How to live on $432 a month in America

Rural living also looks cheaper because most people do not even remotely consider the costs of transportation.

The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per mile. If you have to drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back, your grocery bill goes up $18/trip. If you need to drive 15 miles to work and back, take $90/week out of your paycheck.

Then there's the fact that whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked. So The Employer gets to abuse every rule in th book because who's going to complain and risk losing their job? If The Employer decideds to drop everyone's pay by 25 cents/hour, what are you all going to do? Answer: nothing.

Meanwhile in the city you can go anywhere you want within a 500 square mile area (or more) for well under $100/month and commuter rail will take you even further for not a lot more. And you can do other things while using said transportation. No "self driving car" needed.

As a sidenote: the same author complains about the "loss of the $50 motel room" and laments they're 3x more expensive now. Days after complaining that housing isn't actually that expensive. The guy has to be a troll...

Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it.

For fucks sakes the government actually runs a program to subsidize rural Americans getting to fly around on barely-occupied turboprop planes. But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.

About the bit regarding funding:

It’s because rural voters are both active and reliable regardless of their party affiliation, they get out the vote. This in turn for the fact that many rural counties account for a great many house seats and can swing senate elections, they have more power than numbers suggest.

If urban voters were as persistent and consistent as rural ones they could easily flip the narrative, but in my experience (and by looking at a lot of election statistics) a huge chunk of apathetic eligible to vote voters live in urban areas, so you don’t have the same en masse consistency and persistence

I also noticed the author's budget did not include health insurance.

I also wonder how close it is to the nearest hospital or urgent care.

Wait wait, how much does fuel cost that a 50km trip is $18? Even my diesel car does that for 4 €.

The IRS is also presumably factoring in increased wear and tear on the vehicle and increased insurance costs.

Exactly, as someone who moved to a rural area (in Chile) a year ago, I can say that you basically pay a shipping tax on everything you need, starting with construction materials themselves.

It's basically that ancap meme of building your own infrastructure: water, electricity, access roads, clearing the vegetation that constantly tries to reclaim your property. I've never owned so many things in my life until I moved here, many of them just to be able to tend the wilderness around me.

But shoveling and cutting things has been an eye-opening experience in terms of how many processes the high-energy urban civilization hides from us. Even with steel/power tools, it’s brutal out there.

> drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back,

Okay, but you're inventing a strawman there, since there are millions of places to live that are far closer than 15 miles away from basic services. The outskirts of Massena for instance, are about 2 miles from Walmart.

> whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked

The article is specifically about how with a low cost of living you don't even need full time work. It's not about moving to a company town to work a 9-5 at a factory.

> a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day

I mean, they most definitely do get that federal funding -- this fiscal year there is $1.5 billion available. Here's[0] last fiscal year's winners. But I assume the meaning of your comment is that it bothers you that someone somewhere complained about that fact? I doubt it's the rural folks complaining, probably car drivers in the city complaining that the money didn't all go to fixing the potholes, the same cranks who complain about bike lanes, etc.

It is interesting how this proposal that people even just consider rural living as a thought experiment seems to have triggered a lot of people. If you love the city yet simultaneously think it's too expensive, other people opening their minds to living somewhere else is good for you. It doesn't have to be for you for it to be an okay idea.

[0] https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/grants/fy24-fta-bus-and-...

>The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per mile.

I think you are manipulating and substituting concepts, and these calculations of the cost of the trip include expensive cars of highly paid city workers. And if you recalculate the cost of the trip taking into account cars that are used outside the city, then the amount will be several times lower. Probably 5 or more times lower if people are interested in the maximum reduction in the cost of travel.

>almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized

I don't know, show me the data. Maybe the city guys are just saying that it's all subsidized, while they themselves are completely stealing all the allocated funds, taking advantage of the lack of control. I recently watched a program about how government-funded projects were costing 10 or 20 times more. So, without credible evidence to the contrary, let's assume that what we see around us in rural areas has roughly zero subsidies, and all allocated funds have been completely appropriated by contractors.

>But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day.

This is blatant hypocrisy. We have already sorted out how rural areas are "subsidized". And under these conditions, we are asking rural residents to pay for the transport of pompous urban asses? If this transport really moves so many thousands people as you said, why don't these city people pay for it themselves from their huge city salaries? Why do you want to put your fat fingers in the pockets of the rural guys?

I don't know about America. But for me here in Switzerland additional transportation cost is actually cheaper in a rural area than parking costs in any city. A standard parking space about 100$ a month (not including going anywhere and park there, which is also es expensive closer to the city).

Every round trip ads maybe $5 right now. We don't have to drive to the city every second day.

The last time I did the maths on that fuel was half the cost of running our car.

Hello stranger! No need for a throwaway account for such an insightful comment. I thought exactly the same when I read the article.

Yeah, it is a bullshit/clickbait article. No healthcare? Yeah, let's see how long his wife will put up with that. And, literally, there is zero cost for heat. Do you know how cold that place is in the winter? Here is what he wrote:

    > 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.

To be clear: That's not zero. Another lie.

Still: This person should setup a YouTube channel to document their life. It would be like the boring/suffering version of people who sail around the world on a yacht.

The IRS reimbursement rate includes maintenance and depreciation along with fuel and insurance costs. I get back around $500 a month at $0.75 a mile for expensing my work-related mileage.

> Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance.

Couldn't you say the same for cities since they live on food produced outside of cities, energy from the Gulf and products imported from China?

It doesn't matter where the thing comes from, it matters who's paying for it.

I live in a pretty rural area. We have a hospital and urgent care 12 minutes away, though for anything that isn't immediately life threatening I'd be driving an hour for much better hospital care in a larger city.

You can drive for a lot less than $0.60c/mi. At $0.04/kWh, evergy to propel an EV costs 1-2 cents per mile. If you buy a $35k car and drive it 200k miles while spending very little on maintenance (tires might be the major expense), add maybe $0.20/mi, for a total of $0.21/mi or so. Insurance isn’t all that expensive and doesn’t vary that much with mileage. If you buy a BYD car (oh wait, not in the US), it’s even cheaper.

To be fair, at $0.04/kWh, even at very low outdoor temperature, a heat pump at COP only a little bit above 1 or even an electric resistance heater is not very expensive to operate. If you have anything resembling decent insulation and you heat only a small space, heat can be very inexpensive. Even in an old, uninsulated, drafty house, you can fudge it cheaply with window insulating film and by hanging fabric on the walls. (Those cheap cut-to-size cellular window shades sold at many home improvement stores also have excellent thermal performance.)

It gets tricky if you want a civilized humidity level, though. You need to control leakage to achieve decent humidity and you need to control condensation to avoid damaging the window trim or other parts of the structure and to avoid growing mold.

That honestly doesn't sound very rural at all.

The IRS mile rate does not actually reflect real world costs. Even including maintenance, insurance, etc, it's quite inflated, unless you barely drive it.

Whereas driving a personal vehicle on public roadways is a daily dance with death that snuffs out 40,000+ lives a year.

Who in their right mind would put their lives at such risk?

>Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it.

This is pretty naive. Farmers aren’t subsidized so that farmers have cheap food, they are subsidized so that the city you’re hyping doesn’t riot because they run out of food. Farm subsidies exist for everyone who’s not a farmer.

"Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it."

Things like farming, forestry and so on aren't possible without basic local infrastructure. It's also reasonable that farmers can buy groceries, their kids can go to school, and they have access to healthcare services.

Without farming city folks would starve to death, so I wouldn't complain about things being subsidized. Feds fund lots of less important things.

There are definitely more rural areas, that just depends on where you draw the line on what is considered "rural".

This area is unincorporated and the nearest towns all have a few thousand people or less.

When we moved here I was actually surprised that we had a hospital in one of those small towns. Its part of a larger network that and the city an hour away has a big training hospital and med school, I assume that's why there's a smaller hospital in our area.

For reference, our only "grocery stores" withing 45 minutes are Walmarts and Dollar Generals.