Family Lives Without Money


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A Berlin family of three has been living on practically nothing but love and the goodwill of others for more than two years and counting?not as a victims of the rough economy, but as activists who are on a money strike to protest what they call our ?excess-consumption society.?

?As consumers, we support the system, and we are all responsible for making a wasteful society,? Raphael Fellmer, 29, told Yahoo! Shine. ?This strike is to inspire other people to reflect about our other possibilities.?

Fellmer, who said he?d held jobs since he was 12 years old, began his protest after years of working in hotels, bars, restaurants and various offices. In 2010, after graduating from college in the Hague as a European Studies major, he and two friends embarked upon a 15-month ?journey of humanity? to raise awareness of environmental destruction and of society?s many wastes, including estimates that about one-third of all food produced worldwide (valued at about $1 trillion a year) gets wasted.

Now the couple, along with their 18-month-old daughter Alma Lucia, are continuing to live nearly money-free in Berlin, where they do odd jobs and organizing work in exchange for living space, with roommates, in the Peace House Martin Niem?ller, which contains various non-profits.

One is through the fast-growing German movement of ?foodsharing,? in which adherents use the Internet to share edible food that?s been foraged from grocery-store dumpsters. Fellmer founded an organization in which he partnered with a leading German organic-food chain to create an efficient way of ?rescuing? food for distribution just before it is thrown away.

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meanwhile, i just threw out a bunch of food,including prime steaks out of my fridge because they've been there too long and spoiled. this sucker is punishing his family, because nobody gives a ****.

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i was thinking they had a farm and raised their own food, etc...

that's almost like saying a homeless person is living 'without money'

While I do agree to an extent, the point they're trying to make isn't that it's possible to live without money per se. It's more that we're so wasteful that they can actually live practically for free based on what is being thrown/wasted. Which sadly, is very true. With the amount of pretty much everything that we waste on a daily basis, it's actually quite disheartening to see how many people starve and or don't have certain things.

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