How to live on $432 a month in America • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by hyperpape » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

walleeee wrote: post #127

viccis wrote: 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.

Huh? My in-laws came from industrial maintenance/construction companies in rural North Carolina. They vote for Trump, majority of them go to Southern Baptist churches. I spent two years living out there and working for one of their industrial maintenance companies.

This is not what they aspire to, or what 95% percent of the people living there aspire to.

Sure, the fishing sounds good, and the country living, but living without a car? No TV? Never eating out? That's weird, man.

This guy's life is no more representative of how most people in red states live than any blue state office worker who idly talks about going to live on a commune is representative of how people in NYC live.

Sure, lots of folks from any culture have a dream of getting back to the simple life. But it's an idle fantasy for almost everyone.

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

#152

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:32 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #10

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #7

Just make sure you don't get sick.

Do like your great grandfather did, eat some hot chicken soup and go to bed.

Just a couple generations back my family members were dying of preventable illness. Like I'm not joking, we have the records.

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

#153

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #97

jedimastert wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't miss the point that I'm making, which is that the standards of living in 1960 for some people was built on the back of exploiting others.

Sigh. Again, that has nothing to do with my comment. My point was that living standards at X point in the past were normal for the time but aren’t normal for today. 1960 was a random year I picked. The point is that if one can manage to live “behind the times” materially, life is cheaper.

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by skyyler » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #134

I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself - hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater. FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45 miles away) - and I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. I mean…

The lack of a budget for heating in an article that uses the term "American Siberia" is so hilariously out of touch that it makes the rest of the article farcical.

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

#155

Post by aaronbaugher » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

poopsmithe wrote: post #143

How do you find a property like that? Is there a Zillow for cheap rural land?

My cheap rural place is on Zillow, so you can probably just use that. Pull up a map, identify a couple of large cities (St. Louis and Kansas City, for instance), find a point between them, and zoom in. Repeat until you find a spot you like. It's a really, really big country and most of it isn't urban, so there are lots of places to choose from, with a wide variety of weather conditions, population densities, and other aspects.

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

#156

Post by ianferrel » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:36 PM UTC

I like this article. I think it's a little unrealistic in many ways, but it's good to consider that a life does not require extravagance. However:

>often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.

>They’d merely need to content themselves with a manner of living that would be more in line with that of their own great-grandfathers

The problem isn't that we can affordably live like our great-grandparents. It's that we can't affordably live like our parents and grandparents did.

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

#157

Post by bobthepanda » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #70

HankStallone wrote: post #5

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…

> 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 only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too. This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in an urban area and I haven't eaten at a chain restaurant outside of road…

there is a huge market distortion in that dense, walkable living is illegal to build in most of the country. i've seen polling that suggests walkability is in demand for about 40% of the population but there isn't 40% of available homes in such a configuration, so there are also a lot of people who get priced out of that and into suburbia.

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

#158

Post by theendisney » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:38 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #132

nkurz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One 10hr shift is ~30% of what you need. So multiply that by 3.3 and... oh hey you're working nearly 40hrs a week to afford your impoverished lifestyle in the middle of nowhere. Are you possibly confusing "per week" with "per month"?

Honestly, this is the weirdest way the author could've written that sentence. He should've said either "one 10 hour shift per month will make 30% of what you need to live here" or even "one 10 hour shift per week will make more than what you need to live here."

It doesn't seem to be caused by his lifestyle as the posters above also cant divide by $7 per hour. Its 62 hours or 11 shifts.

I think hé means one should do all kinds of small projects.

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

#159

Post by fzeroracer » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

monroeclinton wrote: post #144

fzeroracer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, looking at the map of Massena this seems like bullshit. I've lived without a car for my entire life across multiple states and it is incredibly onerous in even mildly dense areas.

https://www.slcnypublictransit.com/transit-schedules It seems like they have a good number of routes and do route deviation within 3/4 of a mile of the bus stop.

Frequency is often as important as the route from experience; because a route that's reasonably distant from your location can be walked to/biked to etc but a low-frequency route means it's something you need to plan your entire day around. And if you miss any bus then you're stranded (which, given that they don't have internet I'm curious how they manage...)

Most of the bus routes here seem to run maybe twice a day, once early in the morning and then once late in the afternoon. There's a few more frequent ones that run on the hour but it looks to be closer to the denser cores.

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

#160

Post by shusaku » Fri, May 23, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

Hold up. You don’t need a car due to a robust transportation system. You don’t work too much because of a high minimum wage. Health care is free. Retirement is handled by someone else. Education expenses are free. Child raising expenses free! You are provided free entertainment, news, etc at the library. The author forgot about how they were going to pay for clothing, etc, but there’s food stamps on the other side of the balance. Your taxes are zero, paid by richer people. The 29k payment for your house is taken from a homesteading fund.

Somehow I think grandpa would be suspicious of this tale of bootstrapping just being socialism. But why not? I think people in the left have been insisting that if we gave people a robust baseline for free (by taxing the rich), we could revive this sort of lifestyle.