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How to live on $432 a month in America

shagbark.substack.com

121–130 of 764 posts

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#121
post #2

I've often felt this way about some of today's complaints. I grew up in area like what was mentioned in this article and I long for the day I can go back there. I would in a heartbeat if my partner shared the same mentality as me. I don't really see a point in living a big city with the remote job I have and that many others have if I can live in a smaller area that still has humans but much cheaper way of living. Ev…

[deleted]

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#122
> any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream

If (and only if) you aren't socially different from the communities you'd be moving to. Being gay or trans, for instance, might mark you out as a target in a lot of the places where you could live this cheaply. Plenty of race, religions, or political beliefs that would make it untenable.

It's hard to claim that any American can achieve this.

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#123
There's so many issues with this article. Ignoring the real costs of living in declining rural areas (poor health services, vanishing community), they also fail to account that you also cannot raise a family there properly. Schooling is often poor and the infrastructure poorer and you're fucking over your kids future so you can play pretend boomer while ignoring the biggest things they benefited from.

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#124
Could not get past the multiple paragraphs of strawman nonsense. Here, let me summarize:

The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …

Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#125
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you not read the article? The whole point of it is once you get your costs down to this manageable a number, you have a lot more options for "how you're going to support yourself." You could clear $5,000-10,000 a year, which I should remind you would be tax free money simply due to the standard deduction, doing any number of things either local or remote. Ideas I'm just making up: 1. Buy, repair, and flip MacBoo…

> 3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters 5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales Those might pay well in the city, but nobody making $17/hr is going to pay more than $10/hr for lawn mowing.

That's fine, you don't need them to pay more than $10/hr. You only even need to earn say, $800 a month (I'm assuming you'd want a pickup truck to transport your mower and get around, so padding the $432 a bit) so if you worked 5 hours a week at the gas station for $340 then you need about 11 hours of $10 work per week for another $440 and you're done. If you have any savings, the current interest on $100,000 would alternatively give you $416 so you could just not work at all.

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#126
post #74
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article he mentions there is a well at the house. Also blankets and wood fires are free heat.

In what way is wood free? To heat even a tiny home purpose-built for high efficiency you'd need several acres of woods to sustainably harvest. For a falling-apart $30k hovel in upstate NY you'd probably need more like 15 acres, and you don't get a 15-acre stand of woods in the deal for that price.

Who said anything about sustainability?

My parents would heat their home this way. Actually, I think they still do. They'd gather all sorts of wood from fallen trees on other peoples' land as a sort of "service" aka- they haul it away and you don't deal with it. Is it worth the cost savings? I highly doubt it. They're just not good with managing time/money.

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#127
post #41

This almost seemed like it was going to be a Modest Proposal style tongue-in-cheek skewering of this "old man yells at cloud" style of curmudgeonly generational finger wagging. The breakdown of that $432 itself was almost enough to be a farce. But no, the author really does believe this. (Please correct if I'm wrong, as it still seems hard to believe such a fatuous piece could be written and submitted here) >At the e…

If you're so concerned about class warfare, as I agree we ought to be, you need to get along with the people from middle America or anywhere else who consider this a perfectly respectable way of life. Many of them are equally fed up with things.

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#128
In many countries around the world, $432 is more than enough.

BeWelcome.org is free accomodation for travellers, so if you need somewhere for just a couple of nights, you can stay. It’s safe; there’s an entire safety team dedicated to handling complaints.

If you settle down for too long though, it is recommended to share in paying the rent or utilities, out of politeness.

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#129
post #117

Higher income employees would pay way more than that in taxes alone. This is why properties in low and no income tax states skyrocketed. Assuming it's not high income but a real scrounger, this is leaving out way too much. Out of pocket health insurance will easily quadruple that number. Utilities could too, depending.

Out of pocket health insurance 1400 a month? Really? It that’s true, that is criminally ridiculous. Why do people accept that, when even in developing nations basic health care is free, and there are plenty of private choices. Decent health insurance costs about 150-300 a month the world over, except in the USA where it is ten times that for no reason whatsoever besides greed and the fact that healthcare is a basic n…

The main reason is that the government isn't funding it, like in other countries. I do agree the healthcare system in the US should be reformed. But the cost isn't going to go all away - it's just going to be shifted to higher taxes. Which is fine.

Re: How to live on $432 a month in America

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived most of my life in (or outside of) small towns, and some of it in a city. I've noticed that my small-town friends who moved to the city would often talk about all the culture and food choices, but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's o…

I recently visited New York City for the first time and honestly wasn't impressed. Outside of a few neat things like visiting the cronut place, I could do nearly everything the same back home. The bagel places were indeed good, but not noticeably different than the hipster bagel places in my city. Wood fired pizza was good at several places, but again...none were noticeably different than the wood fired oven fancy pl…

You can go bar to bar to bar to bar until 4am in nyc and then find $2 pizza by the slice that is actual pizza and not 7/11 pizza. You can’t really do that anywhere else what with how the busybodies regulate their liqour licenses and the lack of density justifying many 24hr food establishments. You can do all of this entirely on foot too within a few blocks. Nowhere else in the US is like that with such glaringly obvious economies of scale going on in your favor.
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