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.
TL;DR: this is a repository for discussing income generation strategies optimized for free time
I hope I'm not cluttering up LW but maybe enough people are also interested in this? I graduated high school about a year ago.
I have a lot in common with Will Newsome's self description in this post
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2qp/virtual_employment_open_thread/
But it's a dead thread, and there's been some interest in early retirement extreme, (http://earlyretirementextreme.com/) and having repositories for stuff.
The upshot of it is that I want to optimize for free time and mobility. Need about $2,000 to live (1600 expenses 400 savings/buffer) 2nd EDIT: no I don't, I must have screwed something up when I was adding this it's more like $1600. ($1300 to spend $300 buffer). A 20 hour workweek or even shorter is what I'm going for here. Right now I'm barely functional. Even that much is a bit of a stretch for me as I am now. Plenty of advice abounds on optimizing my health and squashing akrasia though, and I'm sure that if I implemented it I could get to the point of handling part time work. But I think I would always find being a 9 to 5er unappealing.
I'd value spending that time reading texbooks or walking around town or lazing around on the beach more than I'd value extra money. I'm also interested to hear about some more conventional part time jobs if they pay enough. I'm ok with doing somewhat boring work if the hours are light and I have time to think.
I've generated some candidate strategies if anyone here has experience at these. I don't have much knowledge of what they would entail or how to break into them. Or they might give someone some ideas I dunno but anyway:
4hww style dropship business (but success at that seems hard to set up and sustain)
freelance work at a site like odesk or elance
Own a popular app or forum
Push carts at wal mart part time (but I don't think that pays enough)
Self employment doing massage therapy (I can set my own hours but I'd need to invest time and money to get trained)
Tutoring (I might like this one. Do I need a college degree? Can I make enough with part time hours? Is it hard to find leads for clients? How would I do that?)
Online poker (but it seems kinda hard)
Does anyone here live in a yurt? And has anyone tried living in other countries to cut down expenses?
edited to add: Did I make a mistake including numbers? They're what would be ideal for me, not strict requirements. I can work a little more or spend less. Err on the side of posting ideas, I'm sure some other people are interested in low stress work but don't value free time *quite* as much I seem to