How to live on $432 a month in America

>Though I and my wife do not presently live in Massena, we live nearby, and we’re doing exactly this — we do not have an automobile, nor do we want one. We use the rural county transit bus, which we have found to be extremely cheap and quite reliable; and it has certainly saved us thousands and thousands of dollars by liberating us from the onerous expense of keeping a car.

This part has me screaming shenanigans. Unless you basically don't leave the house, you need a car outside of like 8 American cities. More believable would be a pair of used bikes.

That’s obviously not true, if you change what you “have” to go to.

There are thousands of American towns that are about 10k population - large enough to have a Walmart and other stores, small enough to walk across in an hour or so.

Once it gets cold you won't be walking much anywhere. I guess grocery delivery from Walmart can mitigate this, but that fundamentally changes the situation.

Let’s not pretend that the cold regions of the world were uninhabitable before the invention of the car.