23 ms·

How to live on $432 a month in America

• deleted 1y ago
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• xeromal 1y ago
  I've often felt this way about some of today's complaints. I grew up in area like what was mentioned in this article and I long for the day I can go back there. I would in a heartbeat if my partner shared the same mentality as me. I don't really see a point in living a big city with the remote job I have and that many others have if I can live in a smaller area that still has humans but much cheaper way of living. Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services but I see those same people decry how much the food costs and also that they have no friends and can't find someone to date. My thoughts aren't as articulate as I'd like them to be but I guess I'm ultimately trying to say is if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper.
  • HankStallone 1y ago
    I've lived most of my life in (or outside of) small towns, and some of it in a city. I've noticed that my small-town friends who moved to the city would often talk about all the culture and food choices, but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too. I'm sure some city people do take advantage of all the diverse options the city gives them, but it seems like a lot of them ended up there for other reasons and then use that as a rationalization for staying where everything costs so much more.
    • keiferski 1y ago
      I agree with you for the most part, and think a lot of people think they need to live in NYC/LA/London/etc. because of unstated social pressure, not because they actually utilize all of the megacity’s amenities. However – I do think there is a sweet spot. If you can get a remote job that pays decently well and doesn’t require an excessive amount of time – and live in one of these cities – you can actually manage to see and do everything. For example - I lived in New York for a while doing exactly this. I worked remotely and so could avoid rush hours on the subway, at restaurants, etc. and I had enough time and pocket money to explore the city.
      • trollbridge 1y ago
        I’ve never really been super confident with remote jobs - a recession hits and you can’t find another job.
        • xp84 1y ago
          > remote jobs > a recession hits and you can’t find another job. Suppose you avoid all remote work. You live in San Francisco. If a recession hits and you're laid off, now there are 10,000 local unemployed tech workers trying to get 5,000 local jobs. Similar risk of unhappiness. I don't believe that remote positions as a class are more likely to be eliminated than any other, so I just think of jobs located in "Remote" to be just like jobs in any other city, "Remote" just happens to have more jobs than any one city, and has unlimited housing for sale or rent at every price point. I went remote in 2018 and couldn't be happier with my choice. I'm on my 3rd job, although Job #2 required me to be onsite for about a year starting in 2019.
          • trollbridge 1y ago
            I'm remote too (sort of), but I do sometimes dislike the fact that the kind of tech jobs I'm best suited for are all an hour+ away.
    • 7thaccount 1y ago
      I recently visited New York City for the first time and honestly wasn't impressed. Outside of a few neat things like visiting the cronut place, I could do nearly everything the same back home. The bagel places were indeed good, but not noticeably different than the hipster bagel places in my city. Wood fired pizza was good at several places, but again...none were noticeably different than the wood fired oven fancy places in my small city. The game stores are much bigger in my city due to lower real estate prices. Times Square was the biggest disappointment. It's literally just standard big box store crap like GAP and M&M store and stuff like that. I guess that one's on me as it's a tourist trap. Central Park was cool, but not as good as the multiple large parks in easy driving distance. I could go on and on like that, but essentially I can own a home for a fraction of the cost to rent there. The only real difference is in a metropolis like NYC, you can meet up with people for any interest you want practically. You want to learn Klingon? I'm sure there's people doing that in NYC, but not like a city of 150,000. Edit: the tap water was superior to my towns.
      • keiferski 1y ago
        No one that lives in New York goes to Times Square, save for the subway station. The great thing about New York is the prevalence of basically every nationality, with its own designated neighborhood. Places like Flushing, Corona, Brighton Beach, etc. These are also the areas that inexperienced tourists don’t visit. If you visit again, definitely try to venture out to those areas.
        • RHSeeger 1y ago
          I always found it kind of fun to wander through Times Square in the evening, every now and again (on the order of once every few months). Pointing out that it's the same old big box stores doesn't really connect to the draw of it. Most people don't go to Times Square to shop, they go to _experience_ it, and its entertaining. But it's not the place you're going to on a normal Saturday night with your friends.
        • 7thaccount 1y ago
          Thanks. Yeah, if I do go back it won't be in Manhattan. I was alarmed by how every place was pretty much closed by 6-8 PM near me. Again...my medium city has plenty of cool stuff open much later -especially on a Friday/Saturday night.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • alexjplant 1y ago
      I've had the opposite experience. Having moved from the boonies to a downtown in a Tier 2 US city has caused a lot of my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could buy a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for what I pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that not having to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth the 35% premium in housing for me. Before I moved I owned a house and justified living where I did by saying stuff like > country people can make a day trip to do that too. ...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to drive 90 minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour before even getting in the vicinity of where you're going has a very real chilling effect on planning fun time. Most people just end up drinking Mai Tais that a bartender pours out of a plastic jug at a riverside dock bar instead. Different strokes for different folks, but I think everybody should give each paradigm a shot and decide what they like.
      • xp84 1y ago
        > give each paradigm a shot and decide what they like. Hard agree. I think the article is right that most people haven't even come close to trying the lifestyle he's suggesting.
      • FeloniousHam 1y ago
        > ...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to drive 90 minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour before even getting in the vicinity of where you're going has a very real chilling effect on planning fun time. 1000%. I would complain about driving the 12 minutes just to get out of my subdivision (before moving into town). Just what you say, there's a "chilling effect" when everything you want to do is 30 mins away.
        • bombcar 1y ago
          A big part of it is how you want to find friends. If you have a “friend profile” and you want people to match it, a city is wonderful - more people, more matches. Thing: all friends within 5 years of my age, similar jobs, education, etc. Go city! Or college maybe. But if you’re old country or old rural and want to be friends with those around you a suburban or rural area can be fine. You end up making friends with the ten year old next door, and his parents, along with the retirees on the other side, etc.
    • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
      > but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too. This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in an urban area and I haven't eaten at a chain restaurant outside of road trips in years. I only eat at chains when I'm on a road trip and need a bite in the middle of nowhere. Once I drop into where I'm staying for vacation off the road trip, I'm eating local restaurants or cooking for myself if I'm out in nature. The fantastic food scene in my area is a huge factor in why I live here. FWIW one can make the same comment about large US suburban home dwellers. Most of them just store stuff they rarely if ever use. Most of their less frequently used things are in varying states of disrepair and many of these folks would probably be better served by using communal amenities kept in good condition rather than storing sports equipment that they use once every 5 years in a dusty, mothball filled storage closet. Most folks in car-oriented US suburbs use their cars as mobile living rooms and do all sorts of illegal things (like makeup or doomscrolling their phone) in their car and only incidentally use them as transportation vehicles. But that doesn't stem the demand for folks who want to live in these homes. The fact is, aside from job considerations, there are people who choose their density based on their actual preferences. One set of preferences may seem silly coming from a different set but that doesn't make them right or wrong; it just makes them preferences.
      • tomcar288 1y ago
        actually, i'm now noticing it may be cheaper for me to buy used skis than to rent them. buying used i can get it cheaper than even renting just once or twice
      • JKCalhoun 1y ago
        Yeah, I haven't eaten fast food in — I don't know how long. Maybe it's an age thing? I ate at chains when I was younger.... I grew up in Kansas City, lived 27 years in the Bay Area, and now back in the midwest (in Omaha). Guess what I miss most about the Bay Area? (It's not the traffic and it's not In & Out.) It's all the amazing Asian restaurants. C'mon Omaha! Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good bulgogi....
    • datavirtue 1y ago
      Cities wreck your finances and your health.
      • goatlover 1y ago
        People raise families and live generations in cities. There's plenty of rural poverty and poor health outside of cities.
    • jonfromsf 1y ago
      Cities are lecking grounds. They're places for people to date. Once they get married they move to the suburbs.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services The reality is that it's mostly about living in a city with available jobs What's the job market like near this lovely little $432 per month place described in the article? How am I going to pay for it?
    • kemotep 1y ago
      They suggested working part time at a gas station or seasonally somewhere else which is incredible. I have had to travel across the country multiple times to “live where the jobs are” so I find it hard to believe that the whole time I could have not done that and just picked some remote isolated corner and live like my great grandparents homesteading?
      • DrillShopper 1y ago
        The real trade off here is cheap rural land but no ability to ever retire. Sure, I could live in the middle of goddamn nowhere, grow my own food, make my own clothes, build my own house, etc, etc, etc, but at the end of the day it's never over. I'll be out in my 70s and 80s doing that until I die. Sure, that might be an ideal life for someone, but that someone is not me.
        • xp84 1y ago
          What? First of all, unless you're 18 you should, if you're playing the game correctly, be saving for retirement already, right? That money, which you get to bring with you, will go a lot further in the country. Plus, Social Security exists, and again, that check will be the same amount regardless of where you live in retirement, so that'll go a lot further there too. The longer you've worked for "city money" already, the bigger your SS check will be. Even if you wait until you're just before retirement, moving out of the expensive market is one of the best ways to ensure a retirement secure from the worry of having to keep being economically productive till death.
          • DrillShopper 1y ago
  • abhiyerra 1y ago
    I moved from SF to smaller towns around California. I so much more enjoy the smaller towns. When I lived in SF I ended up going to the same 5 restaurants or cafes and while it was fund in my 20s to be around a lot of people my age as I got older and now have a family having more space is nice. Plus, I still go to the same five places in the smaller town I live in and don't have to usually wait in lines.
  • RHSeeger 1y ago
    Living in a city (or other high COL location) also means you can save more. Sure, you're spending more, but that 5-10% of your earnings you put into saving is a lot more when you're making city money vs not. And when it comes time to retire, having saved 5% of $50-150,000/year every year adds up to a much higher amount to retire on.
  • nurettin 1y ago
    Also small towns attract less serial killers.
    • bryanlarsen 1y ago
      Murder rates are higher in rural Canada than they are in urban Canada, and Massena is basically Canada.
    • aaronbaugher 1y ago
      Don't tell people that. The common belief that small towns are some cross between Deliverance and Children of the Corn is one of the things that keeps small towns nice.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • titanomachy 1y ago
    > Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available services but I see those same people decry how much the food costs and also that they have no friends and can't find someone to date. It sounds like they’d find a way to be miserable anywhere. I live in a medium-density neighborhood of a large US city. I have multiple close friends within a five-minute walk, and I’m constantly meeting new people who share my interests. The music venues, restaurants, and yoga studios are nice too, but having so many potential friends in close proximity is what really makes the city great for me. It’s not necessarily easy to start making friends though, it definitely doesn’t happen automatically. Maybe in small towns, people are more likely to notice you and spend time with you, because they also have fewer people to choose from. When I’ve lived in small towns I found dating almost impossible, though. > if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper Bro. Please go make some friends, or find a hobby or vocation you like, or get religion, or something! You don’t have to be miserable, at least not all the time. Renouncing society will probably just make things worse.
  • bradlys 1y ago
    Small towns can be great if you fit the mold. They’re terrible if you don’t. There’s inherently less diversity within a smaller population. I grew up in a small town. (4000 people, largest nearby was about 15 miles away and 20k. The nearest “city” was 100k and 80+ miles away. Maybe visited that city region once a year. Major city (500k) that was 180 mi away I never even saw growing up.) Even being a straight cismale nerd was considered the bane of my existence. There wasn’t anyone else I met who shared my level of interests. I saw how people who were gay were treated and it was quite grim. Imagine now you’re adding in multiple facets like race, politics, etc. These small places work well for those who fit a certain mold. You’re not gonna have an easier time dating either if you have any modest requirements either like education, income, beliefs, etc. The main issues with cities is that they’re very competitive. If you’re not a competitive person or don’t have whatever attributes the market rewards, it will be very challenging. Especially with dating as the pool to most people feels “unlimited” and therefore people will keep looking than settle for someone who is ugly or whatever issue you have.
  • scarface_74 1y ago
    > I would in a heartbeat if my partner shared the same mentality as me. And what are the chances you would find an acceptable partner for you in the small town if you didn’t already have one?
• jeffbee 1y ago
  It makes a certain amount of sense and I myself bought a little place way out in the hinterlands of Michigan for similar economic reasons ... but I live in Berkeley because subjecting your children to life without opportunities for art, culture, education, sports, friends, etc is cruel. So if you're white, or just don't care that your ethnicity is absent, and if you have no children, and also don't mind living in a car-dependent place where the public transit to the nearest major city is a minimum of 15 hours with 3-4 transfers, then sure Massena NY is dope.
  • rahimnathwani 1y ago
    If someone were buying a place in Michigan today (as a second home) what would be some towns (villages?) to consider?
    • jeffbee 1y ago
      No idea honestly. I had some family connections near the place I acquired.
  • seabird 1y ago
    Is there no culture, or no "culture"? When you talk to people from a major metropolitan area about culture outside of a major metropolitan area, they're very often not talking about culture. They're talking about entertainment, and a specific kind of it. I live in semi-rural Michigan and the idea that there's no culture here is just kind of absurd. The culture just doesn't consist of having a constant stream of touring musicians and restaurants for you to spend money on.
    • jeffbee 1y ago
      I admit the possibility that your idea of culture is a barren plain of consumerism. If that's the case, it's your problem and only you can fix it. Agglomeration effects are real and there are centers of dance and music around the country that exist in self-reinforcing cycles of training and performance. These scenes come and go but they don't arise by themselves in isolated dying towns.
• ydlr 1y ago
  There is a little bit of a sleight of hand going on in this article by claiming the lifestyle of boomers is within reach, but then actually using boomers' parents and grand-parents as the standard. It would be more honest to say "Most of us can't have the relative wealth of our grand parents, but with some sacrifices and creativity, the lifestyle of our great-grand parents is attainable." Even that is only true in a very narrow sense. My great-grand parents built a 600sqft house in a small town and lived their most of their lives. But they built that house right next to their parents. They lived within 5 miles of their combined 9 siblings. They were within half a mile of their church and half mile from the my great-grandfather's union hall. The town was small, but thriving, with multiple department stores downtown. My great-grandmother worked in two of them. They did not isolate themselves into a dying town with few opportunities far away from their friends and family. What millinials and zoomers are really struggling with is the hallowing out of the social and economic institutions that supported our collective wealth and well-being. These struggles may manifest as complaints about the individual ability to afford housing, healthcare, education, etc. But there are not individual solutions to these problems. They are structural.
  • jeffbee 1y ago
    Starting now you can also get the diseases your great-grandparents enjoyed.
  • yupitsme123 1y ago
    The communities that they lived in were more self-sufficient and probably lived outside of the influence of large government or corporations or lobbying groups. The flourishing town probably grew that way organically, not because of government support or because some company opened a big facility there. It's true that land is more expensive now, but even if you could buy your own town and settle people on it, organic growth is basically illegal or impossible nowadays.
    • ydlr 1y ago
      Actually, the town basically existed because of the TVA. It was a major employer and profits went to fund the schools and library.
• AndrewOMartin 1y ago
  Just make sure you don't get sick.
  • SoftTalker 1y ago
    Do like your great grandfather did, eat some hot chicken soup and go to bed.
    • mrguyorama 1y ago
      Just a couple generations back my family members were dying of preventable illness. Like I'm not joking, we have the records.
  • Goronmon 1y ago
    Also, you just need to continually scavenge for "free" water and heat. Don't forget the free fishing rod/equipment.
    • jocaal 1y ago
      In the article he mentions there is a well at the house. Also blankets and wood fires are free heat.
      • Goronmon 1y ago
        In the article he mentions there is a well at the house. Wells are not "free water" unless you never have to worry about any sort of repair or maintenance.
      • jeffbee 1y ago
        In what way is wood free? To heat even a tiny home purpose-built for high efficiency you'd need several acres of woods to sustainably harvest. For a falling-apart $30k hovel in upstate NY you'd probably need more like 15 acres, and you don't get a 15-acre stand of woods in the deal for that price.
• Taikonerd 1y ago
  > any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream — and could be living so cheaply, they’ve got their expatriate buddies down in Mexico beat. Their expatriate buddies down in Mexico probably aren't shivering through an upstate New York winter with nothing but a wood-burning stove for warmth, the way this guy proposes.
  • Goronmon 1y ago
    Yeah, leaving the "heat" part of the list just blank is pretty telling as far as how much thought went into this.
    • ruste 1y ago
      I've been following this guy for a while on X. He does live this way. This isn't a hypothetical. He lives on his writing and has plenty of free time to chop all the wood he'd ever need.
      • Taikonerd 1y ago
        Sure, I think a certain rare type of guy can really thrive like this. But most people don't want to live like this, for understandable reasons.
      • Goronmon 1y ago
        That's not what the article says. Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply. Maybe "a little bit of electricity" or "very cheap scrap wood" appear to be the vague plans for how to handle heat.
        • sgerenser 1y ago
          Apparently electricity is 4c/KWh there, so it really is only a “little bit extra” even if you’re heating with resistance heat (at least for a 600sf house).
• Goronmon 1y ago
  I enjoy the part about "Heat? Well...I'm sure something will happen allowing me to have heat. No need for concrete plans there."
  • diogocp 1y ago
    You mean this part? > as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
    • Goronmon 1y ago
      Those are both vague and completely different ways to handle heating. Also, conveniently, neither appear to have an associated cost so we don't have to worry about whether the financial math works out.
      • celestialcheese 1y ago
        It's because when you live rural like this, wood stoves are common, and wood is free. I live in the northwest, so I can't speak to upstate NY, but downed trees on state and federal land near roads is free to take. Every day there's people posting rounds of wood for free to take. It's hard work, but it's good exercise and rewarding. There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat.
        • Goronmon 1y ago
          If that's what you do in this situation, why didn't the author write that instead? There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a decade is practically speaking $0 heat. I feel like this is really stretching the definition of "$0".
          • kemotep 1y ago
• keiferski 1y ago
  Existing on the living standards of say, 1945, or even 1960, is very possible and allows you to make less money and presumably work on what you truly care about. But that means you don’t get the latest iPhone, cook basic foods at home and rarely eat out, repair your own appliances, and so on. The hardest part, I think, would be dealing with the social expectations of society at large. 1960 living standards were universal in 1960, but nowadays you’re fighting the entirety of Western marketing machine.
  • NegativeK 1y ago
    I think the author is very comfortable fighting the Western marketing machine. I also don't think they are capable of understanding why other people have other needs.
  • kemotep 1y ago
    Do you forgo modern medicine?
  • giraffe_lady 1y ago
    You would not be able to afford any kind of property insurance or medical care with this budget. You won't be able to have a well dug or a septic system maintained either. We're going back a few decades farther than 1945 to make this work I think.
  • jedimastert 1y ago
    > 1960 living standards were universal in 1960 Universal for whom? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
    • keiferski 1y ago
      I wrote that to imply that the living standards of 1960 were normal in 1960, but wouldn’t be normal today. Don’t over-focus on the word universal and miss the point I was making.
      • 1y ago
• egypturnash 1y ago
  they’d need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind, rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because in all truth, they’re actually great. I am glad people like this exist because that means there is less competition for the climate zones I can live in without having to perpetually struggle with the urge to kill myself on a daily basis. I am from the Gulf Coast and the years I lived in Seattle were a constant fight with seasonal depression. Once I left for sunnier climes again all of that just vanished.
  • pavel_lishin 1y ago
    That's exactly how I feel about hot climates - the idea of moving to Texas instantly makes me flash back to being constantly sweaty (alternating, of course, with freezing anywhere indoors as people crank the AC down to somewhere in the 50s), and to the dreary winters whose palette is washed out browns and dirty greys. Every time I visit the beach, I remember: wow, I really hate this!
  • speuleralert 1y ago
    Definitely a different strokes for different folks situation. I am also from the Gulf Coast and I genuinely love the cool rainy Seattle weather. In fact, I was just lamenting having to squint to see in the “hot” (65 F) sunny day this morning in Seattle.
  • Supermancho 1y ago
    Heating a space is easier and cheaper than cooling one. I find the midwest is plenty dry and plenty warm, even with multi-month snowy winters.
    • triceratops 1y ago
      > Heating a space is easier and cheaper than cooling one. Not really no. Cooling always uses heat pumps (air conditioning) while heating only sometimes uses heat pumps. And cooling usually has a smaller temperature delta than heating. It comes down to the relative costs of natural gas and electricity where you live.
    • 1y ago
• chasd00 1y ago
  Living in rural areas is probably very different now with connectivity options like cell phones and Starlink. I went to HS in a small town ( pop. < 1k ), it has advantages and disadvantages just like going to HS in a big city. However, entertainment in a small town was vastly different then vs today. It's probably a lot easier to live out in the middle of nowhere now without going crazy as long as you have power and something like Starlink.
• joshstrange 1y ago
  So many problems with this, including "Live like a boomer" -> "Actually, live like their parents or their grandparents" but this one: > Internet: Use library Ok, funny joke. As if it's actually _reasonable_ to live without a smartphone or the internet in 2025 (or 2015 for that matter). Can you do it? Sure, I guess, why would you? I'm not on TikTok/IG/<insert social network here other than HN>, that's not what I'm talking about here, but it seems almost criminal to not have access to the internet, it would be akin to parents refusing to take a kid to the doctor. Why would you proudly be ignorant and cut yourself from such a valuable resource?
• NegativeK 1y ago
  > Yes, startling as it could be to many “Zoomers” and “Milennials,” it just so happens that if you really want to become a member of the landed gentry, it’s really not so far out of reach just the moment you decide that you like the snow, don’t need access to the hottest clubs and the biggest cities, and can be more than happy with getting cozy in a smaller house. This is strawman to the point of rhetoric and reminds me of the "you can afford a house if you'd just stop eating avocado toast all the time." I'm actually not sure if the article is meant to be rhetoric with a pitch for small town America or if it's an actual argument that happens to have a lot of bad faith claims. I hope OP is enjoying where they live. I also hope they visit small towns where skilled tradespeople are losing their jobs and businesses due to shifts in America. I don't think telling them to work at a gas station would go over well.
• kemotep 1y ago
  Trailers in trailer parks in my rural census designated micropolitan statistical area of Ohio go for 60k at the minimum so there certainly is a lot of modern amenities you would have to accept to live without in the house described in the article. And by modern amenities I mean heat and potentially running water. This reminds me of a hunting cabin in Alaska you could rent for 100 bucks a month. One room. Wood fire stove. Outhouse. Only an hour outside of Fort Wainwright. Good luck is all I have to say.
• viccis 1y ago
  This almost seemed like it was going to be a Modest Proposal style tongue-in-cheek skewering of this "old man yells at cloud" style of curmudgeonly generational finger wagging. The breakdown of that $432 itself was almost enough to be a farce. But no, the author really does believe this. (Please correct if I'm wrong, as it still seems hard to believe such a fatuous piece could be written and submitted here) >At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them. But I am here to tell anyone who is fed up with the housing market, tired of living the “4HL,” and sick of seeing our country’s heartland regions continue to crumble that there are actionable solutions to their problems. They could do it today. They could make the change if they wished. No one is angry that they can't buy a piece of shit shack in middle America where they will have to walk an hour each way to work at their (as suggested by the author) gas station cashier job in the deep snow all winter. They are angry that in much of the latter 20th century, when the actual "boomers" (rather than the previous generations that the author is disingenuously using in their place) could afford a home that was near jobs and community without being in the top 10-20 percentile of earners. They're angry that this is no longer the case for a number of reasons depending on whom you ask, to include housing as speculation, generational wealth destroyed by medical debt, onerous zoning and regulations preventing housing development, selfish older generations selling their homes (and therefore much of their generational wealth) to fund either lavish retirements or more medical treatments, etc, etc. Yeah you can live a 1910s rural lifestyle on the cheap, sure. Hell, get a tent and a backpack and you can live the hobo life in any of our major US cities today! But this is ignoring the obvious question, which is: If the productivity of our nation has exploded so tremendously since that time, where has all of the wealth gone that one would even dare suggest that we live a life of sufficient poverty to be suspended in that century-old way of life?
  • xp84 1y ago
    You seem really certain that the older 'way of life' is categorically bad, but you seem very unhappy and angry in the life that you reject it in favor of. Also, you can make any number of easy tweaks to his formula to allow you to have conveniences that would make your life orders of magnitude richer than the true 1910s were. For instance, a $3,000 car, Internet access, etc. Also, anyone coming into this experiment with savings from a few years of "big city work" has a huge amount of capital to play with to set themselves up. $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance. The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations. Some people would arguably be happier working little to not-at-all, or working for themselves to make $10k a year and devoting the rest of their time to whatever makes them happy. Why is that so offensive an idea?
• pgwhalen 1y ago
  There are a lot of specifics HN can and will nitpick in this piece, but the perspective is useful and not invalidated by these specifics. Personally I would never choose this lifestyle, but I like that OP highlights how clearly it can exist.
• kens 1y ago
  The article mentions that the Moses-Saunders International Power Dam is nearby. A bit of a tangent, but this was built by Robert Moses, who isn't as well known as he should be. Moses built a huge number of projects that reshaped New York City: the state parkway, lots of bridges including the TriBorough and Verrazzano-Narrows, multiple NYC expressways, Jones Beach, Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, United Nations headquarters, large public housing projects, and so forth. If you like very long books, you should read "The Power Broker", a biography of Moses that explains how he used his job as state park commissioner to become one of the most powerful (and controversial) people in New York.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• neilv 1y ago
  > Massena is one of the poorest, least-desirable places not only in New York State, but in the United States at large. [...] on the flip-side, it’s within very close distance of two major Canadian cities, [...] Coincidentally, recently thinking of Handmaid's Tale for some reason... I was clicking on towns on Google Maps, on either side of the NE US border with Canada, and was struck by many of the featured photos of these places being abandoned-rural-decay. Probably because overgrown abandoned human activity is interesting to photographers. And maybe that constitutes the majority of photos from those places being shared with Google Maps. But I also had an idle thought of what-if there was a conscious effort to discourage people from going there, like a town that's kept off of maps. So I started looking around for hints of sensitive government facilities, developers buying up large swaths of land, etc. The first thing I found was an industrial marijuana-growing operation. I didn't know what to make of it, other than that land might be affordable, and hopefully Amazon delivers.
• kayodelycaon 1y ago
  You definitely have to be a certain type of person to do this. Not everyone is physically and mentally capable and has a “socially-acceptable morality” to live that kind of lifestyle. Access to healthcare is also a serious problem. Also the people may be hostile to anyone who is “a liberal” or “woke”. I wouldn’t recommend being openly transgender in one of these places.
• DrillShopper 1y ago
  > Taxes: $41 > Electric: ~$30 > Water: $0 > Heat: (no, it's really blank) > Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there, assuming you go to town 3x per week at $2/trip. Multiple options to take the bus to town each day from this location. > Food: ~$300/mo. > Telephone: $8/mo > Entertainment: Fishing and library, free > Internet: Use library This author cannot be coming at this from a serious point of view with this absolute embarrassment of a cost breakdown. There is no accounting here for heat (which is sort of important in the middle of "American Siberia"), property taxes, homeowner's insurance, healthcare, or saving for retirement. > I’ve known men who grow rare Chinese medicinal herbs in greenhouses on a tenth of an acre to sell via the mail; or my uncle, who takes lumber from old barns and crafts it into shelves to sell online. Damn, I be that would be a lot easier with an Internet connection at home and a smartphone.
  • qingcharles 1y ago
    He overpriced the phone. Good2Go have a 1GB data plan for $5/mo that I use. I only need data when I'm outside the house. You can buy a half-decent Android phone off eBay for $30-50. But, you still need some sort of Internet. If you can't get wired, then that means having to fork out for Starlink or Hughes. I'm in literally the middle of nowhere in a one-horse town and it has 1Gbps wired to my house and they just put in a second company with 5Gbps the other day, which is wild.
    • junar 1y ago
      I'd expect 5G home internet to be cheaper than satellite, though probably still more expensive than an ultra-low-cost cellular plan.
      • qingcharles 1y ago
        True. Verizon and T-Mobile both had really awesome 5G home Internet plans for $25/mo. I had the T-Mobile one for a while in 2022 and was getting 800Mbps which was wild.
  • cricketsandmops 1y ago
• distantsounds 1y ago
  this dude _literally_ wrote about a neighboring town that's dying and the government isn't helping them out. https://shagbark.substack.com/p/obituaryland https://shagbark.substack.com/p/obituaryland Convincing people to move to a remote area while at the same time seeing literal ghost towns develop, is not something I would recommend. What happens when the public utilities fail? The roads need repairing? One of the _many_ blizzard-like seasons can knock out critical infrastructure.
• 999900000999 1y ago
  >Though I and my wife do not presently live in Massena, we live nearby, and we’re doing exactly this — we do not have an automobile, nor do we want one. We use the rural county transit bus, which we have found to be extremely cheap and quite reliable; and it has certainly saved us thousands and thousands of dollars by liberating us from the onerous expense of keeping a car. This part has me screaming shenanigans. Unless you basically don't leave the house, you need a car outside of like 8 American cities. More believable would be a pair of used bikes.
  • fzeroracer 1y ago
    Agreed, looking at the map of Massena this seems like bullshit. I've lived without a car for my entire life across multiple states and it is incredibly onerous in even mildly dense areas.
    • monroeclinton 1y ago
      https://www.slcnypublictransit.com/transit-schedules https://www.slcnypublictransit.com/transit-schedules It seems like they have a good number of routes and do route deviation within 3/4 of a mile of the bus stop.
      • fzeroracer 1y ago
        Frequency is often as important as the route from experience; because a route that's reasonably distant from your location can be walked to/biked to etc but a low-frequency route means it's something you need to plan your entire day around. And if you miss any bus then you're stranded (which, given that they don't have internet I'm curious how they manage...) Most of the bus routes here seem to run maybe twice a day, once early in the morning and then once late in the afternoon. There's a few more frequent ones that run on the hour but it looks to be closer to the denser cores.
        • bombcar 1y ago
          Rural bus routes used to be very common - they commute in in the morning and out in the afternoon. You change your schedule to handle that, and they usually will drive the van (barely a bus) up to your door.
• silisili 1y ago
  Higher income employees would pay way more than that in taxes alone. This is why properties in low and no income tax states skyrocketed. Assuming it's not high income but a real scrounger, this is leaving out way too much. Out of pocket health insurance will easily quadruple that number. Utilities could too, depending.
  • K0balt 1y ago
    Out of pocket health insurance 1400 a month? Really? It that’s true, that is criminally ridiculous. Why do people accept that, when even in developing nations basic health care is free, and there are plenty of private choices. Decent health insurance costs about 150-300 a month the world over, except in the USA where it is ten times that for no reason whatsoever besides greed and the fact that healthcare is a basic need that puts people under duress. Get your shit together , Americans, you’re getting piped over a barrel six ways to Sunday and you just take it like it was mandatory. What gives?
    • returningfory2 1y ago
      The main reason is that the government isn't funding it, like in other countries. I do agree the healthcare system in the US should be reformed. But the cost isn't going to go all away - it's just going to be shifted to higher taxes. Which is fine.
      • K0balt 1y ago
        Sure, but I’m having a hard time understanding how developing nations the world over can afford to do this, but the USA cannot lol. I’ve used the healthcare systems in many developing nations, and while it’s not really fun, it is adequate and free for 80 percent of the issues that a person encounters. For the other 20 percent, it’s best to go to a private clinic, where the care is as good if not better than many US clinics but at 10-20 percent of the cost. And the private clinics are not subsidized. My wife just got an MRI at a private, fully for profit imaging clinic. The total cost was $217 USD for a study with and without contrast on a 2023 Siemens scanner. Labs for the contrast approval were $6. What people pay in the USA is in no way justified by equipment or facility costs. Runaway liability and profiteering, perhaps. But not because of the “quality” of the healthcare or the equipment.
• aeturnum 1y ago
  Some of the claims here are pretty intense, but I do think his closing statement is true enough: > there’s never been a better time to try to “make it” in America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we can’t see that now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten bad — it might mean that our perception has become grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality TV, and social media comparison syndrome. With an extremely strong emphasis on "older version." This vision of life is not the life that most "black pilled" people were raised to expect or plan for. It is very accessible and is extremely discoverable thanks to the internet (with electricity costs like that I'm surprised crypto miners haven't moved in) - but it's a level of self-dependence and isolation that most people do not want. However it's absolutely true that it's never been easier to live a "frontier" lifestyle, only now with 3d printing and amazon and other bountiful resources to fill in traditional gaps.
  • weard_beard 1y ago
    What I don’t understand is the authors antagonistic framing. The complaints about moving backward because of boomer greed aren’t any less valid just because caves exist, fire remains “discovered”, and we can clone wooly mammoths.
    • serf 1y ago
      the complaints aren't less valid, but having a constant axe to grind that you blame for all UN-success isn't a good strategy.
  • sweeter 1y ago
    I think it's absurd. I work full time in the richest country on Earth and I can't afford an apartment and healthcare. The problem is clearly not advertising. Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their expectations" type of energy
    • digianarchist 1y ago
      We're all being asked to sacrifice the living standards our parents grew up with because the utter failure of local, state and federal government to provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare, something most of the Western world manages to pull off without issue. We have never been more productive in this country's history and yet we cannot even meet a bar set in the 1950s. It's frankly ridiculous as is this piece.
• potato3732842 1y ago
  If I wanted to be a jerk I could spew the same opinions the author is, but I'm not, so I'm disagreeing with him. I don't buy lunch. I don't eat "nice" food. I don't drive nice cars. I don't eat out often and have never in my life run up a bar tab over $30. I have under $20/mo in streaming services, buy used/free furniture etc, etc. If I did to all those things the monthly cost would not even make up the ~1k/mo difference between my "got in early" mortgage and what rent on a shitty 1-2 bedroom costs these days. I live in a 1200sf house (in a post-industrial town with an industry more or less killed by globalization, so not like it's somewhere nice) and have the biggest house of anyone I know under 50. This is not a "people won't settle" problem. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely am "making it" in that I'm hitting milestones like home ownership, retirement contribution, etc (at the expensive of day to day material conditions, of course) but if everyone behaved like I do to do it the economy would collapse. There's a discussion to be had about laws, codes, zoning, etc. and how they've done the same things for housing that the same people's regulatory legacy has done for cars. And to address rural New York specifically, it is a goddamn dump. You think coal country is bad? You think a bad part of Detroit or St. Louis is bad? it ain't got nothing on <shuffles cards> Oneonta. We're talking boarded up to occupied houses ratios one step short of abandoned mining town. You either work on a farm or live off welfare up there. Oh, and the property taxes are pretty crushing in NY, you'll be better off in a comparably crappy town in just about any other state.
• energywut 1y ago
  > any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream If (and only if) you aren't socially different from the communities you'd be moving to. Being gay or trans, for instance, might mark you out as a target in a lot of the places where you could live this cheaply. Plenty of race, religions, or political beliefs that would make it untenable. It's hard to claim that any American can achieve this.
  • dsadfjasdf 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • paulryanrogers 1y ago
      Having lived in a small town in the South East, it's true. Even being white and male may not be enough. You have to be able bodied, not too ugly, not too short, not too nerdy, the correct religion and denomination for the area. Unless you want to live like a hermet.
    • energywut 1y ago
      Are you asking for data on whether intolerance ore pejudice _exists_ in small towns in the US? Well, I would have assumed that was well understood, but you know what? Here's some data that shows that rural communities do, in fact, have measurably higher prejudice against others (In this specific case, hispanic immigrants): https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1409896/FULLTEXT01.pdf https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1409896/FULLTEXT... And here's a study demonstrating that outgroup identity, particularly in rural communities, can lead to worse outcomes including worse allocations of scarce resources: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09680-3#Sec6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09680-3... If you want more data, there's plenty of research out there.
  • nkurz 1y ago
    Maybe you have more direct experience with this than I do, but I'm not sure I agree. I don't follow the lifestyle the author describes, but I do live in an economically and culturally comparable town in Vermont that's much smaller than Massena. The town is full of gay and lesbian couples, and it really doesn't seem to be an issue. The few racial minorities seem to be well accepted. Religion is a surprisingly small factor. Political beliefs do divide the town, but national politics are actually less divisive than I've experienced in larger places. Trans folk do have it harder, but we seem to judge the few we have as individuals. I'm sure there are other towns where these things are much less true, but I wouldn't automatically assume it couldn't work in Massena for anyone with the right attitude. I think it would come down to the individual.
• fzeroracer 1y ago
  There's so many issues with this article. Ignoring the real costs of living in declining rural areas (poor health services, vanishing community), they also fail to account that you also cannot raise a family there properly. Schooling is often poor and the infrastructure poorer and you're fucking over your kids future so you can play pretend boomer while ignoring the biggest things they benefited from.
• thisisnotauser 1y ago
  Could not get past the multiple paragraphs of strawman nonsense. Here, let me summarize: The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. … Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
  • aorloff 1y ago
    This guy lives in Amish country, yet is not Amish, but drives a hard bargain. I'm nearly sold, but I haven't sat on the furniture yet to see if it will be hard enough.
• peterburkimsher 1y ago
  In many countries around the world, $432 is more than enough. BeWelcome.org is free accomodation for travellers, so if you need somewhere for just a couple of nights, you can stay. It’s safe; there’s an entire safety team dedicated to handling complaints. If you settle down for too long though, it is recommended to share in paying the rent or utilities, out of politeness.
• eugenekolo 1y ago
  Confused by his portrayal of Massena, NY. I don't live there and have never driven through, but looking on Google Maps it doesn't seem that bad or depressing as the author (and I guess commentators) make it out to be. It has a Walmart, Home Depot, BJs (similar to Costco), a main street with several businesses. A walkable grid with sidewalks in that main town area.... Feels like reaching that this place is so desolate and depressing.
  • fullStackOasis 1y ago
    Also what I was thinking! I saw the Home Depot on the map, and an International Airport (with daily flights to Boston no less), and thought, "Wait a sec, is this guy pulling our collective legs?". https://flymassena.com/ https://flymassena.com/
  • loeber 1y ago
    Agreed! I'm randomly Google Street View-ing through town, and it looks... modest but actually quite nice? Check out these pleasant-looking houses in the summer: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Massena,+NY+13662/@44.9264827,-74.8975068,3a,75y,279.74h,93.36t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sIpYdcFf16_br8jvRhM43MQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D-3.358190102272374%26panoid%3DIpYdcFf16_br8jvRhM43MQ%26yaw%3D279.736858578341!7i16384!8i8192!4m6!3m5!1s0x4ccc3e334844bb3d:0xf3532d54519c10d7!8m2!3d44.9279308!4d-74.891794!16zL20vMDN6MHE0?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDUyMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/place/Massena,+NY+13662/@44.9264... Edit: I've spent a few more minutes on Street View. This is not at all the podunk backwater that the author makes it out to be. They've got plenty of commercial streets, and big blocks of houses with nicely trimmed lawns. I suppose this actually makes the author's point more strongly -- even if you have very little money, you can live pretty nicely in Massena!
  • firesteelrain 1y ago
    It’s got three elementary schools, one junior high and one high school. My hometown had two public elementary schools, few pre K options, two religious options for K-8, one middle school and one high school at 25k residents. And we don’t have an international airport (we do one hour away and in the same county though) Massena is small but not that desolate/small
• TrackerFF 1y ago
  I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself - hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater. FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45 miles away) - and I honestly don't know how anyone can live out in the boonies without a car. Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. I mean, obviously there are plenty of people that do manage - but sooner or later you'll become completely dependent on others for certain types of transportation. Also, there's clothes, house maintenance, and lots of other things.
  • Loughla 1y ago
    What small town even has a bus? The closest bus line to me is in the closest large town (40k) about an hour away. Are there bus lines in the middle of nowhere?
    • wombat-man 1y ago
      If you’re around or on the way to a popular hike I’ve seen buses run out to some more remote spots. But probably really depends on the county.
    • cozzyd 1y ago
      Rural transit exists in some places but certainly is not common in the US like it is in e.g. eastern Europe
    • II2II 1y ago
      Granted, this was 20 years ago, but I remember taking the Greyhound and people were getting on or off the bus in the middle of nowhere. By nowhere, I mean the nowhere in the literal sense: at the intersection of two highways in the northern Ontario with no other development in sight. Of course, they also serviced the other types of nowhere: the lone gas station or the tiny village. The author is being somewhat misleading in the sense that this is not the type of bus service that one would use for your weekly commute to that 10 hour shift at the gas station, never mind the three or four times per week that you would need to cover the bills. It may be fine doing errands in town, where the arrival time and departure time don't much matter. It may also be fine for spending a day or two in the city, assuming you have the budget to stay over night. I'm not saying that the type of lifestyle alluded to is impossible, but it is not going to be the type of lifestyle accessible to young people. Then there is the question about whether they are equipped to live that type of lifestyle.
• poopsmithe 1y ago
  How do you find a property like that? Is there a Zillow for cheap rural land?
  • aaronbaugher 1y ago
    My cheap rural place is on Zillow, so you can probably just use that. Pull up a map, identify a couple of large cities (St. Louis and Kansas City, for instance), find a point between them, and zoom in. Repeat until you find a spot you like. It's a really, really big country and most of it isn't urban, so there are lots of places to choose from, with a wide variety of weather conditions, population densities, and other aspects.
• sandspar 1y ago
  Interesting how the author says that people tend to react bitterly when he says stuff like this. And sure enough, the HackerNews comments are mostly people reacting bitterly.
  • nkurz 1y ago
    Even beyond the comments, this article was immediately flagged dead despite many upvotes. Then enough people vouched for it to bring it back. I don't find it controversial or inappropriate, but many people apparently do. If you (generic you, not parent) happen to be one of those who flagged it, maybe you could explain why?
• theendisney 1y ago
  An expert told me there are places to earn and places to spend in the world. In the cheap places to spend you might want a fun job with very little pay and few hours. You for example earn 400 and spend 600 per month. In the places to earn you should try not to live at all. Ideal is to work 84 hour weeks for 15-20 bucks, rent a bunk bed with a shared kitchen and bathroom and eat whatever cheap crap you can stomach. 50 for the bed 100 for food, save something like 1400. Every week not living like that buys 6-7 MONTHS in the afordable location. Two weeks is a year. Clearly you dont actually need to live. You do 2 to 12 weeks of pure work, enough to slightly burn out. This will make the 1 to 6 year vacation all the more enjoyable. You also have money in the bank so if you feel the need to burn a few thousand on something you can. It will shorten the vacation but who needs 6 years seriously?
• ianferrel 1y ago
  I like this article. I think it's a little unrealistic in many ways, but it's good to consider that a life does not require extravagance. However: >often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes. >They’d merely need to content themselves with a manner of living that would be more in line with that of their own great-grandfathers The problem isn't that we can affordably live like our great-grandparents. It's that we can't affordably live like our parents and grandparents did.
• shusaku 1y ago
  Hold up. You don’t need a car due to a robust transportation system. You don’t work too much because of a high minimum wage. Health care is free. Retirement is handled by someone else. Education expenses are free. Child raising expenses free! You are provided free entertainment, news, etc at the library. The author forgot about how they were going to pay for clothing, etc, but there’s food stamps on the other side of the balance. Your taxes are zero, paid by richer people. The 29k payment for your house is taken from a homesteading fund. Somehow I think grandpa would be suspicious of this tale of bootstrapping just being socialism. But why not? I think people in the left have been insisting that if we gave people a robust baseline for free (by taxing the rich), we could revive this sort of lifestyle.
• chachacharge 1y ago
  yes, Massena and Ogensburg. Plagues of flies and mosquitos. Frozen car batteries. Snow plows. Rust.
• eraviloi 1y ago
  So many folks bashing the author. The message is clear, most people are not willing to alter their lives to live more comfortably. Whether that is giving up living in comfort or making small changes to their habits. I think the relevant commentary here is to look at what happiness looks like for you. For a lot of folks they are just going to mentally masturbate to alternative ways in life. For the select few that make those changes content like this is critical. Thanks for spreading the seeds.
• probably_wrong 1y ago
  I think the author is arguing against their own point with the illustration they chose. The very last picture can be found in the Wikipedia page for the Homestead Act and, two jumps later, one can find themselves in the Dutch version of "Sod house" [1] which has this to say: > The living conditions there were miserable. Due to the construction method, the room was difficult to heat, it was damp and teeming with vermin. (...) The Housing Act of 1901 prohibited living in sod huts. If the author says "you can live like your grandparents" to mean "in conditions that were already considered miserable for the standards of 1901", that's not a great selling point. And while I sympathize with the underlying message to a point, I would argue against romanticizing the past. Sure, my grandfather lived in a cheap house he built himself, but he also came back home every day with bleeding fingers that my grandmother would treat. [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaggenhut https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaggenhut
  • tantalor 1y ago
    The point could be taken in the other way, as in "hey at least you don't have to live in a house made of dirt, right?" Comparably you are much better off, so there is no point in complaining. They made it work. Sure it wasn't great, but we're all passed that now, standards are much better.
    • onecommentman 1y ago
      Adobe (dried mud) homes in Santa Fe go for well north of a million dollars US. I’ll take a couple of those myself.
      • Centigonal 1y ago
        adobe and sod are very different materials, and the climates they are built in are very different, too. Technically, a brick manor is made of dirt, too.
  • titanomachy 1y ago
    I don’t know why they chose that picture, but it’s also not really related to the argument of the essay.
• orzig 1y ago
  The author mentions they’re just about to have a baby, and it’s notable that they don’t talk about the quality of the schools. Even if they homeschooled, I imagine they want their kids to have some friends, and they didn’t talk about how that would work without a car. Once they get a car, they might get a little bit unlucky and live an hour away from their kid’s closest peer. I hope they get along!
  • fullStackOasis 1y ago
    > Even if they homeschooled, I imagine they want their kids to have some friends, and they didn’t talk about how that would work without a car. Why do you assume that they are no kids in the neighborhood? I suppose another option is that they don't actually care if their kids have friends. Perhaps parents are enough, in their view.
  • wredcoll 1y ago
    Where are they going to go if the birth is complicated? Just bleed out on the floor of their hut?
    • tokai 1y ago
      «My wife took down and died upon the cabin floor / And I ain't got no home in this world anymore» https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgzXJACXzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgzXJACXzs
      • FireBeyond 1y ago
        Even more recently: https://genius.com/Phil-collins-the-roof-is-leaking-lyrics https://genius.com/Phil-collins-the-roof-is-leaking-lyrics "My wife's expecting, but I hope she can wait. 'Cause this winter looks like it's gonna be another bad one" "The roof is leaking and the wind is howling, Kids are crying 'cause the sheets are so cold. Woke this morning, found my hands were frozen, I've tried to fix the fire, but you know, the damn thing's too old."
  • zachlatta 1y ago
• omosubi 1y ago
  I think think is doable, but how would you find a partner that is willing to do it? how many men or women are interested in this that are also the kind of people that read substack regularly?
  • bradlys 1y ago
    Plenty of retvrn types that are terminally online. You’re not likely finding them in person though in a major city. They’re probably barely scrapping by in a MCOL and don’t go out - thus, find them online.
• cozzyd 1y ago
  Is this the place? https://redf.in/UXIUBi https://redf.in/UXIUBi
• datavirtue 1y ago
  The US is packed with vacant infrastructure over hundreds of dying cities where you can get a nice home that has electricity, water and sewer and trash removal and schools etc...for dirt cheap. You could make the payment trading options with an almost meager portfolio. Evil stock market and corporations could buy you a free house.
• lwansbrough 1y ago
  In the 4th paragraph the author suggests that the economic backbone of the country - young people - simply desert economic centres of growth and prosperity and to instead assume a life of poverty in a rural teardown. A life substantially worse than their parents live, simply because their parents don’t want more homes near their own home. I didn’t bother to check if the article gets any more serious from there.
• tomcar288 1y ago
  I think a lot of people are taking it as a precise prescription. Rather, I think it's the main idea that counts: you can downsize and reduce your expenses by quite a bit. I think this will become ever more important going into the future as the standard of living continues to erode, as it has done for the last 27 years.
• giancarlostoro 1y ago
  I sometimes wonder how much Amish have to spend a month.
• jppope 1y ago
  I think a lot of people are missing the larger point. Yes its very possible to live quite inexpensively in the American Siberia... thats not what the author is really getting at. The Author is pointing out that there is a HUGE opportunity for young americans to live in places that aren't a handful of large Metros with outrageous housing costs lots of these places are the heartland, where it is socially unacceptable now for costal middle class adults go. The authors point resinates for me, and I've seen a different but related model by friends - A couple (Dentist and small business owner) living in semi-rural Kansas (city pop ~40K). Their contention was that normal people in a normal week eat some food, go to work, do kid stuff (school, practices, etc), workout, watch some TV, and sleep a bunch... And theres really nothing about that that is needs to be in a major metro, so they moved to a place where college educated adults from the coasts dare not go- Kansas. The recognize the useful stuff from the metros are the food, culture, etc... and what they did was take a trip one a month to live like kings... Can you imagine how much more fun you can have with ~400K of disposable income (after living expenses)? Seeing the trips they've taken and the adventures they were able to afford because their 7 bedroom 5 bath house cost ~400K (movie theater and all)... was mind boggling to me. It was all for the small cost of not being able to get access to the metros during the week. Seems worth it to me...
  • lfowles 1y ago
    > The recognize the useful stuff from the metros are the food, culture, etc... Probably most importantly, a thriving job market
• jebarker 1y ago
  > At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them. What would you judge them for even if you were here for that?
• tinyplanets 1y ago
  I think the author's main argument is interesting, and despite the good counter arguments already made in this thread (health care, car dependency, social isolation), it does make me think a bit about where I could possibly retire. I live in a smallish, highly-desirable city just north of Seattle that - while being pleasant to live in - is becoming extremely expensive. For me, one of the biggest issues with living out in a small rural town like this is the culture. From my experience, the majority of rural areas in the United States are now extremely politically conservative. Going anywhere outside of the Puget Sound metroplex always reminds me of this reality... lots of MAGA and confederate flags, billboards promoting the latest ultra right wing candidate, etc.
• cokeandpepsi 1y ago
  [dead]
• CommenterPerson 1y ago
  Worse than a Boomer who got his and pulled up the ladder is a Boomer who got his, pulled up the ladder, and lectures a youngster to go live in a miserable cold place in the middle of nowhere with no heat.
• 6stringmerc 1y ago
  My main takeaway from the article is that I agree it benefits the younger generation of Americans to consider moving abroad if they are comfortable with a different lifestyle where consumerism is secondary to adaptation. Personally I’m looking forward to traveling to places where being a Blues Guitarist from Texas might be a curiosity rather than a liability (such as in Texas). The biggest export, decade after decade, the US can cite is “culture” and “what is cool” and though other countries do have significantly different political / authority structures, I’m interested in exploring them. Nepal, Panama, Albania, and Vietnam are all on my list. Going into the armpit forgotten realms of the US is, however, not appealing in the least despite its financial practicality on limited means.
• fencepost 1y ago
  So, it's a stationary alternative to the "van life" trend that floats around sometimes. Massena's about the size of the town we moved my parents from after my father had a stroke, though it's a lot poorer (in 2013 nearly a third of the population was below the poverty line, and that's before Alcoa closed a chunk of operations there). It does have a hospital (25 beds, not-for-profit) and given the demographics I'm 100% positive that it's one of those hospitals that *needs* Medicaid to survive. I'm pretty sure that doing this really would feel a lot like going back and living like your grandparents or great-grandparents did - all the joys of the 1950s. I wouldn't be surprised if there was data center work available though - with cheap power there's probably someone there doing cryptomining or maybe even hosting AI processing.
  • sgerenser 1y ago
    Yep, they already thought of the cryptoming angle: https://www.nccs.one/ https://www.nccs.one/
• Jackson__ 1y ago
  >Taxes: $41 >Electric: ~$30 >Water: $0 >Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there >Food: ~$300/mo. >Telephone: $8/mo >Entertainment: Fishing and library, free >Internet: Use library >Medical costs in case a moose kicks you in the nuts while fishing: ~$500000 Someone help me manage my budget, my family is dying.
  • y-curious 1y ago
    Also your offspring need to go to schools paid for by local taxes. Ruhroh.
• xp84 1y ago
  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.
  • jvanderbot 1y ago
    Any discussion of staying near family and friends on a forum predominated by startups out of the bay area is completely disingenuous. But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates accidentally for just staying home. Your family probably already lives in an area that is more affordable than SF/NYC/Paris, and they are there waiting. It's entertaining as an extreme data point but motivating for other reasons This article is most interesting to me because I tried moving to the big city to be a big shot techie, and have been substantially happier living outside a major city in Minnesota. Absolutely nobody that I knew in those cities lived near their family, absolutely all of them moved away to chase fortune and fame.
    • 1y ago
• deleted 1y ago
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• labrador 1y ago
  Nobody wants a Breaking Bad ending like Walter White hiding out in a New Hampshire cabin or Ted Kaczynski scribbling his manifesto on cold winter nights.
  • quesera 1y ago
    ... that's not how Breaking Bad ended. :)
    • labrador 1y ago
      I assume that buying a machine gun to single handedly murder a biker gang is outside the scope of most of our experiences so not worth mentioning. The real end for me was him alone in a cabin with a barrel of cash. To me that was a more realistic ending. If anything, your correction proves my point. Most people don’t want living alone in a cabin as their ending.
      • quesera 1y ago
        Actually, I'd forgotten about the New Hampshire hideaway episode. The (actual) final episode was much more memorable. And I'll agree that "living alone in a cabin" ... while you are the object of a nationwide manhunt ... is not how people want to live!
        • labrador 1y ago
          It was forgettable because it was unspeakably depressing. My great-grandfathers had to live like that but they worked hard to provide their descendents with better opportunities. I'm retired, old, on a fixed income and live alone so I've made my peace with it. I wouldn't recommend it for people trying to have a dating life!
• dyauspitr 1y ago
  >they’d need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind, rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because in all truth, they’re actually great. You lost me here. Weather is probably the most important thing to me. Cold weather gets into my bones and leaves me low and uncomfortable. My body physiology is such that even if I wear appropriate clothing, I end up sweating under them and paradoxically get even colder. Winters for me just mean being cold, wet and uncomfortable and is not worth it for me.
• 1024core 1y ago
  Such cheap homes all across America: https://tinyurl.com/hnlink https://tinyurl.com/hnlink
• 1024core 1y ago
  I don't think living in the boonies is for everyone. I was in South-Eastern California just visiting desolate areas. One place I stayed at had absolutely nothing: the nearest place to get food or gas was Bishop, CA, a 50-minute drive. Coming from a big city the desolation is appealing at first, but gets tiring pretty soon.
• geoka9 1y ago
  > They’d need to disabuse themselves of the idea that they ought to abscond to some kind of a tropical Shangri-La; and moreover, they’d need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind, rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because in all truth, they’re actually great. New Mexico, Arizona, even Florida if you're into tropics - have pretty amazing weather, no? And there must be low COL locations there. Now, imagine living in Canada. The warmest place in all of the country is south-western BC and it rains most of the time (the nature is amazing though).
• markvdb 1y ago
  I've seen better publicity for a simpler life. Jacob Lund Fisker[0]'s ERE comes to mind. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lund_Fisker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lund_Fisker
• don-code 1y ago
  There were several years (late 2015 to mid 2017) where I did a much less extreme version of this. I stopped because, as many commenters have noted, I was (to quote this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44077097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44077097) "living off the economic surplus of [others]", and perhaps even taking opportunities away from those who needed them much more than I did. Some anecdotes from that time: I had a $30/mo phone plan that got me 100 minutes, and 5GB of data at HSPA+ speeds. I basically never worked from home, even if that had been an option, because one too many `npm install`s or video conferences would've set me over the edge. I brought my personal laptop to the office to install OS updates, and took downloads back home on a flash drive. And if I had an unexpected call to a 1-800 support hotline - one that I knew would take an hour - I'd literally go find a payphone, where you could call it for free (although it's a much higher charge to the recipient). I developed a strong love of free-to-me media and entertainment. I was a voracious reader of library books, got my news off broadcast TV, listened to FM radio for music (to be fair, I'd always - and still - done that), and so on. I was attending one or two tech meetups a week. I didn't have a car. Being a 15-minute walk from a train station helped drastically, but I wasn't as close to the city as most of my colleagues were (maybe 20min over others' average). Visiting my parents took 115 minutes (30 minutes by car) and I did it every other week. Twice a week, I'd take a commuter rail train south of the city, then walk 20 minutes to get where I was going. Most of the time I'd bum a ride back to the station with someone else there. All said, it was probably two extra hours of commuting whenever I did this. There were even times where I'd carry odd things home from Home Depot on the train. And then, as we got older, many of my friends started to move far out of the city, to places unserved by our transit system. I was totally dependent on my friends still in the city to carpool, even though I was almost certainly making more than they were. I wish - truly I wish - that I could say that this was the straw that broke the camel's back, what made me snap out of it. Sadly, that honor went mostly to both my work changing (much more teleconferencing / Zoom), and my family situation changing (needing to commute out to the burbs regularly, sometimes with little notice). I still remember some of the jibes I'd get while doing this - "why do you make life so hard on yourself?" and "you don't know how to have money". I look back on that time and do think it was an interesting experiment, and to an extent, I'm glad I did it for the perspective. But really, I was naive. I wasn't doing something that somehow made me more independent, or less wasteful. I was dependent on much of other's output, and really only wasting my own ability to be productive.
• owenversteeg 1y ago
  Like other people here, I have my quibbles with the exact math. But the general premise is true: yes, you can live in rural poverty for cheap. The problem is the vibes. A hundred years ago, you would have a community, a place in society, and all of your family and friends nearby. In 2025, the only actual local job the author of the piece can come up with is at a gas station. Top ten occupations, 1920: Farmers, farm laborers, clerks, salespeople, servants (bellboys, butlers, cooks), textile workers, machinists, carpenters, and teachers. All of those jobs, even the less respected ones, had infinitely more societal respect than the common jobs hiring in rural America today - such as stocking shelves at Walmart or working at a gas station. You could be a simple farm laborer and have a wife and kids and a place in society. Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the world around him.
  • AstroBen 1y ago
    Not saying I agree with the premise of the article at all but making life decisions based on how much others will respect it is a terrible way to live
    • weregiraffe 1y ago
      Humans are a social species. Your happiness absolutely depends on what other people think about you.
      • AstroBen 1y ago
        Good luck making everyone like you
    • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
      Yes, it seems the only thing the world around me respects is conspicuous consumption. It's better for your own wellbeing if you can avoid indulging that.
      • deleted 1y ago
• selimthegrim 1y ago
  I am sure people are managing it in New Orleans.
• alexpotato 1y ago
  I remember reading about a family with 4 kids who lived in a one bedroom house. The kids slept in two sets of bunk beds in the bedroom. The parents slept on a pull out couch in the living room. I’m not saying I want to live that way. Just pointing out that people have lived that way before.
• yibg 1y ago
  The other version of this is the whole FIRE movement. Instead of living cheap, which also affords the ability to not work much, work as normal (or more than normal) for a shorter time while living cheap, so eventually you can live cheaply forever without working. Especially tenable for the tech crowd, where salaries are high and potentially scales well with more effort put in, even if for a short duration.
• aeblyve 1y ago
  The book "Hinterland" by Phil Neel comes to mind.
• shipscode 1y ago
  It's actually possible to live pretty cheaply in America if you can save up enough to buy a house or condo in cash. This article harps on ultra rural America, but there are plenty of closer knit communities that are quite affordable as well. Lots of HOA communities exist with condos or townhouses. Example prices would be $175k for 3 bed, 2 bath condos. These can be found all over the country. Add a little more on top of it, say $250k-$300k and you've bumped up to a 3 bed 2 bath townhouse with a garage. For the price of a downpayment for a dump in a major metropolitan area, you can own a 20-30 year old construction fully paid off. And that's a mid-case scenario. In a low tax area a place that's paid off like that might cost you $400-500/mo between taxes, homeowners insurance, and HOA fees. The big "GOTCHA" everybody comes up with is health insurance. Well between medicaid and Obamacare you can get sizeable tax credits up to fairly high incomes. If you're making around $50k/yr in my state PA, you can get around $1500/mo in credits with a family of 3, and end up paying ~$1200 in premiums per year. There's literally nothing blackpill about this lifestyle. It's as walkable as any suburb, with the same CHATGPT-style standard of care healthcare that exists across the country, and it's actually more convenient to get from point A to point B in a car than in most major cities or in high density suburban areas. Fiber internet is likely more accessible and reliable too, unlike how it would be in decrepit city buildings. A lot of pros, and not many cons - sure it isn't $432/month, but you can make situations like this work for $2-3k, which opens up an endless number of careers, projects, and opportunities to live off of.
• dbg31415 1y ago
  Missing healthcare costs.
  • refurb 1y ago
    at that income level Medicaid is an option in many states.
    • FireBeyond 1y ago
      Same with education and such. "How to live on $432 a month", "... with society subsidizing a bunch of the important parts."
• bmenrigh 1y ago
  “Internet: Use library” says all you need to hear about this wonderful bargain of a location.
• hysan 1y ago
  I flagged this article and later saw it dead, so I’m quite surprised it came back. I found the content extremely shallow and lacking nuance. Others have mentioned, but it leaves out huge caveats because it would destroy the the conclusion - the cost of moving to the place in the first place, social connections, health (even worse for those with disabilities), emergency services, retirement, etc etc. The list of obvious hurdles that immediately disqualify most people is a glaring omission and I really don’t understand why this article garnered upvotes aside from affirming confirmation bias. This is the first time I’ve been greatly soured by the response from the HN community. What substance are people finding in this article?
  • an_guy 1y ago
    > the cost of moving to the place in the first place, social connections, health (even worse for those with disabilities), emergency services, retirement, etc etc Anyone moving to bay area for a higher income job would have most of these issues. A forum full of people willing to migrate for better income and lifestyle should not be criticizing "cost of moving", "social connections", "health disabilities" and "retirement".
    • hysan 1y ago
      I might be misreading your reply, but what you’re keying in on and singling out is a tiny fraction of the audience the article is arguing for. My problem is with how shallow this article is and how it throws a wide net that doesn’t cover a ton of situations that prevent people from doing what he claims is possible for just about anyone if they change their mindset. If the argument were just for the subset of users you’re using as an example, then sure? But that’s isn’t as clickbaity and certainly doesn’t support the claim that any young person can just up and do what the writer claims.
  • nkurz 1y ago
    Thank you for posting your reasons for flagging it! I'm on the exact opposite side. I thought it was a decent article, flawed but worthy of discussion. I was surprised to see it flagged dead, so I vouched for it. When this didn't bring it back alive, I emailed Dan to see if he could resuscitate it. He said that it was already alive due to enough other people having vouched for it. Your criticisms are all reasonable, but they are exactly the sort of things I'd hope to see discussed in the comments. And they are! I think the article is a good starting point for a discussion on what's possible. I'm nowhere near as extreme as the author of the piece, but I live a life much closer to what he describes than most people here. Rather than being soured by the response, I'm glad to see both the pros and the cons being discussed. Yes, there are lots of ethical issues about living the way he suggests. There are lots of things you'll be doing without. But there are also lots of upsides about living in a way that you have time to do things besides just work and sleep. Which parts of the response did you find souring?
• dbbljack 1y ago
  i'd have to do a lot of research to find a cheap rural area that I would be able to exist in after sundown.
• rendall 1y ago
  > A long and mostly endless stream of “blackpills” about the cost of housing can be readily found on any social media platform — and often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes. I've often heard the criticism that Boomers lived unsustainably and then pulled the ladder up behind them, making life harder for future generations. But what I don't often hear is a breakdown of the specific policy decisions that led to this. What were they?
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  I've been thinking a lot about this in my personal context. I'm not super wealthy and thinking about the inevitable moment when I will work less and need to live on what I've scraped together by then. I currently live in Berlin in a gentrified area which is nice to be in but also getting more expensive rapidly. It's convenient for me to be here. But I wouldn't mind being in a much cheaper place otherwise. I see a few technical trends that would enable me to live quite far away from Berlin mid term that could be a lot more affordable. - Starlink provides good enough internet pretty much anywhere. Rural Germany is famous for its lack of connectivity. I could live anywhere in Germany and have a decent connectivity and be able to work remotely. Complete science fiction until recently. But now feasible. I expect there will be competitors in a few years. - Improved modes of transport to remote locations via autonomous driving electrical cars, mini buses, drones etc. could unlock rural destinations. Electrical means cost per mile/km is expressed in kwh. About 2-4 km/kwh. Autonomous means there is no driver to pay or tiring driving to do. Even at Germany's high-ish grid prices, a 50 km commute becomes quite affordable (a cup of coffee worth of energy). And you can take a nap, relax, or work while you move and be quite comfortable while being moved. There are a lot of affordable housing options starting from about 10km away from where I currently live. 50km, we are talking rural Brandenburg which has depopulated significantly since the fall of the wall. Ghost villages, lack of employment, etc. I know several people that moved to the edge of Berlin or beyond and have a great standard of living there. - Tiny/prefab housing means the current cost of constructing houses is increasingly complete bullshit. I don't need a artisanally crafted house at great expense. I just need a small amount of space that is comfortable. That shouldn't cost me north of half a million and put me in debt for decades. And modern materials means such a place could be well insulated and relatively cheap to heat. - Low cost, renewable energy is starting to dominate. Germany has really high energy prices. But it's investing to fix that. Those investments might pay off in a few decades and lower the cost of energy. That's good news if I'm heating with a heatpump, and am being moved around electrically. So, I need some land reasonably close to where the action is (Berlin in my case) but not in the middle of it. An affordable & comfortable way to get to Berlin when I need to. And some housing that won't break the bank. I think all of those are well in reach for well below 100K and next to nothing in monthly cost. All I need is some kwh of power and water. And the usual insurances, taxes, and what not. And food, which I might even grow some myself if I had enough room for a garden. And being far away from all the hipster areas in Berlin, probably means local shops are going to be relatively cheap. Of course this being Germany, the obstacle to this is going to be immense bureaucratic inertia. You can't just plonk down a tiny house anywhere you want. There are rules! Designed to frustrate anything entirely reasonable like that. But I imagine similar things are going to be true everywhere and there is going to be fierce competition between depopulated regions to attract people and their money. And when push comes to shove, I'm not German and could be persuaded to move elsewhere. Also, if you extrapolate to autonomous RVs, you could just live in those and let them drive you to some remote parking space at night and to charging and water points for access to the essentials. Be in nature when you want to be, drive up to a city when you need to. Move south in the winter, north in the summer, etc.
• eagsalazar2 1y ago
  Two words: "Health Insurance"
• yodsanklai 1y ago
  No mention of health expenses. This is often underestimated in all these "Retire Early" scenarios.
  • sgerenser 1y ago
    At this income level health is covered 100% by Medicaid. Depending on where you live, that can be perfectly fine or pretty bad.
• w10-1 1y ago
  Jobs and crime: What value can you add, and what value can be taken from you? Stressed communities like Massena are defensive: outsiders (particularly relatively wealthy ones) are typically a target, and are unlikely to get a plum job that goes by word of mouth. That effect is amplified when people don't have the assets or kind of life they want to protect for themselves, so they have little to lose and a big chip on the shoulder. To me the sweet spot for young people would be the in-law unit in a great neighborhood where you could do professional work. Learn from the best, and deal with people more interested in a clean, secure transaction than extracting every advantage they need (e.g., buy good engineering used from someone who loved their car). Even wealthy people aspire to pare down to what they really need, because the simplicity restores irreplaceable time. If there are thousands of ways to do wrong and few to do right, give yourself your best opportunities. Make yourself not only useful but reliable and graceful. Anyone under 30 (or anyone at all?) should be budgeting 30% on making the future selves they really want to be.
• fullstackchris 1y ago
  Great article, yes, its the classic "I want to not work AND keep my current lifestyle" I dont know if it was social media, bitterness at boomers, or whatever, that made most zoomers behold this pipe dream. Loved the Massena example, but I went to school near there (Clarkson) and the winters are pretty rough. Summer / fall is beautiful though!
• pqs 1y ago
  I like this proposition, but the article didn't mention health services in the area. I'm European and I don't fully understand the US health sector but I want to know what would happen in case of severe illness, living this way.
  • AngryData 1y ago
    There are some little emergency clinics around in rural places, but its generally like the bare minimum where if you make it there they can give you a bag of blood and an oxygen tank, but I would expect atleast a 45 minute travel time to an actual hospital that can treat you for anything, and it would cost $2,000 for the ambulance trip alone, not to mention the actual hospital bills.. The hospital will have to take you in if you need emergency treatment, provided you make it that far, however they only guarantee the minimum treatment to "stabilize" you, and at that point they are going to expect either an insurance policy be given to them, or your agreement to take on additional medical debt beyond what you already incurred to receive additional treatment. Like if you have a heart attack, they will take you in, give you some nitroglycerin, and try to get it so that they aren't worried about you keeling over within the next 2 hours, but if your heart is still in a lower level of afib and you can't afford treatment? They will give you the boot and tell you to go see a doctor but it ain't an absolute emergency any more. Or say you crash your car and your leg is crushed. They will stabilize you, but then you or someone else will have to make a financial decision for you or give your insurance. Will you be able to afford the costs of multiple surgeries to pin your shattered leg bones back together and all the rehabilitation? Sure they can do that. Can you already not afford the costs you incurred and certainly can't afford all the additional surgeries and rehabilitation later? Well they will "save" you from all those costs you can't afford by chopping off your leg, knowing that without those other surgeries they will end up cutting it off 6 months later anyway.
  • aqrit 1y ago
    > health services in the area Massena Hospital is a 25-bed hospital. Might have to go to Canton or Ogdensburg for a family doctor (45 minutes by car). Most things serious get referred to Syracuse or Burlington (3 hours away by car). AFAIK, Cost[1] is "theoretically" nothing if annual income is less than the federal poverty line ($15,650 for an individuality). And might as well be free for an income up to $39,125. [1] https://info.nystateofhealth.ny.gov/EssentialPlan https://info.nystateofhealth.ny.gov/EssentialPlan
• Coffeewine 1y ago
  This is bizarre to me - my extended family live in the towns surrounding Massena, NY, and have for about four generations now. The area certainly has its perks, it can be very pretty and there is plenty of room for hunting, fishing and other such pursuits if one is so inclined. Houses are extremely inexpensive, as is a surprising amount of land if that’s what you want. Though the set who are actually farming has declined precipitously over the generations. The article however rather oversells the economic opportunities of the area - the two best employers are a nearby Indian casino and the prison system, both of which have their drawbacks. Otherwise there is a reason why all the local farmland is slowly being occupied by the Amish, they’re a group that doesn’t care much about the lack of opportunity. As you can guess, this has led to a big divergence in outcomes. My relatives who have found remote work are living like kings, and the ones who haven’t are really struggling. I dunno why I’m writing this. I guess it’s just funny to see Massena written about. And Massena is the big city compared to the surrounding towns.
• davedx 1y ago
  What happens when you get sick?
• Version467 1y ago
  This is one of those articles where the comments are really interesting to read through. I see a bunch of comments who don't agree with the exact math, which might be warranted, but it seems at least directionally correct to me. However there's also a bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn't viable for some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don't want to live without. But having read through most of the objections I still find myself enticed by this. If I mentally place myself in this position I think I could quite happily live a few decades without talking to anyone for weeks or even months at a time. I'd still have my pets to give me companionship. Load my kindle up with a thousand books I want to read and just work my way through it. Pick up writing as a hobby and spend the rest of the time working at a gas station and fixing up the house and/or grow some food to offset the reduced income. Healthcare is an issue. Doesn't seem like a viable place to grow old. Once you become too frail for physical work it's probably just time to die, which isn't great.
  • discordance 1y ago
    You might also like a documentary called Alone in the Wilderness, which tells the story of Dick Proenneke, a man who moved to the remote Twin Lakes region of Alaska in 1968 and lived alone in the wilderness for 30 years. Proenneke built his own log cabin entirely by hand, using only simple tools (many of which he made himself), and filmed his daily life, including hunting, fishing, foraging, and crafting everything from scratch
    • MichaelRo 1y ago
      Man, I don't wanna see someone going to live as a hermit in the woods and shit in the bushes for $400. I've got plenty of examples of people living in mud huts in Africa for much less. I wanna see how it's possible to live a decent life in civilized conditions (roof over your head, running water and sewage system, electricity, heating) on $400.
  • zamadatix 1y ago
    > However there's also a bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn't viable for some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don't want to live without. Given humans are also just animals that had lifestyles before money and modern society was invented, this doesn't seem like a useful distinction. Either you're talking about your personal preferences you don't want to lice without or money isn't even part of the picture in the first place. Where that line is personally drawn is just as arbitrary to this point at $1 as $1,000,000. Overall though I agree the article sheds light where we don't normally tend to think. At the same time it crosses points too often to make that those focus of conversation. That is to say it makes a good point with just a little too much PoV twist inserted so people who don't agree will think about that statement instead. E.g. don't complain about not having the home prospects of a boomer because you can live like your great grandparent - which would be something ~40 years prior to the boomer comparison, even for a zoomer (-> driving pushback against the idea owning a house at all is the same as the lifestyle the article laments hearing about -> driving conversation like the above paragraph).
• kristianc 1y ago
  > Moreover, the vision that I am going to postulate here would not even require very much in the way of work. I say this because by all I have seen, many young people today find the idea of indefinite wage labor to be a dismal one. They seem to prefer a “low-work lifestyle,” but very often, the manner of living that such a lifestyle would require is completely foreign to them. Because of this, right alongside the many social media posts on the topic of the awful expense of buying a home — there are just as many posts, it seems, complaining about “life in the 4HL,” or pining for remote work, or (rightfully) bemoaning the scam-infested, difficult-to-navigate, often cynical and fake job market that they’ve encountered. It's cheeky because it frames itself as rejecting the status quo, when actually what it is doing is saying "accept the status quo wholesale and just move to somewhere the status quo hasn't reached yet." And of course, if enough people do that, no one will be around to fight against the status quo anymore. The main difference between this and Thoreau's cabin in the woods is that Thoreau could have chosen to do differently.
  • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    It seems a fairly pragmatic solution to me. Yes, at a societal level things are pretty messed up for lower earners but there is next to nothing they can do about that. However from an individual perspective there are options and they aren't all as extreme as this.
• brokegrammer 1y ago
  I think living in rural areas sucks because you'll end up feeling very lonely. And I'm speaking as a hardcore introvert who didn't feel lonely at all during the lock-down. But after extended periods of isolation, human connection becomes important, especially if you're young. I'm currently living below my means in a small village in Mauritius, but I'm planning on moving to a big city in a big country ASAP because while living like this is good for my bank account, my mental health is taking a heavy toll. Not to mention how challenging it is to find a date. As a young person, IMO the best thing to do is move to a place where you can make some good lifelong friends, and build a solid network for employment opportunities. Saving money while living frugally only served to dampen my social muscles.
  • rwyinuse 1y ago
    Yeah, it really depends on your life situation. When I was reaching 20's I felt like you, and moving to city was great for my mental health. Now I'm in my 30's, my parents and my spouses parents live in rural area. We have small kids, and due to that we have barely any time to socialize. At this life stage, cheaper housing, quiet and proximity to our family in the countryside is really becoming attractive. City life with kids sucks when there's no family nearby, and you can't afford a big enough apartment.
• ada1981 1y ago
  I sold a small import export business I stood up during Covid and after living in NYC for 13 years, decided to get a “fancy instagram bus” after a voice in my head told me to do so. The next day a friend called, who I hadn’t seen since we got shipwrecked in the gulf of Panama, and told me he had been building out a “fancy instagram School bus” for the last year and between his wife and his pot farm in CA he realized he’d have no time for it. “I figure you were the guy to buy it from me.” I said yes and bought a 1 way ticket to Santa Cruz. I sublet my place in park slope for $3,600 a month furnished which was $1k more a month than the base rent. I thought I’d spend a few months driving around, go on Phish Tour, and flip the bus for $50k. That was about 4 years ago. The bus cost me $36k and within 10 months paid for itself. I let the place in nyc go entirely after that and for one months rent could drive back and forth across the US. A $89 parks pass gets me into all the national parks and I can stay on BLM land in the most beautiful places for free. I soon realized many people have at least 1 home and love having a self contained guest for a week or two. I visited friends, family and clients (I still maintain a high end high performance coaching business working with founders of companies like Asana, Bombas and other interesting folks). I also run a remote AI research lab for the last 4 years. I shop at farmers markets or wholefoods. I love ultimate frisbee and am pretty good, having been a former world games invitee, and any city usually has a game and within an afternoon I can make a dozen or so new friends and be invited to all sorts of things. (pickupultimate.com). Last year on the eclipse I met a woman in hot springs, Arkansas and fell in love - and she lives in Kansas City so I’ve spent a lot of time here with her the last year. The creative freedom of having a bus and living in beautiful spaces is unmatched. And knowing if I lose all money, I can buy a 50lb bag of rice and beans, fill up on water, and use my cell phone and solar for a month to figure out the next move, is very comforting. Of course there have been problems like breakdowns, a friend filling my diesel tank with reg gas, a break in in nyc, and getting hassled for parking legally by house dwellers in Santa Monica, but it’s been a great investment. So much of “middle class lifestyle” is a trap marketed to you people by the upper classes to get you to opt in to being a modern day share cropper. Taking a couple vacations a year, retiring out of shape and unable to really enjoy life and nature, and coping with pills and drugs and tv and consumption that are primarily part of the problem. Ps we host an ai / philosophy / founder meetup every Wednesday, come as my vip! Http://earthpilot.ai/play
• smeeger 1y ago
  living outside of society is not viable. but its true that the economic system that we all live inside of is not serving us well because of corruption. everything is much more expensive than it should be. i think the best solution is for people to make their own little societies, bring back towns, and instead of a walmart and box stores put people to work growing food and making things. its the only way to live affordably without moving to another country.
• andrewrn 1y ago
  I've spent time in upstate New York, and the communities I visited were not welcoming to newcomers. I had a few beers in a bar in Tupper Lake and I may as well have been a green alien. Unless you're religious and can lean on a church community, this life seems absolutely lonely.
• dsalzman 1y ago
  Surprised that there isn’t a kibbutz trend in the US with this sentiment.
  • Barrin92 1y ago
    A lot of kibbutzim are run collectively. As a joke in the TV show The Americans went, from an Israeli to a Soviet spy: "if you like socialism so much, defect to Israel, we do it better". That kind of thing isn't in the American DNA. You'd have people demand a lawn and a fence after a month.
• thrance 1y ago
  Disregard systemic problems, place the blame entirely on younger generation using too much tiktok/uber/doordash/netflix/whatever. You should live like it's 1899 out in the fields and basically enjoy none of the good sides of modern life. This is part of the reason why "OK boomer" is so popular. (Also, living that far from urban centers when you're not a farmer is a burden on society. You require much more road, water pipes and power line maintenance than someone that lives in the city.)
• AngryData 1y ago
  It sounds nice, atleast until non-daily tasks and costs start to pile up. Goods are not cheaper in a rural area, you don't get an Amazon or Walmart discount for living in the middle of nowhere, medical and dental are not cheaper, general services are far more expensive so I hope you can fix or install most all of your own appliances and plumbing systems and roof, it will cost you a lot more to have wood delivered than cut it yourself for heating and using sawmill cutoffs is not a great material for maintaining a fire overnight. Friends and family are farther and fewer. Law enforcement in these places basically only exist to extort people because that's how they fund themselves and real crime is so uncommon, but of course they still need to pay for maintenance on their MRAPs and Humvees and such and think they are better than the local "yokels". Fire service may or may not cost you money to pay into, or may simply not exist for anything other than making sure it doesn't spread after your house is gone. And of course you are living outside of modern society and being left behind technologically, which isn't a problem for a few years, but after 10+ years you start to become out of touch. This kind of thing might sound nice from the outside, but if poor rural community living was as nice and cheap as claimed, these kind of areas wouldn't be so cheap or abandoned. These kind of articles always seem like a "grass is greener" type escapist fantasies. Yeah sure there are a handful of unusually better spots, maybe this place is one of them, but 95% of poor rural areas are just... poor rural areas with little to offer. Hope you don't have kids because the schools will be garbage. Hope you don't like going to bars or being super social because 90% of the clientele are the same handful of drunks you see every time. Just because you can eek out a few cheap years in a place like this in your 20s or 30s doesn't mean it is a great place to actually live. Say you work a decent amount to "save" money for 10 or 15 years, what will you walk away from there financially? You weren't saving city wages that will afford you to move wherever you want, you saved poor rural wages which will afford you.... another slightly less poor rural area or maybe living like a 20 year old in a more prosperous place for a year, your house might be worth less later than what you paid for it, your job might just disappear one day without warning and no viable replacement except for a desperation job at just a bit above minimum wage. Ive lived in rural areas, mostly poorer areas, my whole life. And yeah sure there are some hippies around surviving, some Amish dudes surviving, a few people are doing a bit better with long-distance traveling jobs like truckers or seasonal work farther away. But 90% of people are just barely surviving, watching their health slowly fail away faster and faster because they can't afford the care to maintain it. Hopefully you can live until you are 60+ without any health problems, but that is a big gamble. If you get sick a single hospital visit can wipe out a decade or more of careful savings. Break an arm or an ankle? There is an entire year's savings or more. You get to watch those few still around you struggling day after day living in shacks or 30 year old decaying mobile homes. Poor rural areas are not some hidden grove of wonder and peace, if it was these places wouldn't have been abandoned to start with.
• losvedir 1y ago
  > In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well at this particular house Am I missing something or is this implying that you need to work 34 hours a week at the gas station to live there. That's.... basically a normal, full-time job, right? It's a strange way of putting it.
  • sgerenser 1y ago
    No, it’s saying one 10 hour shift a week gets you 30% of what you need to live for a month. So doing 3 or 4 of those a month is sufficient to live on, assuming the posted costs are remotely accurate and aren’t missing anything important (big assumption).
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    The expenses are monthly so if you did that shift every week, you’ll have an income surplus.
• 0n0n0m0uz 1y ago
  Only way you could live on $500 a month is in a paid off vehicle on public lands in western states where you only drove to buy food. I know because I do it.
  • rufus_foreman 1y ago
    What happens if you need to go to a museum or the opera?
• byronic 1y ago
  An incredible strategy for getting the article to break containment. I won't share it unless you pay me $7100, which is how much it costs me to live in America with dependents
• timcobb 1y ago
  > In fact, were it to be that any of those who seek a simpler, more straightforward, more affordable way of life matched themselves up with the various regions in which that kind of a life is on offer in spades — it just might make our country better. I think this all the time too. Would be interesting to try to start a colony like this.
  • tallanvor 1y ago
    People have tried it plenty of times. There might be a few still sort of running, but most of them fail.
• stickfigure 1y ago
  On one hand I agree with the general premise of the article, which is that you can live a lot cheaper than you choose to. Homes in the passably-cute downtown of Massena are under $100k; you could live on $40k/yr comfortably and if you're here on HN you can probably earn at least than that with a remote job. Cutting it to $5k/yr is just trying to prove something. The missing thing is health care. If you're young and immortal and willing to take risks, sure. This attitude won't last into middle age. My wife had cancer, and without health insurance I'd be a single parent right now. Maybe you can lean on public assistance like Medicaid (if it continues to exist), but this isn't really a scalable solution for "we can all live cheaper". It only works if enough people stay in the rat race to pay for it. "Cheap" health insurance for a youngish small family is >$1000/mo. That really isn't optional in the US.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • MarceColl 1y ago
    That's insane, my dad had cancer 3 years ago, and here in Spain we didn't even think about it (beyond of course the terrible situation). If you also want private insurance it will cost a youngish small family (like mine) 150EUR/month.
    • 999900000999 1y ago
      This is America. We don't have any money to treat sick people, we need to make sure the networth of billionaires continues to grow. We need to fund military bases all over the world and conflicts in places most of us can't find on maps. You find how truly alone you are when you can't afford your medicine. No longer an "American" you're a freeloader, a parasite. Perhaps God himself hates you. And Blessed are the Billionaires for God gave them so much.
    • hajile 1y ago
      The problem with US healthcare is bloat. According to Google, person in Spain spends on average $4,432 per person per year with some $3,113 of that being paid by the government. The US government pays out $6,000 per person per year or nearly TWICE as much. The problem is that $6000 is still less than half of the $14,570 per person per year (2023) healthcare costs in the US. And of course, the US government payments don't cover everyone equally. They only cover the elderly and some subset of the very poor (mostly kids). The only fix is reducing US healthcare costs to something more like the rest of the world, but that requires sharing drug R&D costs evenly with other countries (raising your costs), reigning in insurance companies, eliminating over-credentializing of doctors and other medical professionals, fixing school cost/debt, and reducing/eliminating the massive amounts of unnecessary bureaucracy/paperwork (allowing doctors to reduce staff and see more patients per day which reduces overall medical costs).
• stackedinserter 1y ago
  If you're ready to move to frozen salty belt to live bare minimum, why not move to a cheap country, work as English tutor for 10x quality of life? Don't live in this area, it sucks. You'll have 8 months of miserable, not enjoyable winter with winds and freezing rains, 2 months if suffocating humid summer with mosquitos and ticks, and maybe relatively enjoyable September. Ask me how I know.
• jaco6 1y ago
  [dead]
• kixiQu 1y ago
  I think we should all just calibrate what kind of project we believe the author to be engaged in from the following quote from a linked post: > After all, constant sunshine is the weather of the dullard. The lover of hot, lazy days and breezy, cloudless skies fancies himself a lordling — he insists that the earth be his womb-like chamber of easy, saccharine delights. He is the same man who enjoys sugary-sweet sodas, on-the-nose political commentary, prefers his novels to be cheap and gutless, and his women botoxed and spray-tanned. No very close reading is required, I believe.
• rayiner 1y ago
  > By the standards of our great-grandfathers Not even great grandfathers. My wife’s dad grew up in a 600-700 square foot modular home with three siblings. Mom was a waitress, step-dad never had a W2 job (hunted, did handyman work, etc).
• Dudical 1y ago
  I suspect there is also something in between the big city and rural Massena. Just a couple hours east of Seattle you’ve got a a full fledged city (Yakima) with lots of infrastructure and plenty of 3-4 bdrm houses going for ~33% the cost (~350k).
• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Ok so the math is off by a factor of 2, but the basic premise still holds. Harder to do if you have school age kids though or are generally in poor health. But otherwise doable. Not for everyone, but for some it’s a much better life, qualitatively. I wonder at what point we’ll see this become a trend as young-ish people realize that the trade off is worth it for them. Will we see a reverse migration from the cities at some point? We did some of that during Covid but I haven’t seen any numbers on much of it “stuck” post-COVID especially with RTO. Anyone seen any stats on this?
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  This is why I love the idea of remote work. The wealth of these companies doesn't need to stay trapped in a handful of rich enclaves. We could have millions of Americans living in these sorts of places "sharing" the wealth.
• liveoneggs 1y ago
  Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin- He's broke; don't do shit!
• liveoneggs 1y ago
  I really really hope young people start to re-settle America outside of the broken and expensive urban areas with new ideas, new industries, and affordable living.
• methods21 1y ago
  Never a fan of these 'click bait' headlines, and surprised it made it this high in hacker news. We get the 'premise', Mr. Money Mustache has been preaching similar for years, but these numbers are just not realistic. You need money to buy the house, maintain it, clothes, healthcare, NY is going to jack your taxes up, etc. and more, as all the folks have mentioned here. Can some folks live more frugally, for sure, but this is unrealistic.