Mike Atnip might want to update his estimate of $1,000 a month to $1,250; apparently the cost of living in upstate NY went up 25% in the last few months. Inflation is very real.
A.H. wrote: $1250/mo is easy to live on, even with a family.
I currently live on ~65% of that ($800/mo) with a wife and baby. It works because I own a house outright, maintain a large emergency fund, and because we are content to live a "1940's-tier" way of life.
I'll break it down:
1. My yearly tax bill is about $1200, which includes water and sewer. That's $100/mo.
2. My electric bill is almost never over $40. But our hot water heater is only 15gal and we do not shower daily (because no one did that until the 1980's and it's not necessary)
3. For heat, we live in the woods, and there is ample firewood available for free, to be burned in the woodstove.
4. We do not own an automobile. Transit costs us $3 per ride on the rural county transit bus, which has 2x daily service M-F. If we go to town once weekly, it's $12/wk or ~$50/mo.
5. We have bicycles for local travel, which cost a negligible sum to maintain. After intertubes, grease, replacement brake pads, etc, might be about $10/mo.
6. Because I use the internet to make a living, I do pay for it at $50/mo, and it pays for itself.
7. We receive trash removal services twice monthly for $30/mo. This is cheaper than owning a truck to use to take trash to the dump.
8. For medical concerns, we do whatever the Amish do (we are accepted friends of the Schwartzentruber, considered "almost Amish.") This means cash payments for dental fillings, buying treatments the Amish buy in Mexico and bring here, or, if something big happens, dipping into emergency fund and Amtraking to Mexico to stay with Amish contacts who have their own cash-paid doctors.
9. For entertainment, we have a radio, a CD player, and a gigantic personal library, as well as 50,000+ acres of public land within 1000' of our house.
10. For clothing, my wife thrifts extremely cheap bolts of fabric and makes a lot of our clothes by hand. We also shop at thrift stores on bargain days, spending maybe $30/mo on average.
11. For food, we eat a lot of bulk staples. If it's cheap and in season, we buy it and eat it. My wife cans a lot of stuff for the wintertime. We also have access to a private bulk foods grocery that sells at cost, and have friends who sell us eggs for $2/doz and milk for $2/gal. In all, we spend between $300 and $400/mo to eat a complete diet. We do not eat basically any pre-prepared, pre-packaged foods at all.
12. Auxiliary heat system is an extra expense. I have propane forced air heat as backup, I spend maybe $600/yr on propane for that: $50/mo
13. Odd things come up each month -- new HW heater element, broken shovel handle, new splitting maul, need to buy firewood, etc. That amount varies.
Adding up the above, it's $660/mo. We could CERTAINLY live on less, if we forewent electricity and hot water, if we gardened / hunted / fished / trapped, sought discarded meat from local fur trappers, used the internet only at the local library for free, skipped propane Aux heat, and if my wife made 100% of our clothes. But we like a few little luxuries that make life easier.
Additionally, if we lived in a lower-property-tax state, closer to a town (such that we do not need to use the bus), or in a climate that required no heating, expenses could be even lower.
I say "$800/mo" because though mandatory expenses are $660 on paper, there are a few extras and little things that crop up here and there, and I want to depict the lifestyle as honestly as I can.
What were the up-front costs to doing this?
1. $33,000 cash to buy our house, which was move-in ready when we bought it, and is in a tiny village walkable to a Church, a Dollar General, a pub, a library, and a gas station.
2. The cost of certain tools, our library and wardrobes, radio, and bicycles.
3. Having no debt at all.
4. Amassing about 5 years of total annual expenses in reserve, as an emergency fund. This is very easy to do if you live as cheaply as we do.
5. The nonmonetary costs of establishing close ties (and building TRUST) with the local Amish
6. The nonmonetary cost of transgressing basically every modern social norm about how one is expected to live. People think we're nuts.
Again, my original post said you CAN do this, and fairly easily at that, it's just that most people don't WANT to do this. They want to live a lifestyle that emerged as the "new normal" from about 1950 to 2025. It changes, becomes more complex, more expensive, etc -- and it's their prerogative if they want to live that lifestyle. It's a free country and I don't judge them, I just remind them they are indeed free to choose to live another way.
We do not live the "normal life", and for it, our life is absurdly, insanely cheap. And we have security in knowing our own great-great grandparents would not find any part of our life to be offensive nor to constitute any kind of deprivation.
You are free to do it too -- if you want it.
Whoops! Looks like they do have Internet after all, not just the local library. One of the more amusing aspects his purported lifestyle is claiming to be both Catholic and “almost Amish” at the same time.
I also really have some questions about how they’d get medical care for their new baby. He also left off the cost of maintenance on $33,000 house. For reference, the cash cost for my 1 year old daughter’s medical care was about $5,000 for prenatal care and delivery (which we paid cash for) and another $20,000 or so in services since then. Cash medical costs are really high these days. The cash cost of each pediatric checkup is about $750, some labs we recently got were about $2,500, and a specialist appt another $2,500. Of course, it’s cheaper if you apply for government assistance, which is what happens when even Swartzentrubers take their baby to Akron Children’s for an emergency.
