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 missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends

Silicon Valley is not populated by people who are there for family and friends. Silicon Valley is populated by people who left their family and friends to go participate in a gold rush.

Silicon Valley is populated by people from other continents who came to participate in the gold rush, family and friends be damned.

I really don't understand the antipathy towards the fact that you can live on $432 a month in America. I just really don't. With some tradeoffs, you can live on $432 a month in America, and this fact makes some Hacker News commentators very very angry.

I am not angry. I am barely cementator here even. But I find this article radicoulous. For example author mentioned raising family at the beginning. And then mentions no car. How are you suppose to transport kids to school/preschool? 'You can take the bus' - yeah, drive with the bus to one place (kindergarten), then the second (school), then the third (job). In the winter, rain, storm or heat. Yes that is doable but would be very annoying and time consuming. No mention to hearing kids complaining that they want to eat/drink/poop at the bus or bus stop.

And if you and you spouse have jobs and kids you probably need two cars, and school is another cost so I would say 400$ is pure fantasy unless you want to live insolitude, fishing in forest.

Normal people need near school/preschool/highschool/job/store etc. And this is why you have cities. It is cheaper for society to concentrate population around those buildings.

What you described is what my parents have done with me. They took me to the kindergarden, on foot. But then again, I live in Europe and it is dense enough here, the kindergarden was about 3-5 km away. You can definitely take the bus, which many people do around here.

The article is about the US and in most places they can't do that.