Mean Wage Movement
How to Live on $833/Month | Chapter 6
A general overview
←← Introduction | ← Chapter 5
Imagine you’ve decided to live on the global mean wage — roughly $10,000/year, or $833/month.
There’s an obvious problem with this idea. $833 would not even cover monthly rent/mortgage for many of my readers. How is anyone supposed to live in America on that amount of money?
There’s not much of a way around it: the average human’s budget is not enough to afford a conventional American house or apartment all to yourself. Getting by on $10,000/year almost always requires an alternative living situation.
People who live comfortably on that kind of budget have often chosen one of the following paths:
- Living in a van or RV
- Building a tiny house and parking it somewhere cheap
- Joining an intentional community / commune
- Buying land and building an eco home
Some of these require a bigger initial investment than others, and they aren’t always cheap by default, but they are all viable routes to a cheaper lifestyle than standard rent/mortgage.
For those of us who were raised in first-world homes, it’s hard to understand just how luxurious (and unsustainable) our homes are by global standards. All those amenities — power, water, internet, sewage, heat, AC, appliances. Concrete, lumber, drywall; hundreds (or thousands) of square feet all to yourself. A family living in a mud hut would see that as extravagant wealth. A home for royalty.
Those luxuries are our baseline expectation, and I want to call into question our calibration of what’s “normal” and “necessary”.
I’m humbled to think about the relative wealth I was raised in because I truly believe the value of a human life doesn’t depend on wealth. There are billions of equally amazing humans living in very simple homes (or homeless), and it’s not like they deserve comfort any less than I do. Why do I need a fancy home when most people make do without? Couldn’t I live simpler and be just fine?
My answer is yes, and I believe there are numerous ways a simpler lifestyle can actually make us happier than an excessive one.
While adequate access to things like healthy food, clean water, and comprehensive healthcare are important for health and happiness, there are certain ways people in poorer countries experience higher life satisfaction than we do. When you’re living with your whole family in a small space, close to other families, and all working together for survival, it promotes an intimate sense of solidarity and trust in your community.
That’s one way the globally wealthy are often poorer when it comes to lived experiences. We can afford to lock ourselves in comfortable boxes, sterile and rectilinear, and suddenly we’re disconnected from our neighbors. We don’t touch the soil or look at the stars. We lose track of our needs underneath a mountain of wants. It’s not how we evolved to live.
I’m not saying life is overall easier or better for the world’s poor, only that there are things we can learn from them. We’re very inefficient with the amount of resources and money we use to create our homes. It’s possible to create homes that meet our same basic needs using a small fraction of the expense and materials.
It can feel unnatural to think about voluntarily adjusting “downward” into a housing alternative, but giving up luxuries is exactly what we need to do if we’re serious about reversing our excess.
It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Creating your own living space, and your own custom lifestyle, allows you to sort through the clutter of life and emphasize what’s important to you.
It’s like reorganizing a garage full of junk. Hard work that nobody wants to initiate — but the result is a more streamlined, efficient, and relaxing way of life, with free space to work on your passions.
As for me? I live in a vehicle. It’s a 23' shuttle bus that once drove people between the airport and the rental car lot. Living this way plays into my strengths and weaknesses in some ways: it forces me to go outside often and to keep my small space clean. It allows me to travel relatively cheaply and with the full comfort of my home everywhere I go. I can sleep in a new spot every night, or I can stay somewhere for months. I find freedom in that flexibility.
Maybe life in a vehicle isn’t your thing, but living in an intentional community and working on an organic farm would make you come alive. Or maybe you’d enjoy finding an inexpensive plot of land, putting a shipping container on it, and building a dwelling in that.
All of these routes have their challenges. They go against the grain of how we’ve been instructed to live. It’s learning to choose something uncomfortable, sit with it, analyze it, and modify it in a way that works for you. It’s a process that requires open-mindedness and patience.
Lifestyle alternatives take some effort, but they’re nothing to be afraid of! There’s no reason we have to do what society expects of us. We can choose to modify or completely discard the templates we’re given in life. In fact, it’s important to do exactly that if we want to become a sustainable species.
What’s harder in the long run — recalibrating your standards of comfort, or spending a much higher percentage of your life working at a stressful job? Finding a healthy relationship with your purchasing habits, or running faster and faster on the hedonic treadmill? Being seen as less ambitious and successful by your peers, or suffering poor health outcomes due to being overworked?
“I spent too much time in the office” is a common deathbed regret.
“I had a lot of free time to do what mattered most to me” isn’t.
When I’m old I want to look back on my life and be grateful I found ample time for rest, enjoyment, connection, travel, and my personal passions, instead of burning away the hours of my life at a job just to earn excessive amounts of money.
Don’t you?
Practical tips
Monthly rent is the biggest item to reduce, but aside from that, here are some more ways to cut costs:
Housing
If you can’t (or won’t) move out of a standard house/apartment:
- Live in a room in a shared house.
- Rent out any extra rooms in your own house.
If you find the right people to live with, this can have the added benefit of built-in community and social support, which can be crucial for personal happiness.
- Go light on utility usage. You’re probably already familiar with advice for reducing water and electricity costs, it’s just a matter of identifying improvements and making them a habit.
Food
- Do not eat out often.
- Learn how to cook, and make that the usual way you eat.
- Don’t let food go to waste. Eat your leftovers; use the ingredients you have before they go bad.
- Don’t buy more groceries when you’ve already got plenty to eat. It’s good to use up what’s left in the pantry and refrigerator.
- Stock up on cheap, bulk staples that are fairly healthy — potatoes, rice, beans, noodles; include those in your meals.
- Drink water instead of buying beverages.
Recurring expenses
- Avoid paying too much for internet and phone (I can recommend Visible as a $25/month solution for truly unlimited data with a hotspot).
- Shop around for cheaper options for everything else that automatically bills monthly, like insurance.
- Identify if you can drop any services you’re paying for. Do you really need it? Is it crucial for your health or happiness? If not, get rid of it.
Belongings
- Buy secondhand whenever possible; use thrift stores, Facebook Marketplace, or Craigslist.
- Share tools and appliances with neighbors.
- Avoid buying new things compulsively; that can be an addiction and needs to be addressed. Learn to be satisfied with what you already have instead of seeking the rush of that next new thing.
- Practice having some days where you buy nothing all day.
Cars
- If possible, just use a bike or public transit instead.
- Maybe a motorcycle or a scooter would suit your purposes.
- Never buy a new car. It’s cheaper to seek out a reliable, older, fuel-efficient car, and reduces the demand for new cars to be built.
- Be willing to learn how to do light repair jobs and maintenance yourself. If you can access the right tools, then all the information you need to do the job is on YouTube or on a car forum somewhere.
- Don’t repair cosmetic damage or wash your car. If it gets you from A to B, it’s doing its job — who cares how it looks?
Bus-dwelling budget
It may be helpful to see an example budget for a mean-wage lifestyle. Here’s an approximation of how I spend my money:
Automatic monthly expenses
- $50 vehicle insurance
- $25 phone/internet/hotspot (Visible)
- $23 Spotify, Medium, and other apps
Other
- $200 diesel (depends on how much I’m traveling)
- $200 food and water
- $150 entertainment — eating out, random purchases, bus upgrades
- $100 to save up for mechanical work, registration, tires, unexpected expenses
Grand total: $748.
There are many months where I spend more than this, especially on food, diesel, and entertainment.
There are also months where I remain stationary to avoid fuel costs, cut out entertainment purchases, mostly eat staple foods, and get through the month on $200–300.
When you boil it down to what you actually need to survive comfortably, $833/month is more doable than most people think. Remember that half the world lives with less than $300/month.
The trick is learning to separate wants from needs.
The way we’ve been taught to meet our needs often brings with it a lot of unnecessary waste (eg. we need to drink water, but it doesn’t need to be bottled water). It takes some effort to tease those things apart and learn how to satisfy ourselves with a smaller footprint. More on that next week.
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