How to live on $432 a month in America

I enjoy the part about "Heat? Well...I'm sure something will happen allowing me to have heat. No need for concrete plans there."

You mean this part?

> as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.

Those are both vague and completely different ways to handle heating.

Also, conveniently, neither appear to have an associated cost so we don't have to worry about whether the financial math works out.

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, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.

If that's what you do in this situation, why didn't the author write that instead?

There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.

I feel like this is really stretching the definition of "$0".

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 / month and working 30-40 hours at this cashier job then using your off days to grab and process wood is honestly pretty miserable. There are slums in developing countries with higher standards of living because they can heat their "house" (read: tent or hut) with oil.

Well water being free also means amortizing the potential maintenance costs of the pump, filters, and testing to make sure you aren’t drinking arsenic or lead.

Seems like a tongue in cheek way of implying that climate change will solve that eventually, no?

The author makes a big deal out of not having a car, and the math gets a heck of a lot worse if you add a truck.

Well, minimum wage in NY state is $15.50/hour. ($432/mo)/($15.50/h) is about 28 hours per month, i.e. 7 hours per week. https://dol.ny.gov/minimum-wage-0

He also mentions other forms of employment, like raising rare herbs, so maybe he's got a little homegrown operation going that doesn't take much time.

Good catch on the hourly rates there.

Other than that, again, not sure how different it is from living slums in underdeveloped countries. Me, I'd rather just save up and buy some oil.

And yeah, a truck costs money, whether for maintenance and gas, or bare bones insurance.

.. a cargo bike might be a better choice

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.

Wood is not free, and you have to consider the time and gas and tools to cut it, also this guy doesn't even have a car not to mention a truck to haul it, and he is living on a lot, not a wooded acreage. 90% of wood people want to get rid of for free is pine or fir which takes 4 times as much to match hardwood heating, and takes more careful stone pipe maintenance to not build up creosote and get a chimney fire, a lot of people exclusively burn hardwood just because of the risks of burning softwood and causing a fire from buildup. Even myself being "lucky" to have Emerald Ash Bore which has killed 95% of ash trees and given me "free" dead hardwood for the last 25 years wouldn't consider it free.

Say you do have a wooded plot, the first year or two it might not be so bad, lots of wood near the edges where you can drive up to to load and move, but what about after that when you have to go deeper into the woods? You need to get in there, it may not be accessible by truck or get swampy where you will get stuck, and now you are considering a tractor or other vehicle, a decent expense to obtain, in order to not have to carry all your wood an armload at a time through the woods longer and longer distances. Chains and gas and oil for cutting it aren't expensive but not free, nor is maintaining a gas chainsaw if you seriously use it for all your heating wood, doubly so if you aren't already mechanically inclined enough to repair engines. And then you still have to split it. There are cheap splitters, but cheap spliters will only split the wood that took little effort to split with an axe, and less than half the wood you cut is going to be that easy to split straight grain wood, so you are either going to need more for a splitter or to be physically fit and capable enough to split a lot of gnarly wood by hand. Some people enjoy it for the exercise, I do, but not everyone is up to it, and it is such a hard physical activity that you need to be in good health to maintain it.

Also splitting mauls are a gimmick, they take far more effort than a long handled axe and are only a good option if you are otherwise incapable of using an axe. Speed applies more kinetic energy than mass, kinetic energy is half of the mass times velocity squared, so doubling the mass you are throwing around is far less effective at applying force into splitting than trying to double your swing speed. And that is the biggest "trick" to a good axe split, swing speed, which is why you want a long handle. Mauls are far slower than an axe, take more energy than an axe to lift and swing, and are far less capable of splitting more gnarly wood as the more aggressive edge angle has a much harder time splitting into and separating the grain as much of the energy merely crushes wood fibers before it bites in and starts wedging. If an axe can't do it, a maul won't do it even more, and then you are getting into a sledge hammer and steel wedges anyways, and a wedge and sledge are easier to set and more maneuverable than a maul with a big ass handle on it.

Burning wood is a decent way to heat a house if someone is always at the house in regular 8 hour intervals or more, but it has a lot of caveats and is not what I would call free. More like subsidizing a portion of the cost of with hard physical labor.

Wood is free if you scavenge wood from an uncertain source, ignore fuel, equipment, time, oh and labor. Never mind it's green wood, so you need to manage stockpiling to dry it.

I live in a country where for half of the population wood is the default fuel. There's a reason it's a lot of peoples job.