The self-help guru who owns just 15 things

James Altucher can fit everything he owns into a small, canvas carry-on bag.

A few months ago, the boyish 48-year-old let the lease expire on his Cold Spring, N.Y., apartment, and dumped or donated virtually everything he owned, more than 40 garbage bags of sheets, dishes, clothes, books, his college diploma, even childhood photo albums. Since then, he’s been bouncing among friends’ apartments and Airbnb rentals.

It is not that he is down on his luck. Several of the 16 books he has written, including his 2013 personal-empowerment manifesto, “Choose Yourself,” continue to sell briskly. His weekly podcasts, “The James Altucher Show,” featuring interviews with notables as diverse as Ron Paul and Luther Campbell of 2 Live Crew, and “Question of the Day,” with Stephen Dubner, are downloaded about two million times a month.

Mr. Altucher is simply practicing what he preaches. Over the last half-decade, this former tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist and financial pundit has reinvented himself as a gimlet-eyed self-help guru, preaching survival in an era when the American Dream — the gold-embossed college diploma, the corner office, the three-bedroom home — seems like a sham. So one by one, he has shed all of them.

“I have ambition,” he said, “to have no ambition.”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.