How to live on $432 a month in America

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.

Apparently it's "free Amish wood" or "a little extra in electricity"... which, as someone who lives in a temperate area, is a stunningly low price to imagine for electric heat in somewhere cold.

It’s a 600 ft home with electricity at 0.04kWh. As someone who owns a 400 sq ft uninsulated cabin in MN, with rates closer to 4x that, I can tell you it’s about $100/month to heat it with electricity.

I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around $50/month to heat it in the winter months.

E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested as much below.

Fyi it's kWh not kW/h

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.)

Literally mentioned in the article. Their electricity is literally less than 0.1x what I pay in California.

Should be budgeted though right.

You can get by with a woodburner without buying wood in a fairly large city if you collected the odd car load during the year.

That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then get the wood delivered.

It's mentioned as the article as free from using waste wood.

I live just over an hour north of this place. Until recently I heated my log cabin exclusively with wood.

It takes somewhere between 7 and 9 cubic metres of wood a year to heat about 800 square feet of house. It costs about CAD 1500 for a tandem load of sawlogs plus the cost of fuel and maintenance of the chainsaw and hydraulic splitter plus about 100 hours of labour bucking, splitting, hauling, and stacking. And still there are mornings when I had to break the ice on the dog's water bowl in the kitchen when it's been below -30 C for several days in a row.

You're not going to survive a winter in that part of North America with just "a few scraps of wood" for heat. "A few carloads" is maybe going to take you to Christmas and they'll simply find your thawed corpse during a warm spell in March.

so people are just delivering free wood to anyone who chooses to move out to the boonies? Seems like a bad assumption to be making

Heat is mentioned in passing with literally no attempt at quantifying the cost:

> 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.

That's it. The line in the budget for heat is there and was left intentionally blank:

> Heat:

You can't just hand-wave away the cost of electric heating at the temperatures they get in upstate NY, even if the 0.04 number is accurate year-round (which it almost certainly isn't), and wood-burning stoves use way more wood than the author appears to be imagining with their "scrap wood" comment.

[0] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/massena/new-york/unite...

Good points. I also heat with wood in a northern clime, and this seems accurate. I'm a little confused by the units and the costs, though. I cut my own, so I'm not sure how much a tandem truck holds, but am I right that your $1500 CDN load of sawlogs ($1100 USD) is enough for several years of heating? My quick search suggests that a tandem load might be around 12 full cords (44 m^3), and thus be enough for 5 years for you. Is this about right?

well, specific people are delivering free _waste_ wood to people specifically near them.

Kinda like those people that got free _waste_ oil from restaurants to run their vans. It's not something you can replicate literally anywhere but it does exist. Industrial waste has to be disposed of somehow and often people are happy for you to accept it for free.

> and 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.