Karl Rabeder : he lost his fortune and gained a life..

There is a saying in german: simple people live happy lives” and Karl Rrabeder from Austria has become a perfect example of this. Mr Karl Rabeder, 47, a businessman from Telfs(Austria) is in the process of selling his luxury 3,455 sq ft villa with lake, sauna and spectacular mountain views over the Alps, valued at £1.4 million.

Also for sale is his beautiful old stone farmhouse in Provence with its 17 hectares overlooking the arrière-pays, on the market for £613,000. Already gone is his collection of six gliders valued at £350,000, and a luxury Audi A8, worth around £44,000.

Mr Rabeder has also sold the interior furnishings and accessories business – from vases to artificial flowers – that made his fortune.

"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing,"

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains with some clothes, two boxes of books and a laptop. He will live on a monthly stipend of about $1290(INR 57000) and is confident he wont need half of it.

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.

"For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness," he said. "I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years," said Mr Rabeder.

But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling.

"More and more I heard the words: 'Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life'," he said. "I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need.

However, 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."

He had similar feelings of guilt while on gliding trips in South America and Africa. "I increasingly got the sensation that there is a connection between our wealth and their poverty," he said.

On one trip, rabeder met a gifted carpenter. “He was an artistic person with ideas for custom-built furniture, and he needed a special kind of saw. Without collateral, the bank would not advance him the money to buy it. So I gave him $300. I was an open-ended loan, but the next year, he met me at the air-port with a big hug and said. ‘here’s your money!’ now he has a business that feeds his children and fulfills him artistically, and it was just so easy!”

Suddenly, he realised that "if I don't do it now I won't do it for the rest of my life".

Mr Rabeder decided to raffle his alpine home, selling 21999 lottery tickets priced at just £87 each. The provence house in the village cruis is on sale at the local estate agent.

all the money will go into his micro-credit charity, which offers small loans to Latin America and builds development aid strategies to self employed people in El-Salvador, Honduras , Bolivia ,Peru, Argentina and Chile

Since selling his belongings, Mr Rabeder said he felt "free, the opposite of heavy".

But he said he did not judge those who chose to keep their wealth. "I do not have the right to give any other person advice. I was just listening to the voice of my heart and soul."

A great inspiration for us to do something that can really make a difference in the world we live in..