How to live on $432 a month in America

It sounds nice, atleast until non-daily tasks and costs start to pile up. Goods are not cheaper in a rural area, you don't get an Amazon or Walmart discount for living in the middle of nowhere, medical and dental are not cheaper, general services are far more expensive so I hope you can fix or install most all of your own appliances and plumbing systems and roof, it will cost you a lot more to have wood delivered than cut it yourself for heating and using sawmill cutoffs is not a great material for maintaining a fire overnight. Friends and family are farther and fewer. Law enforcement in these places basically only exist to extort people because that's how they fund themselves and real crime is so uncommon, but of course they still need to pay for maintenance on their MRAPs and Humvees and such and think they are better than the local "yokels". Fire service may or may not cost you money to pay into, or may simply not exist for anything other than making sure it doesn't spread after your house is gone. And of course you are living outside of modern society and being left behind technologically, which isn't a problem for a few years, but after 10+ years you start to become out of touch.

This kind of thing might sound nice from the outside, but if poor rural community living was as nice and cheap as claimed, these kind of areas wouldn't be so cheap or abandoned. These kind of articles always seem like a "grass is greener" type escapist fantasies. Yeah sure there are a handful of unusually better spots, maybe this place is one of them, but 95% of poor rural areas are just... poor rural areas with little to offer. Hope you don't have kids because the schools will be garbage. Hope you don't like going to bars or being super social because 90% of the clientele are the same handful of drunks you see every time.

Just because you can eek out a few cheap years in a place like this in your 20s or 30s doesn't mean it is a great place to actually live. Say you work a decent amount to "save" money for 10 or 15 years, what will you walk away from there financially? You weren't saving city wages that will afford you to move wherever you want, you saved poor rural wages which will afford you.... another slightly less poor rural area or maybe living like a 20 year old in a more prosperous place for a year, your house might be worth less later than what you paid for it, your job might just disappear one day without warning and no viable replacement except for a desperation job at just a bit above minimum wage.

Ive lived in rural areas, mostly poorer areas, my whole life. And yeah sure there are some hippies around surviving, some Amish dudes surviving, a few people are doing a bit better with long-distance traveling jobs like truckers or seasonal work farther away. But 90% of people are just barely surviving, watching their health slowly fail away faster and faster because they can't afford the care to maintain it. Hopefully you can live until you are 60+ without any health problems, but that is a big gamble. If you get sick a single hospital visit can wipe out a decade or more of careful savings. Break an arm or an ankle? There is an entire year's savings or more. You get to watch those few still around you struggling day after day living in shacks or 30 year old decaying mobile homes. Poor rural areas are not some hidden grove of wonder and peace, if it was these places wouldn't have been abandoned to start with.