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How to live on $432 a month in America

shagbark.substack.com

531–540 of 764 posts

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

#531

> Moreover, the vision that I am going to postulate here would not even require very much in the way of work. I say this because by all I have seen, many young people today find the idea of indefinite wage labor to be a dismal one. They seem to prefer a “low-work lifestyle,” but very often, the manner of living that such a lifestyle would require is completely foreign to them. Because of this, right alongside the man…

It seems a fairly pragmatic solution to me. Yes, at a societal level things are pretty messed up for lower earners but there is next to nothing they can do about that. However from an individual perspective there are options and they aren't all as extreme as this.

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

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because when you live rural like this, wood stoves are common, and wood is free. I live in the northwest, so I can't speak to upstate NY, but downed trees on state and federal land near roads is free to take. Every day there's people posting rounds of wood for free to take. It's hard work, but it's good exercise and rewarding. There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck,…

To add to the sibling comment, collecting this wood takes time. I've collected wood the forest service takes down for use in a stove I use but processing all that wood takes time. You bring it home, cut it into small bits, keep it in a dry area to make sure the green wood dries out, and then you meticulously rotate older and newer stock to make sure you use the driest stuff for heating. If you're living on $432 / mon…

I grew up in a 1300sf wood heated house, so I have relevant experience here. It does take time to buck, split, load, unload, and stack the wood. It goes faster if you have a small child (me) to help!

We cut wood for our own use and also sold it, so it didn't require 100% of our time to keep the heat on.

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

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's a perception that young people (for probably 60 years now) see "getting out of this town" as a major life goal. It sort of is. Opportunities in the small towns is limited compared to urban areas. As well as other social aspects like night life, entertainment, the culture of the residents, etc. The people argument of being irreplaceable works both ways; you're simply going to get more options when you're arou…

Does anyone actually like nightlife though? Same for local entertainments, sure they're a nice extra sometimes but nothing worth sacrificing for. It's all some variation of "crowded into a dark room with hundreds of strangers with deafening music, can't see anything, can't hear anything".

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

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you could get a wood burning stove heater. as long as you have enough trees to be sustainable, burning firewood is a great way to go. and with the clean burning filters they have now a days, you'll much much better off than from the days when they used to burn fires inside a house with no container/stove/filters or even a chiminey at all! (just a hole in the roof if you were lucky.)

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

#537
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, my impression is most people have highly contradictory desires along these lines. They say they want to be able to walk to places more. But they also want a big suburban-style house with bedrooms for everyone and storage and garage and lawn etc, easy parking for them, nice wide roads to drive everywhere on and tons of free parking when they get there. This makes it impossible for the area to be walkable u…

My understanding of the issue is that while walkable communities are in demand they are a minority and generally speaking, also a minority that is less politically active than single-family homeowners. Pretty much everywhere has a political majority of single-family homeowners, and if each locality decides on its own it doesn't want to have multifamily housing, then you wind up in a situation where almost nowhere act…

This is so weird to read. My cultural bias is showing: I'm from the Netherlands. As most of you know, walkability is the norm here. And while the country is flat, so is the area described in this article.

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

#538

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

Of course you could afford an apartment, or even a house! You just don't want to move there.

I don't judge you - I also live in a VHCOL area and my wife wouldn't even want to move 30km where the housing prices are half of where we are now. Such is live.

But saying you couldn't afford it is false - you can't afford it where you'd want to live, is more accurate.

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

#539
Disregard systemic problems, place the blame entirely on younger generation using too much tiktok/uber/doordash/netflix/whatever. You should live like it's 1899 out in the fields and basically enjoy none of the good sides of modern life. This is part of the reason why "OK boomer" is so popular.

(Also, living that far from urban centers when you're not a farmer is a burden on society. You require much more road, water pipes and power line maintenance than someone that lives in the city.)

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

#540
It sounds nice, atleast until non-daily tasks and costs start to pile up. Goods are not cheaper in a rural area, you don't get an Amazon or Walmart discount for living in the middle of nowhere, medical and dental are not cheaper, general services are far more expensive so I hope you can fix or install most all of your own appliances and plumbing systems and roof, it will cost you a lot more to have wood delivered than cut it yourself for heating and using sawmill cutoffs is not a great material for maintaining a fire overnight. Friends and family are farther and fewer. Law enforcement in these places basically only exist to extort people because that's how they fund themselves and real crime is so uncommon, but of course they still need to pay for maintenance on their MRAPs and Humvees and such and think they are better than the local "yokels". Fire service may or may not cost you money to pay into, or may simply not exist for anything other than making sure it doesn't spread after your house is gone. And of course you are living outside of modern society and being left behind technologically, which isn't a problem for a few years, but after 10+ years you start to become out of touch.

This kind of thing might sound nice from the outside, but if poor rural community living was as nice and cheap as claimed, these kind of areas wouldn't be so cheap or abandoned. These kind of articles always seem like a "grass is greener" type escapist fantasies. Yeah sure there are a handful of unusually better spots, maybe this place is one of them, but 95% of poor rural areas are just... poor rural areas with little to offer. Hope you don't have kids because the schools will be garbage. Hope you don't like going to bars or being super social because 90% of the clientele are the same handful of drunks you see every time.

Just because you can eek out a few cheap years in a place like this in your 20s or 30s doesn't mean it is a great place to actually live. Say you work a decent amount to "save" money for 10 or 15 years, what will you walk away from there financially? You weren't saving city wages that will afford you to move wherever you want, you saved poor rural wages which will afford you.... another slightly less poor rural area or maybe living like a 20 year old in a more prosperous place for a year, your house might be worth less later than what you paid for it, your job might just disappear one day without warning and no viable replacement except for a desperation job at just a bit above minimum wage.

Ive lived in rural areas, mostly poorer areas, my whole life. And yeah sure there are some hippies around surviving, some Amish dudes surviving, a few people are doing a bit better with long-distance traveling jobs like truckers or seasonal work farther away. But 90% of people are just barely surviving, watching their health slowly fail away faster and faster because they can't afford the care to maintain it. Hopefully you can live until you are 60+ without any health problems, but that is a big gamble. If you get sick a single hospital visit can wipe out a decade or more of careful savings. Break an arm or an ankle? There is an entire year's savings or more. You get to watch those few still around you struggling day after day living in shacks or 30 year old decaying mobile homes. Poor rural areas are not some hidden grove of wonder and peace, if it was these places wouldn't have been abandoned to start with.

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