How to live on $432 a month in America

Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living expenses to a point where you can work ¼ or so of the time most of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so materialistic.

The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends. If I could take my in-laws and my 2 best friends and their families with me, I'd sign up to move to a rural place like this tomorrow. But it's impractical for nearly everyone in the whole country to make such a thing happen. This limits its appeal. This place is 90 minutes or so from the Montreal airport, which is actually not bad for rural places, but flights are not cheap, certainly not accessible on the budget described here, so for you to have contact with anyone outside this town, they're likely going to have to drop about $500 per person, per visit, and will be staying at the Super 8 since you probably don't have a guest room). So, implied but not acknowledged in this piece is the assumption that you are almost definitely going to only see your family and friends a few more times (maybe once a year each, if you're super lucky) for the rest of your life.

And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and friends aren't fungible. You can start over and hope to make new friends out there, but you can't replace people. This is what would make this life untenable to me, and I'm not even all that extraverted.

But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home. Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affordable than SF/NYC/Paris, and they are there waiting. It's entertaining as an extreme data point but motivating for other reasons

This article is most interesting to me because I tried moving to the big city to be a big shot techie, and have been substantially happier living outside a major city in Minnesota.

Absolutely nobody that I knew in those cities lived near their family, absolutely all of them moved away to chase fortune and fame.

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 rent is twice as expensive in SF, if your salary is twice that then your savings are also twice as much which will go a longer way anywhere but SF.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

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.