MINIMUM WAGE FOR SURVIVAL
You all know I advocate a lower wage type of living, both to escape higher taxes and the threat of outsourcing. Now, I realize that many of you have families and it is insane to think that you can raise a family on the kind of money I’m talking about. Or is it?
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Anyone can go into any business hiring help and get seven dollars an hour with minimal job experience. Some states are still at $5 an hour and that figure might be more like $6, but changes are that in that case you would be in a lower cost of living area anyway and things would roughly be equal. So I think $7 an hour is reasonable. You gross $1,000 a month and take home $800. You can raise a family on that amount. It will not be easy, but it can be done. If both parents are working you usually see little from the second income due to child care, but assume at least $1,000 a month if both work for take home, after taxes, after day care.
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Now, the beautiful thing about working for such low wages is that you can move anywhere. Everyone is paying about the same but some areas are cheaper to live in. When I lived in Florida the average starting pay was $6. Then I moved to Nevada and it started at $7. But rents were 50% more in Nevada. I would have been better off staying in Florida. So you aren’t stuck in one area just for the pay, as you would be if you were a professional or a blue collar worker. Making less money frees you up to move to the most advantageous survival area.
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Buying a used mobile home and paying lot rent in a park is one cheap way of having enough room for the family cheaply. If you made a bit more than the minimum and lived as cheaply as possible you could even pay for a piece of land to eventually avoid the house payment and rent. It essentially boils down to living primitively and doing without comforts for a short time and then being financially independent or clinging to your comforts and being forever in debt and holding on to those increasing scarce better paying jobs. I just lived five months in a van to put money into this business and have some money in the bank. I am now back in a travel trailer to start living normal again. Anyone can live like a dog for a short time to achieve a goal. And before you dismiss my experience, two years ago we were living in a thirty five foot travel trailer with my step-daughter, the grandson and his father. Four adults, an infant in diapers and two angry cats. A year after that we took the grandson in for five months. We got no assistance from his mother. Me, the wife and the grandson and two slightly less angry cats lived on my income alone. While he was in diapers.
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You need rent, electric and food. You don’t need a car. Or credit cards. Or cable television. I know living without a car is tough. I used to bring back a weeks worth of groceries for two tied in plastic bags to my bicycle handlebars ( remember the song by Queen “I want to ride my bicycle”- it keeps going through my head whenever I bring up that mode of transportation ). I used to peddle twenty plus miles round trip to visit my kids on the weekend. If you live in town or close to it you don’t need a car. You want a car, true. When it is raining or ten degrees out, it sure would be nice. Just do without for five years until your trailer and/or land is paid off. Then go back to having a car.
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Look, income is not a criteria for living well or preparing for survival. Attitude and discipline take you a lot farther. My folks live on a combined total of $50k plus and complain of never having enough money. And their mortgage is only $999 a month. What went wrong there? They won’t deprive themselves. New cars, cable TV, a very comfortable setting on the thermostat and trips to the casino. Same with my married step-sister. Two very high County government jobs with high seniority pay. And never having two nickels to rub together. They can’t tell the difference between needs and wants. You can live in a crap shack and eat a lot of beans and grains and little meat. If you are properly motivated.
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You can use cloth diapers, if you had to. You can live off of beans instead of meat ( well, large portions anyway ). You can walk or bike to work. Not to deprive yourself of comfort but to achieve a goal. A paid for house ( you can build your own if you build smart and small for the cost of most peoples down deposits ). A small business ( easier than ever with the Internet ). Or becoming independent by reducing your income needs.
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By learning to live on less you can earn less and move anywhere you like. You don’t have to be stuck in a big city. With crime and pollution and traffic. You can move to a more peaceful area. Just learn to live on less. I could easily earn $10-$13 an hour. But I don’t need the stress. I like earning $7 an hour and not having to dread going to work. I can move anywhere I want, although I do like the Great Basin area here. High desert agrees with me. Even when it gets thirty degrees in the trailer like this morning. Four degrees outside, thirty inside. I have a heater allowance I can’t exceed so it can get rather cold. The price of $7 an hour means wearing two wool sweaters and a wool beanie inside sometimes.
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Your family doesn’t have to go through such extremes. Remember, I earn $7 an hour and pay child support. Your take home is higher than mine. Your food can be non-processed and mostly potatoes, grains and beans with a little meat. Your family can eat very cheap. Diapers can be cloth, you can buy re-useable feminine hygiene products, cloth napkins, etc. Your family can all ride used bikes, you can run around in shorts in summer with fans instead of A/C, wear sweaters and hats in the winter, cook with solar ovens, etc. You can live cheap and dad can stay at home a lot more than he used to. And you can live in a safe area.
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I can share techniques with you. The motivation is all your doing. If you want to do it, you can.
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6 comments:
With regards to the potato and grain diets you advocate, I disagree that you will live cheaply on that diet. You might succeed for a year or 2 or 10, but eventually the extra expense on medical care (if you are lucky enough to get medical care) will get you.
The problem with vast percentages of your diet coming from grain and potato sources is that you will end up with mostly omega 6 fats and few omega 3 fats. This is already a chronic problem in western diets. Eating meat used to help when cattle still fed on grass, but in the interest of profit the cattle now eat grain instead. Too much omega 6 and too little omega 3 leads to a plethora of degenerative diseases.
I offer a cheap suggestion in keeping with your live cheap philosophy. Get canned fish. I regularly see cans of salmon and sardines at my local dollar stores, so anyone can afford at least a few cans per week. Sardines, salmon, and other oily fish are packed with omega 3 fats and could well save your health.
Aussie Survivalist says... Hey Jim, I love the low money living idea. I happen to have a butcher friend who lives about a hundred miles from me, so what I do to increase the amount of meat in my diet is when I go hunting (useful for shooting practice, good camping fun and in this case providing for the family), I take my butcher friend along. If we can bag two deer, relatively easy where I hunt, I get him to butcher both carcasses and we throw all the meat in his huge esky until we get home a few days later. We then divy up the meat and get enough meat to fill a small chest freezer... and there you have meat for a couple of months at the cost of using a few of your stored rounds.
Jim, you're right on the money! My wife and I have had times that we made big money and other times when we were on minimum wage...either way, we've always lived "close to the bone", doing things economically, while we put as much money away as we could. We've always done our major shopping at thrift stores and garage sales (and saved a bundle by not being too proud) it's always been a fairly enjoyable challenge to us.
Re: Omega 3's (above)...the inexpensive route is to make sure you include flax seed in your diet. We put it in the breakfast cereal and bread that we bake and we've got model cardio-vascular health (if that suffices as evidence).Try to make as much of your diet as possible "from scratch", it's not only a fraction of the cost, it also does away with the crap that manufactured foods are loaded with! Also keep in mind that a major part of staying healthy is simply getting enough exercise. Walking is ideal or you can use a bike (like Jim does). Either one is decent recreation too, you end up missing an awful lot when you drive around in a car all day.
BIGbill: Jim, you're right again. (I can sympathize with you having to deal with the burden of genius. It is difficult to hold up under the pressure.) The biggest problem is self-discipline. The second is getting the family, or at least the significant other, to go along. We've had to live like cloister members a few times ourselves, and right now we don't exactly scrimp, but we do manage to put some away and live okay on about $35K a year. Of course no mortgage is a big, big help. The real deal is to find the cheapest housing you can stand, and if possible, acquire it without debt. Easier said than done, I know. We finally got it after age 60. Good fortune to you and after the new year, I'll be getting the frugal survivalist, maybe even the chicken little mag. Keep it up.
Temping is another easy income that usually pays anywhere from $2-$10 more per hour than minimum wage. You can do anything from warehouse work to executive assistant work with only a high school degree and you can leave and restart anytime. I've lived in towns of only 5000 with temp agencies. If you want to get really classy and invest you can go through community college or public school to become a nurse, accountant, etc. and move into the "upper levels" of temping. You get paid more and there is slightly more stress but you can still leave anytime you want!
Solarsurvivalist - Another thing you can do to improve your diet is grow fish in a barrel. They can be fed worms that you raise on food scraps and newspapers. Check out this article about it written over 30 years ago:
Raising Fish in a Barrel
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