How to live on $432 a month in America

I&#x27;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:<p>Supposing I&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;d sign up to move to a rural place like this tomorrow. But it&#x27;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 <i>anyone</i> outside this town, they&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re super lucky) for the rest of your life.<p>And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and friends aren&#x27;t fungible. You can start over and hope to make new friends out there, but you can&#x27;t replace people. This is what would make this life untenable to me, and I&#x27;m not even all that extraverted.

I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself - hope you don&#x27;t need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go to a dentist for that mater.<p>FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45 miles away) - and I honestly don&#x27;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&#x27;ll become completely dependent on others for certain types of transportation.<p>Also, there&#x27;s clothes, house maintenance, and lots of other things.

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 &quot;Sod house&quot; [1] which has this to say:<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>If the author says &quot;you can live like your grandparents&quot; to mean &quot;in conditions that were already considered miserable for the standards of 1901&quot;, that&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nl.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plaggenhut" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nl.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plaggenhut</a>

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.<p>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.

&gt;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.<p>This part has me screaming shenanigans. Unless you basically don&#x27;t leave the house, you need a car outside of like 8 American cities. More believable would be a pair of used bikes.

I&#x27;ve often felt this way about some of today&#x27;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.<p>I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t find someone to date. My thoughts aren&#x27;t as articulate as I&#x27;d like them to be but I guess I&#x27;m ultimately trying to say is if I&#x27;m going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper.

Some of the claims here are pretty intense, but I do think his closing statement is true enough:<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>With an extremely strong emphasis on &quot;older version.&quot; This vision of life is not the life that most &quot;black pilled&quot; 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&#x27;m surprised crypto miners haven&#x27;t moved in) - but it&#x27;s a level of self-dependence and isolation that most people do not want. However it&#x27;s absolutely true that it&#x27;s never been easier to live a &quot;frontier&quot; lifestyle, only now with 3d printing and amazon and other bountiful resources to fill in traditional gaps.

On one hand I agree with the general <i>premise</i> 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&#x2F;yr comfortably and if you&#x27;re here on HN you can probably earn at least than that with a remote job. Cutting it to $5k&#x2F;yr is just trying to prove something.<p>The missing thing is health care. If you&#x27;re young and immortal and willing to take risks, sure. This attitude won&#x27;t last into middle age. My wife had cancer, and without health insurance I&#x27;d be a single parent right now. Maybe you can lean on public assistance like Medicaid (if it continues to exist), but this isn&#x27;t really a scalable solution for &quot;we can all live cheaper&quot;. It only works if enough people stay in the rat race to pay for it.<p>&quot;Cheap&quot; health insurance for a youngish small family is &gt;$1000&#x2F;mo. That really isn&#x27;t optional in the US.

&gt; any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream<p>If (and only if) you aren&#x27;t socially different from the communities you&#x27;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 <i>could</i> live this cheaply. Plenty of race, religions, or political beliefs that would make it untenable.<p>It&#x27;s hard to claim that <i>any</i> American can achieve this.

<i>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><p>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 <i>vanished</i>.

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.<p>I didn’t bother to check if the article gets any more serious from there.

Could not get past the multiple paragraphs of strawman nonsense. Here, let me summarize:<p>The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …<p>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.

Confused by his portrayal of Massena, NY. I don&#x27;t live there and have never driven through, but looking on Google Maps it doesn&#x27;t seem that bad or depressing as the author (and I guess commentators) make it out to be.<p>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....<p>Feels like reaching that this place is so desolate and depressing.

I think living in rural areas sucks because you&#x27;ll end up feeling very lonely. And I&#x27;m speaking as a hardcore introvert who didn&#x27;t feel lonely at all during the lock-down. But after extended periods of isolation, human connection becomes important, especially if you&#x27;re young.<p>I&#x27;m currently living below my means in a small village in Mauritius, but I&#x27;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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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:<p>&gt; 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.<p>No very close reading is required, I believe.

This is one of those articles where the comments are really interesting to read through. I see a bunch of comments who don&#x27;t agree with the exact math, which might be warranted, but it seems at least directionally correct to me. However there&#x27;s also a bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn&#x27;t viable for some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don&#x27;t want to live without.<p>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&#x27;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&#x2F;or grow some food to offset the reduced income.<p>Healthcare is an issue. Doesn&#x27;t seem like a viable place to grow old. Once you become too frail for physical work it&#x27;s probably just time to die, which isn&#x27;t great.

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!

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>Their expatriate buddies down in Mexico probably aren&#x27;t shivering through an upstate New York winter with nothing but a wood-burning stove for warmth, the way this guy proposes.

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&#x27;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.<p>If you like very long books, you should read &quot;The Power Broker&quot;, 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.

&gt; 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.<p>It&#x27;s cheeky because it frames itself as rejecting the status quo, when actually what it is doing is saying &quot;accept the status quo wholesale and just move to somewhere the status quo hasn&#x27;t reached yet.&quot; 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&#x27;s cabin in the woods is that Thoreau could have chosen to do differently.

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.<p>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.

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&#x27; parents and grand-parents as the standard. It would be more honest to say &quot;Most of us can&#x27;t have the relative wealth of our grand parents, but with some sacrifices and creativity, the lifestyle of our great-grand parents is attainable.&quot;<p>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&#x27;s union hall. The town was small, but thriving, with multiple department stores downtown. My great-grandmother worked in two of them.<p>They did not isolate themselves into a dying town with few opportunities far away from their friends and family.<p>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.

I enjoy the part about &quot;Heat? Well...I&#x27;m sure something will happen allowing me to have heat. No need for concrete plans there.&quot;

So, it&#x27;s a stationary alternative to the &quot;van life&quot; trend that floats around sometimes.<p>Massena&#x27;s about the size of the town we moved my parents from after my father had a stroke, though it&#x27;s a lot poorer (in 2013 nearly a third of the population was below the poverty line, and that&#x27;s before Alcoa closed a chunk of operations there). It does have a hospital (25 beds, not-for-profit) and given the demographics I&#x27;m 100% positive that it&#x27;s one of those hospitals that *needs* Medicaid to survive.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if there was data center work available though - with cheap power there&#x27;s probably someone there doing cryptomining or maybe even hosting AI processing.

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 &#x2F; authority structures, I’m interested in exploring them. Nepal, Panama, Albania, and Vietnam are all on my list.<p>Going into the armpit forgotten realms of the US is, however, not appealing in the least despite its financial practicality on limited means.

&gt; Taxes: $41<p>&gt; Electric: ~$30<p>&gt; Water: $0<p>&gt; Heat: (no, it&#x27;s really blank)<p>&gt; Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there, assuming you go to town 3x per week at $2&#x2F;trip. Multiple options to take the bus to town each day from this location.<p>&gt; Food: ~$300&#x2F;mo.<p>&gt; Telephone: $8&#x2F;mo<p>&gt; Entertainment: Fishing and library, free<p>&gt; Internet: Use library<p>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 <i>heat</i> (which is sort of important in the middle of &quot;American Siberia&quot;), property taxes, homeowner&#x27;s insurance, healthcare, or saving for retirement.<p>&gt; 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.<p>Damn, I be that would be a lot easier with an Internet connection at home and a smartphone.

this dude _literally_ wrote about a neighboring town that&#x27;s dying and the government isn&#x27;t helping them out. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shagbark.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;obituaryland" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;shagbark.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;obituaryland</a><p>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.

Just make sure you don&#x27;t get sick.

&gt; <i>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</i><p>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&#x27;s.... basically a normal, full-time job, right? It&#x27;s a strange way of putting it.

It&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s a mid-case scenario.<p>In a low tax area a place that&#x27;s paid off like that might cost you $400-500&#x2F;mo between taxes, homeowners insurance, and HOA fees. The big &quot;GOTCHA&quot; 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&#x27;re making around $50k&#x2F;yr in my state PA, you can get around $1500&#x2F;mo in credits with a family of 3, and end up paying ~$1200 in premiums per year.<p>There&#x27;s literally nothing blackpill about this lifestyle. It&#x27;s as walkable as any suburb, with the same CHATGPT-style standard of care healthcare that exists across the country, and it&#x27;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.<p>A lot of pros, and not many cons - sure it isn&#x27;t $432&#x2F;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.

So many folks bashing the author. The message is clear, most people are not willing to alter their lives to live more comfortably.<p>Whether that is giving up living in comfort or making small changes to their habits.<p>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.<p>Thanks for spreading the seeds.

&gt; <i>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, [...]</i><p>Coincidentally, recently thinking of Handmaid&#x27;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 <i>featured photos</i> of these places being abandoned-rural-decay.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>I didn&#x27;t know what to make of it, other than that land might be affordable, and hopefully Amazon delivers.

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?

This almost seemed like it was going to be a Modest Proposal style tongue-in-cheek skewering of this &quot;old man yells at cloud&quot; 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&#x27;m wrong, as it still seems hard to believe such a fatuous piece could be written and submitted here)<p>&gt;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.<p>No one is angry that they can&#x27;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.<p>They are angry that in much of the latter 20th century, when the actual &quot;boomers&quot; (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&#x27;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.<p>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?

If I wanted to be a jerk I could spew the same opinions the author is, but I&#x27;m not, so I&#x27;m disagreeing with him.<p>I don&#x27;t buy lunch. I don&#x27;t eat &quot;nice&quot; food. I don&#x27;t drive nice cars. I don&#x27;t eat out often and have never in my life run up a bar tab over $30. I have under $20&#x2F;mo in streaming services, buy used&#x2F;free furniture etc, etc. If I did to all those things the monthly cost would not even make up the ~1k&#x2F;mo difference between my &quot;got in early&quot; 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&#x27;s somewhere nice) and have the biggest house of anyone I know under 50. This is not a &quot;people won&#x27;t settle&quot; problem.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I absolutely am &quot;making it&quot; in that I&#x27;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.<p>There&#x27;s a discussion to be had about laws, codes, zoning, etc. and how they&#x27;ve done the same things for housing that the same people&#x27;s regulatory legacy has done for cars.<p>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&#x27;t got nothing on &lt;shuffles cards&gt; Oneonta. We&#x27;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&#x27;ll be better off in a comparably crappy town in just about any other state.

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.<p>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.

&gt;Taxes: $41<p>&gt;Electric: ~$30<p>&gt;Water: $0<p>&gt;Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there<p>&gt;Food: ~$300&#x2F;mo.<p>&gt;Telephone: $8&#x2F;mo<p>&gt;Entertainment: Fishing and library, free<p>&gt;Internet: Use library<p>&gt;Medical costs in case a moose kicks you in the nuts while fishing: ~$500000<p>Someone help me manage my budget, my family is dying.

Jobs and crime: What value can you add, and what value can be taken from you?<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.

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?

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.

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. &lt; 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&#x27;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.

I think a lot of people are taking it as a precise prescription. Rather, I think it&#x27;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.

In many countries around the world, $432 is more than enough.<p>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.<p>If you settle down for too long though, it is recommended to share in paying the rent or utilities, out of politeness.

I remember reading about a family with 4 kids who lived in a one bedroom house.<p>The kids slept in two sets of bunk beds in the bedroom. The parents slept on a pull out couch in the living room.<p>I’m not saying I want to live that way. Just pointing out that people have lived that way before.

I&#x27;ve seen better publicity for a simpler life. Jacob Lund Fisker[0]&#x27;s ERE comes to mind.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jacob_Lund_Fisker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jacob_Lund_Fisker</a>

&gt; 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.<p>New Mexico, Arizona, even Florida if you&#x27;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).

&gt;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.<p>You lost me here. Weather is probably <i>the</i> 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.

&gt; 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.<p>I think this all the time too. Would be interesting to try to start a colony like this.

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&#x27;re white, or just don&#x27;t care that your ethnicity is absent, and if you have no children, and also don&#x27;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.

I&#x27;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&#x27;re religious and can lean on a church community, this life seems absolutely lonely.

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).

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.

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.

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.<p>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.

&gt; By the standards of our great-grandfathers<p>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).

&gt; 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.<p>This is strawman to the point of rhetoric and reminds me of the &quot;you can afford a house if you&#x27;d just stop eating avocado toast all the time.&quot; I&#x27;m actually not sure if the article is meant to be rhetoric with a pitch for small town America or if it&#x27;s an actual argument that happens to have a lot of bad faith claims.<p>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&#x27;t think telling them to work at a gas station would go over well.

Well, you don&#x27;t need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin- He&#x27;s broke; don&#x27;t do shit!

I like this proposition, but the article didn&#x27;t mention health services in the area. I&#x27;m European and I don&#x27;t fully understand the US health sector but I want to know what would happen in case of severe illness, living this way.

I don&#x27;t think living in the boonies is for everyone.<p>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.

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.<p>You could make the payment trading options with an almost meager portfolio. Evil stock market and corporations could buy you a free house.

Higher income employees would pay way more than that in taxes alone. This is why properties in low and no income tax states skyrocketed.<p>Assuming it&#x27;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.

An incredible strategy for getting the article to break containment. I won&#x27;t share it unless you pay me $7100, which is how much it costs me to live in America with dependents

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&#x27;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.<p>The authors point resinates for me, and I&#x27;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...<p>Can you imagine how much more fun you can have with ~400K of disposable income (after living expenses)? Seeing the trips they&#x27;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...

How do you find a property like that? Is there a Zillow for cheap rural land?

Such cheap homes all across America: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyurl.com&#x2F;hnlink" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tinyurl.com&#x2F;hnlink</a>

&gt; At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them.<p>What would you judge them for even if you were here for that?

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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?

I am sure people are managing it in New Orleans.

No mention of health expenses. This is often underestimated in all these &quot;Retire Early&quot; scenarios.

i&#x27;d have to do a lot of research to find a cheap rural area that I would be able to exist in after sundown.

Is this the place? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redf.in&#x2F;UXIUBi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redf.in&#x2F;UXIUBi</a>

Surprised that there isn’t a kibbutz trend in the US with this sentiment.

So many problems with this, including &quot;Live like a boomer&quot; -&gt; &quot;Actually, live like their parents or their grandparents&quot; but this one:<p>&gt; Internet: Use library<p>Ok, funny joke. As if it&#x27;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&#x27;m not on TikTok&#x2F;IG&#x2F;&lt;insert social network here other than HN&gt;, that&#x27;s not what I&#x27;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?

I like this article. I think it&#x27;s a little unrealistic in many ways, but it&#x27;s good to consider that a life does not require extravagance. However:<p>&gt;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.<p>&gt;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<p>The problem isn&#x27;t that we can affordably live like our great-grandparents. It&#x27;s that we <i>can&#x27;t</i> affordably live like our parents and grandparents did.

There&#x27;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&#x27;re fucking over your kids future so you can play pretend boomer while ignoring the biggest things they benefited from.

The book &quot;Hinterland&quot; by Phil Neel comes to mind.

I think the author&#x27;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.<p>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.

I sometimes wonder how much Amish have to spend a month.

What happens when you get sick?

It sounds nice, atleast until non-daily tasks and costs start to pile up. Goods are not cheaper in a rural area, you don&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;yokels&quot;. 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&#x27;t spread after your house is gone. And of course you are living outside of modern society and being left behind technologically, which isn&#x27;t a problem for a few years, but after 10+ years you start to become out of touch.<p>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&#x27;t be so cheap or abandoned. These kind of articles always seem like a &quot;grass is greener&quot; 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&#x27;t have kids because the schools will be garbage. Hope you don&#x27;t like going to bars or being super social because 90% of the clientele are the same handful of drunks you see every time.<p>Just because you can eek out a few cheap years in a place like this in your 20s or 30s doesn&#x27;t mean it is a great place to actually live. Say you work a decent amount to &quot;save&quot; money for 10 or 15 years, what will you walk away from there financially? You weren&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t have been abandoned to start with.

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.

“Internet: Use library” says all you need to hear about this wonderful bargain of a location.

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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44077097">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44077097</a>) &quot;living off the economic surplus of [others]&quot;, and perhaps even taking opportunities away from those who needed them much more than I did.<p>Some anecdotes from that time:<p>I had a $30&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;d literally go find a payphone, where you could call it for free (although it&#x27;s a much higher charge to the recipient).<p>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&#x27;d always - and still - done that), and so on. I was attending one or two tech meetups a week.<p>I didn&#x27;t have a car. Being a 15-minute walk from a train station helped drastically, but I wasn&#x27;t as close to the city as most of my colleagues were (maybe 20min over others&#x27; average). Visiting my parents took 115 minutes (30 minutes by car) and I did it every other week. Twice a week, I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;d carry odd things home from Home Depot on the train.<p>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&#x27;s back, what made me snap out of it.<p>Sadly, that honor went mostly to both my work changing (much more teleconferencing &#x2F; Zoom), and my family situation changing (needing to commute out to the burbs regularly, sometimes with little notice).<p>I still remember some of the jibes I&#x27;d get while doing this - &quot;why do you make life so hard on yourself?&quot; and &quot;you don&#x27;t know how to have money&quot;.<p>I look back on that time and do think it was an interesting experiment, and to an extent, I&#x27;m glad I did it for the perspective. But really, I was naive. I wasn&#x27;t doing something that somehow made me more independent, or less wasteful. I was dependent on much of other&#x27;s output, and really only wasting my own ability to be productive.

Missing healthcare costs.

This is why I love the idea of remote work. The wealth of these companies doesn&#x27;t need to stay trapped in a handful of rich enclaves. We could have millions of Americans living in these sorts of places &quot;sharing&quot; the wealth.

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.<p>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?

If you&#x27;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?<p>Don&#x27;t live in this area, it sucks. You&#x27;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.

yes, Massena and Ogensburg. Plagues of flies and mosquitos. Frozen car batteries. Snow plows. Rust.

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.

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.<p>The <i>next day</i> 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.<p>“I figure you were the guy to buy it from me.”<p>I said yes and bought a 1 way ticket to Santa Cruz.<p>I sublet my place in park slope for $3,600 a month furnished which was $1k more a month than the base rent.<p>I thought I’d spend a few months driving around, go on Phish Tour, and flip the bus for $50k.<p>That was about 4 years ago.<p>The bus cost me $36k and within 10 months paid for itself.<p>I let the place in nyc go entirely after that and for one months rent could drive back and forth across the US.<p>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.<p>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).<p>I also run a remote AI research lab for the last 4 years.<p>I shop at farmers markets or wholefoods.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Ps we host an ai &#x2F; philosophy &#x2F; founder meetup every Wednesday, come as my vip! Http:&#x2F;&#x2F;earthpilot.ai&#x2F;play

Two words: &quot;Health Insurance&quot;

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.<p>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.

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.

I&#x27;ve been thinking a lot about this in my personal context. I&#x27;m not super wealthy and thinking about the inevitable moment when I will work less and need to live on what I&#x27;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&#x27;s convenient for me to be here. But I wouldn&#x27;t mind being in a much cheaper place otherwise.<p>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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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&#x2F;km is expressed in kwh. About 2-4 km&#x2F;kwh. Autonomous means there is no driver to pay or tiring driving to do. Even at Germany&#x27;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.<p>- Tiny&#x2F;prefab housing means the current cost of constructing houses is increasingly complete bullshit. I don&#x27;t need a artisanally crafted house at great expense. I just need a small amount of space that is comfortable. That shouldn&#x27;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.<p>- Low cost, renewable energy is starting to dominate. Germany has really high energy prices. But it&#x27;s investing to fix that. Those investments might pay off in a few decades and lower the cost of energy. That&#x27;s good news if I&#x27;m heating with a heatpump, and am being moved around electrically.<p>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 &amp; comfortable way to get to Berlin when I need to. And some housing that won&#x27;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.<p>Of course this being Germany, the obstacle to this is going to be immense bureaucratic inertia. You can&#x27;t just plonk down a tiny house anywhere you want. There are rules! Designed to frustrate anything entirely reasonable like that.<p>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&#x27;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.

Disregard systemic problems, place the blame entirely on younger generation using too much tiktok&#x2F;uber&#x2F;doordash&#x2F;netflix&#x2F;whatever. You should live like it&#x27;s 1899 out in the fields and basically enjoy none of the good sides of modern life. This is part of the reason why &quot;OK boomer&quot; is so popular.<p>(Also, living that far from urban centers when you&#x27;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.)

Great article, yes, its the classic &quot;I want to not work AND keep my current lifestyle&quot; I dont know if it was social media, bitterness at boomers, or whatever, that made most zoomers behold this pipe dream.<p>Loved the Massena example, but I went to school near there (Clarkson) and the winters are pretty rough. Summer &#x2F; fall is beautiful though!

&gt; <i>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><p>I&#x27;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&#x27;t often hear is a breakdown of the specific policy decisions that led to this. What were they?

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.