Admirable or Insane?

I come out on the side of admirable although living in a small wooden hut in the mountains seems a bit extreme.

From the Telegraph (UK)...

Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder is giving away every penny of his £3 million fortune after realising his riches were making him unhappy. "My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come."

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck. His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America.

For many years he said he was simply not "brave" enough to give up all the trappings of his comfortable existence. The tipping point came while he was on a three-week holiday with his wife to islands of Hawaii. "It was the biggest shock in my life, when I realised how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is," he said. "In those three weeks, we spent all the money you could possibly spend. But in all that time, we had the feeling we hadn't met a single real person – that we were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly and the guests played the role of being important and nobody was real."

Oddly, other than the Hawaiian vacation there was no other mention of his wife nor a photo of her. Hmmm, I wonder how she feels about his new endeavor.