How to live on $432 a month in America

I've commented (probably too much) to argue with the harshest critics of this piece, but I am surprised to not have seen much this criticism which is my main one:

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.

The problem is that its across an international border from the Montreal airport. So you'd need to cross a border twice to fly to a domestic US destination and twice more on your return. Crossing a border is always an unknown in terms of delays, so I question the practicality. I'd personally feel like I needed to leave way more than 90 minutes to ge to the airport.

FWIW, I've crossed the border at both Cornwall and Ogdensburg when driving to Ottawa, and they were quiet when I crossed. Going from the US side to Canada was fast and easy, but the reverse wasn't true, and that was several years ago when crossing the border was quite a bit less stressful.

Massena, the place in the article, has an airport. An international airport.

Just checked flights from sfo to there, 500 bucks. I don't get how this is different than moving to another state for work.

also, if you have a social "thing" like tennis or climbing or drugs or whatever thing you like that tends to have an active and welcoming social community that you're willing to engage with, then the social issue can be dampened somewhat

> if you have a social "thing" like tennis or climbing

Then you wouldn't be able to cut down expenses to "nothing"/month.

Social thing assumes expenses. Hobbies assume expenses.

A tennis racket is $13 at Goodwill and tennis balls are $1.30/ea. In the case of living in Massena, NY like the author you can play at Alcoa Park for $0.00.

As for climbing, you don't need a $200 climbing harness you can tie your own Swiss seat out of rope ($2/ft.) and buy a couple of snap links ($4-10/ea.). I would buy a lower-end harness for $30 though.

Spread out over several seasons that is as close to "nothing" as you can get, and is well within reach of any person with a pulse.

35 years ago I played DnD with a single AD&D 2e player's handbook and DM's guide shared among us all, campaigns and items out of Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine hand-copied from issues at the library, and a player miniature made out of a film roll canister that I used whiteout to paint a design on. Our greatest individual expense was dice and I think those were less than $10 for a set.

Hobbies are only expensive if you let them or want them to be.

Have you ever tried to do those sports with cheapest equipment? Because I did and it ended up the same as everyone else who tried it in a cheapest possible way - you stop because it is not fun nor pleasure and equipment limits you.

That being said, for tenista you need to pay entry. For climbing, you will be kicked out of gym on top of it being uncomfortable. Climbing gym don't want you injured due to badly made seat - it makes other guests feeling bad.

> Hobbies are only expensive if you let them or want them to be.

Climbing gyms aren't cheap. Climbing rocks outdoors is fairly cheap.