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.

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.

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

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

Social thing assumes expenses. Hobbies assume expenses.

Literally every human activity incurs a cost. Well, you can become a Hikikomori, so your only expenses will be electircity and internet.

I'm not equaling anything with anything. I'm pointing out the reality to people claiming that "oh it's so easy to maintain any kind of hobbies and/or social life without spending a penny"

> I do almost nothing with my time that cost money

Oh, I'm sure you do plenty, you just don't assume there are expenses in what you do. I'm not claiming they are huge expenses. I'm just saying things not free

Not any, but a sufficiently large amount of options. You may not enjoy those, which translates into “you will need time to adapt to it“, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I meet with most of my friends der outdoors, for walks and hiking. We bring our own bottled tap water (I could never imagine to live in a place without good tap water) and snacks or cooked food, blankets, games. We usually take our bikes, or trains for longer distance trips. We throw parties in public parks. We go camping with tents on semi-illegal public areas. (The Park4night app for example is great for that.) All of this and more can be done for daily social activities and vacations at very little expense.

I’m writing this from a bakery with self-service, and there’s a family teaching chess to a girl at another table. Beautiful.

Compared with most of my social environment that decided to work full time, I think I have a lot more flexibility and voluntary social interactions. They are usually tired after a day of forced interactions; I manage to almost exclusively have voluntary interactions. I do not work with people who I don’t like. My time on this earth is too precious to waste on that.

It’s totally fine if the adjustments and adapting (not tradeoffs, because on a needs-based analysis it doesn’t require any) are not worth it for you (which raises the question of currency), but you and others in this thread make it sound like a horrible lifestyle for anyone, which is simply not the case. I would go as far as to claim it’s easier to maintain an unhealthy lifestyle with lots of money than with little. It’s just that most of us are so used to the stress that we had to stop listening to our own bodies (and often silence it with pills once it starts screaming). Spending money helps to obscure the real underlying need, and too often serves as a short-term patch. A limited budget forces you into thinking and feeling into what it is really about.

It can be inspiring to some to hear stories of people who found creative low-cost solutions to get their needs met. No need to question their ability to take care of themselves, and imply that they need to do without some crucial element of life and suffer.