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.

While such towns may have walkable cores, often places like Walmart are a huge pain to walk to.

If you need only $400 a month, you have a looot of time to spend walking to Walmart.

It's not the distance, but hostile roads with no safe crossings.

My admittedly unscientific survey of small Midwestern towns with Walmarts (that are NOT suburbs!) is that you can walk to the Walmart on sidewalks. At most, you have half a block to the nearest sidewalk, or have to cross the street.

Some of the middling-old sections only have one sidewalk. The oldest have them on both sides of the street, and the newest developments have them also, usually.