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Rukifellth comments on low stress employment/ munchkin income thread - Less Wrong
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Comments (82)
2,000 dollars seems a bit much for bachelor living. What are your expenses?
I currently have a monthly food budget of 200 dollars. I do this by optimizing for raw nutritional content and buying in bulk. This daily diet consists of
However, I work as a dishwasher and this nets a lot of opportunities to eat. The company officially provides one staff meal per shift; on days I have a double shift, I eat twice. Between these meals and the full plates of fries and bowls of untouched seafood chowder I see that would otherwise be thrown away in my work washing dishes, I have actually gone to work in the morning hungry and come home late at night full, having stowed said food away in Tupperware containers I bring with me to the counter. So my food budget is likely to drop down to 125.
Definitely puts the munch in munchkins, eh? Eh?
Become a dishwasher.
That was awful. Upvoted for that alone :)
I don't actually know for sure. I live with my parents and have no expenses. I used a monthly expense calculator and input what I expected things to be likely to cost but I redid the numbers now, and it seems to come out to more like $1600
I must be an outlier then. My rent is 550 including utilities, giving a total expense of ~700. Are you in the city?
$1600 in targeted income, not expenses. The expense calculator adds up the numbers and multiplies it by 1.3 to spit out an income target. The expenses come out to $1300, (including a hypothetical car I'm seriously considering not getting) and they're padded a bit to be on the safe side.
I would be concerned primarily with rent. Getting utilities well below $150 should be doable; food for $200, $300 tops; transportation would depend on specifics, but all said I'd expect under $1000 to be sufficient, barring expensive rent or absurdly high bills (I don't know how expensive house/car payments are, and how this varies with location). To be safe regardless of location, I'd go with $2000, although I could manage on $600 in my current location if not for college debts.
So I suppose the cost of living in the location in question is the important thing; average cost of living is going to be well above a comfortable minimum, I'd expect (or at least, the average cost of living in my area is over $2000/month; I believe it was a little over $2400 last I checked.).
I wouldn't recommend getting a car if your city has good public transportation/bike paths. The cost of updating a monthly pass for a bus will be exceeded once and half again by cost of your car's insurance, never mind gas, maintenance and parking. No, a car is a liability in most cases, unless you have a dire reason to visit rural areas on a regular basis.
For houses I'm not so sure- on the one hand your money will be going back to you in the form of equity, but on the other hand you'd be losing a lot of said payments to interest, unless you really pumped money into the mortgage payments.One year out of high school may be too early to consider conventional housing.
Or if you live in a rural area, but I suppose you covered that with "if your city has good public transportation/bike paths." (I live in a rural area, but physically couldn't drive if I could afford it. gotdistractedbythe doesn't seem to have mentioned eir location, but judging by the way the beach was mentioned, I'm imagining one of the coastal cities that generally have decent public transportation, so I don't expect ey will need to worry about cars. However, said areas also tend to have some of the higher end costs for renting living space, as I understand it.)
Sounds like it has good perks. How's the pay?
Minimum wage. In Canada, this is 10.30
I would expect that by "optimizing for raw nutritional content and buying in bulk" you could get your food budget down to about $55/month. For $200/month that doesn't have to cover lunches at work you should be able to afford much more variety and meat/luxuries etc.
(A while ago I collected lots of food budget numbers: food costs on a scale.)
Really? What items ought I replace?
Cooking dried beans, probably in a slow-cooker, would be cheaper than using canned ones. [1] You could cook the rice along with the beans. Chickpeas would also be cheaper dry.
You could probably get below $100/month cooking all your own meals that way. I'd start with dry rice and beans ($0.61/day for the beans and $0.76/day for the rice) which comes to $42/month, add vegetables, small amounts of cheap cuts of meat for flavor, spices, and luxuries for the other $58/month.
[1] http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2011/07/19/dry-beans-or-canned-beans-a-cost-effective-comparison/
Brilliant! This will shave off ~30 dollars per month, thank you.
(Strangely: I've also worked as a dishwasher, I also bring tupperware to work to take home excess food, and I lived on ~$80/month for food for about 2 years. I think focusing on earning more earlier would probably have been a better use of my time than all of those combined.)
Some advice, written when Jeff and I were spending $170/month on groceries for two of us: http://jdwise.blogspot.com/2011/01/living-it-up.html