up waste food being chucked out by nearby restaurants and shops.

The bloke spent a year handwashing his clothes, picking stuff he needed out of skips and making the 36-mile round trip from his caravan to Bristol on his bike. He liked the lifestyle so much he decided to do a few years more of it and went without money until 2011 when he bought a pair of shoes from a charity shop.

Writing a book about his time without spending money, Mark used the proceeds to buy some land in his native Ireland and built a cabin near Galway.

Mark ended up spending three years living in a caravan, then he wrote a book and used to proceeds from that to buy land and build a cabin on it. (Channel 5)

It was here that he was visited for the documentary Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, which was aired on Channel 5 in 2021.

By this time, Mark had built his cabin and a hostel in which he let guests stay for free.

He told Fogle he sometimes felt angry at the 'big bad world' and had gone through with getting a vasectomy as he thought this world was 'not a place he wanted to bring kids up in'.

Mark's approach had cost him some romantic relationships and he said on the show that he sometimes felt lonely, but gets on well with his neighbours and is by no means a hermit.

How does a life off the grid sound to you?