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How to live on $432 a month in America

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

#331

Post by Retric »

lesuorac wrote: post #299
jvanderbot wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any discussion of staying near family and friends on a forum predominated by startups out of the bay area is completely disingenuous. But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home . Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affo…

Eh, perhaps a curious administrator can share the data but I really suspect just through sheer numbers most people on this forum do not live in the bay area. The NYC metro area is 23 million [1] which is about 7% of the country (23/300). There's a good chance somebody who works in NYC grew up nearby. That said, if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead... Even if…

People aren’t simply moving into the city locally the numbers just don’t work.

The demographics of NYC require and support the idea of a huge and constant flux of people from distant areas moving into and out of the city which matches people’s observations. Even the gender divide is abnormal, the largest age group is 25-29 for women and 30-34 for men despite more men being born vs women living longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

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

#332

Post by sandworm101 »

lesuorac wrote: post #299
jvanderbot wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any discussion of staying near family and friends on a forum predominated by startups out of the bay area is completely disingenuous. But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home . Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affo…

Eh, perhaps a curious administrator can share the data but I really suspect just through sheer numbers most people on this forum do not live in the bay area. The NYC metro area is 23 million [1] which is about 7% of the country (23/300). There's a good chance somebody who works in NYC grew up nearby. That said, if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead... Even if…

>> if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead

And the locals start to hate you for buying up land and generally raising prices enough that working folk are squeezed out of the market. Some areas are starting to enact laws to prevent productive farmland becoming condos and hobby farms for retiring city people.

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

#333

Post by yibg »

The other version of this is the whole FIRE movement. Instead of living cheap, which also affords the ability to not work much, work as normal (or more than normal) for a shorter time while living cheap, so eventually you can live cheaply forever without working.

Especially tenable for the tech crowd, where salaries are high and potentially scales well with more effort put in, even if for a short duration.

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

#334

Post by KennyBlanken »

xp84 wrote: post #270

I've commented (probably too much) to argue with the harshest critics of this piece, but I am surprised to not have seen much this criticism which is my main one: Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic. The missing piece here is social connections. Fami…

Rural living also looks cheaper because most people do not even remotely consider the costs of transportation.

The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per mile. If you have to drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back, your grocery bill goes up $18/trip. If you need to drive 15 miles to work and back, take $90/week out of your paycheck.

Then there's the fact that whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked. So The Employer gets to abuse every rule in th book because who's going to complain and risk losing their job? If The Employer decideds to drop everyone's pay by 25 cents/hour, what are you all going to do? Answer: nothing.

Meanwhile in the city you can go anywhere you want within a 500 square mile area (or more) for well under $100/month and commuter rail will take you even further for not a lot more. And you can do other things while using said transportation. No "self driving car" needed.

As a sidenote: the same author complains about the "loss of the $50 motel room" and laments they're 3x more expensive now. Days after complaining that housing isn't actually that expensive. The guy has to be a troll...

Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it.

For fucks sakes the government actually runs a program to subsidize rural Americans getting to fly around on barely-occupied turboprop planes. But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.

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

#335

Post by istjohn »

digianarchist wrote: post #227
sweeter wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's absurd. I work full time in the richest country on Earth and I can't afford an apartment and healthcare. The problem is clearly not advertising. Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their expectations" type of energy

We're all being asked to sacrifice the living standards our parents grew up with because the utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare, something most of the Western world manages to pull off without issue. We have never been more productive in this country's history and yet we cannot even meet a bar set in the 1950s. It's frankly ridiculous as i…

Median disposable household income is higher in the US than anywhere else in the world [0]. Real median personal income has increased 50% since the 1970s [1].

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...

1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/globalization-did-not-hollow-o...

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

#336

Post by y-curious »

michpoch wrote: post #93
Goronmon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, leaving the "heat" part of the list just blank is pretty telling as far as how much thought went into this.

At 4 cents per 1kWh heating will not be an issue, even with regular resistive heater. It’s almost free electricity. You could run a 1.5 kW heater 24/7 for roughly 40 USD a month. Just make sure the space is well insulated and not too large - but we’re talking about basic living, so that should be easy.

It's not about heating your house, it's about being able to leave it comfortably.

Sincerely, someone who moved from Buffalo NY to Northern California and has never once regretted it.

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

#337

Post by y-curious »

Jackson__ wrote: post #268

>Taxes: $41 >Electric: ~$30 >Water: $0 >Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there >Food: ~$300/mo. >Telephone: $8/mo >Entertainment: Fishing and library, free >Internet: Use library >Medical costs in case a moose kicks you in the nuts while fishing: ~$500000 Someone help me manage my budget, my family is dying.

Also your offspring need to go to schools paid for by local taxes. Ruhroh.

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

#338

Post by cozzyd »

Aeolun wrote: post #281
cozzyd wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While such towns may have walkable cores, often places like Walmart are a huge pain to walk to.

If you need only $400 a month, you have a looot of time to spend walking to Walmart.

It's not the distance, but hostile roads with no safe crossings.

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

#339

Post by aeturnum »

sweeter wrote: post #220
aeturnum wrote: post #116

Some of the claims here are pretty intense, but I do think his closing statement is true enough: > there’s never been a better time to try to “make it” in America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we can’t see that now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten bad — it might mean that our perception has become grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality TV, and social…

I think it's absurd. I work full time in the richest country on Earth and I can't afford an apartment and healthcare. The problem is clearly not advertising. Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their expectations" type of energy

Good news - his plan also includes not being able to afford healthcare and housing while working full time! Are you interested in doing what you do now but different? It just cuts corners in different places than other people do to achieve a result that doesn't seem that interesting to most people but is also bad in interesting ways.

I don't think that this approach is "scalable" and I don't think it's a good idea for most people (perhaps not for anyone). I do think it usefully focuses attention on how so much of cost of living is not exactly one line item, but the massive interconnection of modern life. Living in a place where you can have access to the networks (literal, social, medical, etc) you need for the rest of your plan.

I wouldn't want to live like this! But the fact that one could until one got sick (a common limitation on many creative ways of living the modern US I find) is interesting. I think the fact that there are similarities to traditional frontier living (wood stove heating included!) makes it a particularly interesting.

Edit: Arguably, I think the problem is that the USA achieved the original "American Dream" and simply stopped thinking about how the world was changing and what a modern re-envisioning of that dream should be. Pointing out that you can be an impossibly good frontier pioneer in 2025 could be a way of pointing out to people that we need to move on and stop imagining a thing we can active as the pinnacle. We need to imagine living in a world where everyone who works full time can afford housing and healthcare, where performance is rewarded but isn't required to simply live and where we can let living in the woods safely fade into history as a thing we can certainly do if we prefer but should stop idealizing.

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

#340

Post by 999900000999 »

bcraven wrote: post #320
999900000999 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

77% percent of young Americans aren't fit for service. 2 km of walking in a day, even in great weather is exceptional for me. I probably average 1km or less. And I'm not a car owner. My family members will literally hop in a car and drive 30 minutes over walking .5 km to the grocery store. They like the other one more they say.

This is just utterly astonishing to me. I've just checked a map and it's ~0.5 km between where I park at work and my office!

Your going to have to walk both ways, in the rain/snow, etc ?

Like a lot of comments have already mentioned these towns don't even have sidewalks. You'll be walking on the side of the street risking an accident

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