Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be more concerned with visa issues.
Ya, you aren't supposed to work with tourist visas, and you should be paying taxes in your country of residence on your income. Things can get pretty shady, and you really don't want to wind up in a Thai jail!
What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
61–70 of 110 posts
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#62I've been able to do this after re-arranging my life over the past 5 years. I bought 7 acres of bare land for $35k and built a 200 sqft tiny house for $4,000. I homestead as much as I can and my bills are approximately $40/DSL, $40/Electrical, $35/Car insurance (I drive a 90s Honda), and approximately $30 a month in property taxes. I spend about $40 in propane for heat in the winter and my air conditioning bill is an…
I haven't been able to do what you're doing because remote work is hard to find. Because remote work has been so difficult to find, I've been hesitant to go all out like you have. I scouted all sorts of places and have not been able to get the variables to all work out.
I hang around the outskirts of cities and cobble together a living, and I go into the city for meetups. If I were doing what you were doing, I'd be scared because of the effort it would take to just hit the pavement and go talk to people who could offer me work.
Have you gone through job changes yet?
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#63If you're serious about cheapest as the most important variable, then the sort of glib (but true) answer to this question is to observe where people who have no other choice end up living, which means a trailer in a rural area or housing in the cheapest parts of any large U.S. metro. If you're lucky enough to have startup capital, then you can reduce your recurring expenses to practically nothing. You can find a trai…
I think that reason is the most important consideration. It looks like you may be referring to the worst parts of #4 on this list! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/12/highest-murder-rate...
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#64You may try looking into Tiny houses, they may cause some problems with zoning in some area's so picking a location will require some research. A tiny house can easily run under $20,000 fully equipped. Some people have been able to build them for under $10,000. Fix the house with solar panels, maybe a small wind turbine for electricity. tin roof with a rain water collection, you can run is through a 3 stage or 5 stag…
> Grab yourself a 5-mile wifi- antenna to pick up wifi from coffee shops nearby. This sounds incredibly illegal.
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya, you aren't supposed to work with tourist visas, and you should be paying taxes in your country of residence on your income. Things can get pretty shady, and you really don't want to wind up in a Thai jail!
Wait, what? You aren't supposed to work for people in the COUNTRY Just like you aren't supposed to do business with people in the country No one says you can't continue working on projects for clients in your home country
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you wouldn't get a job as an electrician or day laborer which paid $400 a month then you shouldn't take on any major construction project to save $400 a month We're engineers. We enjoy building things. All sorts of things. I wouldn't do it all the time, but why not try your hand at building yourself a house? Not as a means to save money, but as a hobby, an interesting project, something fun?
All the respect in the world for someone who wants to stride out into the wilderness and build a hobbit hole with their own two hands. If one enjoys it or finds it aesthetically appealing, great. If one simply wants to improve one's family's financial situation, trade solutions to business problems for money then trade money for living space, which is available from specialized providers who enjoy substantial economi…
Okaaay ... not where I was going. I suppose you can do that.
You can also build yourself an office in your backyard, which is what I'm going to do in a few months. Won't save me any money, but I expect it to be fun.
I feel sorry for those who can only think in dollars and cents. Not everything is about maximizing utility. You're allowed to have fun. You can even have fun improving one's financial situation.
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#67The cheapest way I've found to live was to buy a 4+ unit apartment building that when the 3+ other apartments are fully rented cover the cost of the mortgage, and utilities. As a result, net out of pocket each year for housing + utilities + taxes + insurance is < $0. (we turn a profit each year) For us, this means we can reinvest our earnings in our businesses and live a very comfortable middle class lifestyle. We li…
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#68Pick a college town and rent an apartment, optionally with a roommate. In much of the American midwest this implies an all-in rent & utilities expense in the $500 range. If you wanted to try something more exotic, you can do the digital nomad thing and rent somewhere in Thailand for ~$100 a month, but honestly as a programmer I feel that optimizing sub-$500 expenses is not the best use of one's time versus figuring o…
One of the problems with a focus on living cheap is that the rest of the world is still expensive. You can find ways to live super cheap, but medical is still outrageous. Traveling to an expensive city will still take a large chunk out of a small income.
Your focus should be on increasing options. That's probably making more money. You can make a decision to go cheap on the fly, but substantially increasing your savings takes time. As you get older, this may become even more difficult.
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#69Pick a college town and rent an apartment, optionally with a roommate. In much of the American midwest this implies an all-in rent & utilities expense in the $500 range. If you wanted to try something more exotic, you can do the digital nomad thing and rent somewhere in Thailand for ~$100 a month, but honestly as a programmer I feel that optimizing sub-$500 expenses is not the best use of one's time versus figuring o…
I feel like I should point out that getting something that cheap in Thailand is difficult and certainly will not be pretty. I have previously lived in Thailand for just under a year and then gone on to be a digital nomad for three years and counting, mostly in south east Asia.
Its pretty trivial to live on 800-1200/month in Thailand and I have known people to get it down to $500/month but there is a floor there that, to go under, you would likely need to move somewhere very remote that is likely to have an unreliable electricity supply and probably won't have an existing net connection or a telephone line for you to get access to the net. It would help to speak reasonable Thai too as you will be living somewhere well away from the touristy bits of Thailand where the English speakers tend to congregate.
Now, that isn't to say that its impossible. I know someone who, at one point, was living on the outskirts of Siem Reap (Cambodia) for $200/month total. $80/month of that was rent. Firstly, he is an extremely experienced nomad. Secondly, that involved living in an old wooden house with no airconditioning (Cambodia gets brutally hot) and walking across town to use the wifi at KFC. It worked for him because he was working on a book so he only required sporadic net access. He is also from the Philippines and grew up without air conditioning so apparently the heat and humidity was bearable for him. Personally I find not having aircon in the tropics a really quick way to take your productivity to zero. Thirdly, to keep his costs that low an enormous proportion of his diet was made up of boiled rice with token amounts of vegetables. When he went to KFC he would purchase a single piece of chicken so they wouldn't kick him out and so his diet contained some protein. Handy if you want to lose weight I guess but tightly restricting your vegetable and protein intake is otherwise not particularly healthy.
Anyhow, just wanted to point out that "rent somewhere in Thailand for ~$100 a month" isn't something you are just going to walk off the plane and arrange without making some very serious health and lifestyle sacrifices.
Re: What's the cheapest living situation possible that still has basic utilities?
#70Pick a college town and rent an apartment, optionally with a roommate. In much of the American midwest this implies an all-in rent & utilities expense in the $500 range. If you wanted to try something more exotic, you can do the digital nomad thing and rent somewhere in Thailand for ~$100 a month, but honestly as a programmer I feel that optimizing sub-$500 expenses is not the best use of one's time versus figuring o…
>If you wanted to try something more exotic, you can do the digital nomad thing and rent somewhere in Thailand for ~$100 a month, I feel like I should point out that getting something that cheap in Thailand is difficult and certainly will not be pretty. I have previously lived in Thailand for just under a year and then gone on to be a digital nomad for three years and counting, mostly in south east Asia. Its pretty t…