1 hour : 1 day. I love living cheap because it creates miraculous ratios. For every hour I work now, I get one full day in the future to focus 100% on whatever I want. (I'm about to move to latin america to work on some new stuff, and am finishing up a last-minute web/design contract before I go.)
Of course, a good ratio depends not only on living cheap but also getting paid reasonably well for something that doesn't kill you (or your soul).
The first time I got anywhere near this ratio was 8 years ago, but to get it I had to sleep in a tent, wake up at 5 AM and plant trees like a madman on the side of a mountain every day for an entire summer. It was my own personal hell, but then paid for a full year of doing what I loved for free, which then led to the best opportunities of my life, so that I never had to go back to those damned mountains again.
I'm not very good at side projects... I only really get into the zone when I commit myself to something fully. So being able to partition my life into discrete segments of "sell my services" and "build something I care about" is valuable to me.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/9683205/Resume-with-horizontal-tim...