What are the cheapest housing options for single person? RV?

Yesterday’s Jalopnik- The Vanlords of L.A.

I’m tellin ya… tiny house meets self-driving car. It’s coming.

 

So I could go to sleep at home and not have to wake up until I got to the parking lot at work? That would be so cool...

 

VERY inefficient. Just sleep at your desk or on the factory floor like Elon.

 

Renting a whole room or car? WOW, that's so wasteful. Just need a bed: PodShare – Affordable Co-living

 

I’ve been reading about those. I think if they were a great way to live you’d see them going up everywhere, not just in the most expensive zipcodes.

 

When you start getting that far into the details, local info beats nearly anything we can post from over here. Example: RVs last longer and need fewer repairs if they’re always in dry climates that never drop below freezing- maybe enough to make the difference for you. Very much worth talking to your co-worker.

I will add that you can eat for far less than $20/day if you break away from restaurants. I travel for a living and I often need to use restaurants, but I bring sort of an urban camp kitchen which leads to considerable savings, better nutrition and a degree of home-cooked flavor. Work usually puts me in hotels with mini-fridges, I bring a 120v camp stove that collapses into a cooking pot, and some camp-style containers, shelf-stable condiments and seasonings and kitchen prep stuff. It helps that I actually enjoy cooking.

Just having a bit of fridge space is a massive money saver because it enables safe storage of leftovers. Many restaurant meals have 2 or even 3 meals worth of calories, so it’s healthier not to eat it all up front anyway. A small set of reusable plastic food containers is a cheap tool that unlocks a lot of savings. Yeah it’s dishes to wash, no fun. But the savings are real.

You can have packages sent to a US Post Office box. Normally this means only packages which were actually sent through the USPS. However, if you sign up for Street Address Service the P.O. will then also accept packages from UPS, FedEx and other carriers. You would then use the street address of your post office itself. I found this to be extremely useful when I lived in a cheap apartment with a mail theft situation. I don’t think it cost extra on the box rent but I might have paid a few bucks to start it, application fee etc. You can also do the inverse: rent a box at a UPS store. Might be closer or cheaper.

I probably don’t have the cheapest veterinarian but we budget around $250/year for our one cat, covering annual exam, vaccinations, tick & flea control. You can generally feed & litter one cat for $12 per month (and up) if they aren’t picky/no special diet needs.

 

Around here living on a diet of eggs, egg noodles (or ramen/rice) and Aldi spaghetti sauce is under a dollar a day for food, lived that way in college when I needed cash but zero local employment was available

Though it costs more ground Turkey is a buck a pound at Woodmans as well. Chicken is usually under a buck a pound but still can’t beat 69 cents a dozen eggs

 

Our USPS accepts packages. They even have lockers for after hours access to packages.
Some vendors do not like to send to PO Boxes, but most campgrounds that have monthly rates have street addresses and accept packages.

+1 on the food thing...even though my math says you’re only guessing $8.

 

I guess you could eat 8 dozen eggs a day but I sure couldn’t 3-6 eggs was normal,
I usually dumped only one in my 19 cent
hot ramen

 

This has got to be the least expensive diet...

Potato Diet | Natural Weight Loss | Personal Coaching

Potatoes. Red ones, yellow ones, white ones, russets, and for something exotic, sweet ones.

I saw Mr. Spud at at seminar, and he's the real deal. If he's missing anything nutritionally, it doesn't show. Skip the burgers, have another potato...

 

What will happen to Mr Spud fit is the same thing that happens to all vegans after 1-5 years.

1. strong protein cravings
- ignore and gain health problems
- satiate them and all will be well for a while until they occur again

The only reason folks like spud fit do OK for a period of time is that the human body is extremely good at forgoing needs for a long time and further your body needs very little protein to “survive “

It will catch up with him (at least if he is actually being truthful)

Most Americans could fast and gain health benefits (even Mr Spud) but you don’t see many doing that either

 

As much as I abhor most things Vegan, I've lived an almost completely-free plant based life for most of two years, and have yet to experience any 'protein cravings' or any known health problems other than those associated with two more candles on my cholesterol-free birthday cake.

Vegans richly deserve deserve to be criticized.
However (COMMA!) those critiques should be accurate.
A completely vegan diet can be completely healthy - or?
Eating french fries and drinking beer is, for now, considered to be veggie-halal, but then Vegans haven't tumbled to the fact that yeast are living organisms.

OK.
So.....
Blinker on.
Swerving back over to the original topic for the few moments that remain before some militant vegan reads this post.....

@Higgins909
Here, I believe, is most of your problem:

A budget is core and key to arriving at your destination.
You already know this based on your posts, but you really need to refine the income and outflow....honestly.
Otherwise, it's like trying to plot a course to a destination without knowing where you are at present, or how fast or in what direction you are traveling.
It is possible to do so only through a process that has a fairly descriptive name:
Dead Reckoning Navigation.

Free Advice: (Street Value < $0.02)
1. Honest Budget.

B. Prune costs. Example: If you are paying $2400 a year for insurance on a nine-year-old car, then you really do not need to be worried about how many door dings that it has. I'd concentrate on keeping the car mechanically reliable, lowering my insurance costs, getting a budget established and implemented, and THEN worry about the wrapper that your car comes in.

III. Manage EXPECTATIONS.
A $400 studio apartment in a sketchier part of town may not be as convenient as a single occupancy dwelling in the burbs, but it WILL beat heck out of an RV.
Trust me...
If there's anything that a sailor knows all to well, it's the joy of living the "tiny house' life where you have to put something up before taking something out. It's one of the many, MANY things in life that looks a lot bigger and more fun on TV.

Someday.....if you get to a point where you can buy a house then the noisy neighbors, limited parking, and the pain of parting with rent money every month can all go towards a WORTHWHILE long term goal.

Good Luck!

 

This is the story that the meat and dairy industries have spread. It is based on studies of rat nutrition. It's true, rats need a lot of protein. And they live maybe two years. Long lived animals like horses, elephants, and humans do better on lower protein plants.

Here's a video of Nick Degado talking about how he built his championship endurance athlete body on plants only. That after having a stroke at about age 20 eating a conventional diet. That's 40 years on plants (he's 62 in the video) to build that body.

 

I'm not sure how things run in Texas, but in a lot of places there's a middle ground between apartment living and a rooming house - renting an apartment/sharing a house in a single-family house. This works best with an elderly couple or single, where you can trade housework/yardwork for a reduction in rent. There are currently a whole lot of elderly people living in houses too large for them who could use a little extra money each month, and help around the house/yard that they didn't have to pay for would be very welcome. You might even find a situation where you could share meals sometimes.

I don't know if you could get your expenses down to $250/month, but something like this would be the most likely way to easily get out of your current situation.

 

A well balanced diet is possible without meat, but one of just potatoes, which your post seems to convey, is not.

Note of the physiology of horses, elephants, cows, and other herbivores, yeah, they don't eat much protein, but they have a symbiotic relationship going on with microbes. These microboes not only breakdown the cellulose that the animals digestion systems can't, they also produce vitamins and other nutrients that the host animal needs, and then a portion of them also pass on to the rest of the host's digestive system, where the proteins that these microboes made from the protein poor feed stock are consumed. Without those microboes, the animals die from poor nutrition.

Humans don't have the means of supporting such a symbiotic relationship. The horse doesn't have the cow's four 'stomachs', it has a large cecum. The cecum in humans is virtually vestigial. Another herbivore, rabbits, have to have their meals pass through them twice in order to get all the necessary nutrients.

 

The is the best book I've ever read on nutrition. It does go way more in depth on the scientific findings, studies and data (admittedly too much for me) than most books.

Proteinaholic

TL;DR The average western diet is overdoing on protein to the point it greatly increases disease and cancer. Most governmental nutritional recommendations are made by boards hand picked by corporate food industry.

 

I would argue that you are a bit myopic

Big food generally isn’t pushing protein, they are pushing profit which means encouraging bad food combinations that lead to a bigger appetite in its consumers.
Fat & Starch do not belong together as your body would not encounter such things naturally (carb rich foods are naturally low fat)

Potato chips are thousands of times more likely to cause cancer due to chemical byproducts from the heat than any other food.

In no world is a high starch, high simple sugar diet a healthy one, period.
Diets that are mainly carbs tend to drive feelings of hunger , meaning poor impulse control.

People who eat A low cholesterol high carb diet tend to have very bad cholesterol numbers.

So the answer isn’t the SAVD either, a vegan diet needs a lot of exotics and impulse control to be complete and wheat, grain and legumes need to be absent most of the time and not the primary form of substinence (Coming from someone with major food allergies and former crohns who ate a very restrictive low calorie vegan diet for a time)

The Japanese example of a vegan where there is a lot of seaweed, a lot of odd bad tasting exotics , a lot of exercise, rice and moderation can work but in America it would be easy to overeat and many common foods there aren’t remotely similar to what can be bought here.