Have you not read the article? The whole point of it is once you get your costs down to this manageable a number, you have a lot more options for "how you're going to support yourself." You could clear $5,000-10,000 a year, which I should remind you would be tax free money simply due to the standard deduction, doing any number of things either local or remote. Ideas I'm just making up:
1. Buy, repair, and flip MacBooks on eBay
2. Do stuff on Fiverr
3. Mow lawns
4. Clean gutters
5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales
6. Make YouTube videos or shorts about (insert your nerdy interest)
7. 3D print something and sell it on Etsy
All these things are things I'm sure I could do personally, but don't have time to do because I have to work 40 hours a week to earn enough money to pay for my mortgage in the expensive place I live. But all that goes away when the only thing you need to shoot for is to clear maybe $800 on a good month.
And also, if you have modest savings for a city person you could do with far less earnings, as interest on $200,000 = $10,000.
The problem with these lifestyles is that when you have it all finely tuned to live on $400/mo you have no capacity to absorb a $400 water heater expense.
No internet at the house in this scenario, so that's a lot of trips to the library.
>2. Do stuff on Fiverr
See above.
>3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters
These are both viable in the summer, provided there is some "landed elite" in the area that makes more than the $17/hr the gas stations pay. I guess you could shovel snow in the winter.
>5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales
Doing that legally requires licenses and registration, but good idea. Do the people of upstate New York enjoy tamales?
>6. Make YouTube videos or shorts about (insert your nerdy interest)
My smartphone plan is $45 (happens to be same company as article suggests, US Mobile) and supports 50GB of tethering which is plenty. This doesn't appreciably change the cost of living but yes, obviously you'd have that as an expense. Who cares? Yes, it would enable like half those work ideas. You could afford it. What's the problem.
> licenses and stuff
What? No, nobody selling tamales outside in the country (or probably the city either) has a formal license to do so. Nobody cares unless they're trying to get you shut down because you're being a jerk (say, selling them right outside their restaurant). Also, what if I told you, you could pick whatever kind of food the people in the area do like, and teach yourself to make it?
Ironically, I think this is a "blind squirrel finds a nut" situation.
When you're at the absolute bottom, you're not gonna make ends meet by playing by the rule and the enforcers generally leave you alone because you can't get blood from a stone. So for the people living on $400/mo running an unlicensed tamale stand or parting out cars or breeding pitbulls or whatever isn't as risky as it would be for someone making real money.
But yeah, the advice here is generally out of touch.
In my experience law enforcement in rural areas generally are squeezing stones for blood, you think the local cops or judge are going to be living on $20,000 a year? No. And where do they get the money? By extorting poor people that live in the area. Oh you literally can't afford their fines? Well then you can spend the next month or two in jail, now having a criminal record, likely losing your job, and when you are released owe the courts and jail a few thousand dollars on top of all that for the mandatory minimum court and jail fees which will cost just as much as the previous fine you couldn't pay and got sent to jail for.
Sure you might get lucky if you keep your head low, but maybe you won't get lucky and you lose the gamble and are put in a WAY worse situation.
That's fine, you don't need them to pay more than $10/hr. You only even need to earn say, $800 a month (I'm assuming you'd want a pickup truck to transport your mower and get around, so padding the $432 a bit) so if you worked 5 hours a week at the gas station for $340 then you need about 11 hours of $10 work per week for another $440 and you're done. If you have any savings, the current interest on $100,000 would alternatively give you $416 so you could just not work at all.
