The 47-year-old businessman who grew up poor and made his fortune selling interior furnishings and accessories is selling his £1.4 million luxury Alpine villa and his £613,000 stone farmhouse in Provence. He's already sold his collection of six gliders and his Audi A8, and is giving his money to charities that help small businesses get started."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, but he will not even take a salary from these.
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."
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Suddenly, he realised that "if I don't do it now I won't do it for the rest of my life".
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Since selling his belongings, Mr Rabeder said he felt "free, the opposite of heavy".
Rabeder has placed his mountain retreat up for raffle at a price of 99 euros per ticket. If you'd like to purchase one, you must be an EU citizen and buy your ticket by February 28. Your chance of winning? One in 21,999, the number of tickets being sold.
If, on the other hand, you'd like to buy his house in Provence, contact the real estate folks there.
Worker bees, dream on.
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