In Canada? Sure. Even on minimum wage, your healthcare needs are taken care of. In the US it is not possible to be happy on minimum wage unless you’re married to someone with health insurance. It’s also not possible to live by yourself on minimum wage here. That means roommates, usually at least 2 or 3 at that wage.
Minimum wage jobs generally don’t provide an option for health insurance, or the few that do take quite a cut out of that final paycheck.
I think medical and especially dental costs are a huge problem for low income workers.
But let’s do some math. Minimum wage in IL is 8.25
8.25 X 40 (hours) X 52 (weeks) = $17,160 or $1,430 a month. Let’s say you take home about 85% of that. That is $1,216.00
In Chicago a decent studio with utilities can be had for about $600. (or a roomate in a nice apartment). Bus far for a month is $86.00. Phone and DSL internet about $50.00. And $100 for food. So that’s $836.00 to cover you basic stuff
That would leave you $380.00 for everything else. That would be fine if you never needed to see a doctor, never needed a tooth filled, never needed to buy a new computer or new TV.
As you can see a single trip to the dentist would wipe that $380.00 out easily.
The other thing I discoverd as being recently unemployed is how these minimum wage jobs never give you 40 hours. I am sorry but 24 hours IS NOT FULL TIME. I don’t care what you say, saying full time and then offering 24 hours is not accurate, but lots of places I applied to do just that.
Furthermore it’s hard to find two employers that will accommodate you so you can get two jobs. Right now I am in between jobs and my two part time jobs are now, 1 day Saturday and two days Mon - Thursday. But I never know which two days till the weekly schedule goes up.
So I keep looking of course, but it’s always the sneaky little things that get you in situations like these
In the UK healthcare is free to low paid workers. I’ve spent a part of my life on minimum wage/unemployment benefits and managed to survive OK.
Not a comfortable standard of living but bearable for a while.
As for the “right sort of person being happy on minimum wage”? No. Unless they have no aspirations at all then the answer is no.
We’re bombarded with adverts telling us that unless we have xyz product then we’re missing out on all the fun that the rest of the world is having.
If you can avoid and ignore this and be satisfied with what you have you are well on the way to contentment. Everything else is just a distraction.
Peace.
No it is not possible to live a happy life on your own on minimum wage in America, you are one accident away from homelessness at any time. All mimimum wage jobs typically treat you like crap and don’t have much dignity either, and will fire you in a heartbeat. Anyone who could be “happy” with zero security whatsoever is deluded.
I loved college, and my half of the rent and utilities was $350. Transportation costs were about $200/month (but a lot of that was gas to go home, take that out and it is closer to $100. If I needed I could’ve gotten rid of hte car and gotten a bus pass for $40/month). Food maybe $200-300. I didn’t have health insurance at the time but if this is a Canadian fantasy then it wouldn’t matter (God love you canuks and your social safety nets).
I lived a pretty good life for about $1000 a month. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I really got a lot of enjoyment and growth out of htat period of my life and that is a little less than your minimum wage example which would have a net income of about $1400/month. And I’d take a life like that over $2500 a month in a job and city I don’t like.
My brother went to grad school in San Diego and his living expenses barely changed. He had to pay an extra $200/month for his half of the rent, but almost everything else stayed the same. And he lived in one of the highest cost of living areas in the US. I lived with him for a month and a half and I was the same way, aside from slightly higher rent it wasn’t terrible costwise. I could’ve gotten by on $10.25/hr there if I had health insurance somehow.
I only know him through the internet, but there is a guy I’ve talked with on a different board who lives like that. He owns his own mobile home, had no debts and has just finished paying off his car. He says he only needs to work 3-4 hours a day to make ends meet and his health care is taken care of by a state program. But he brags that he is one of the few people in his 50s who has no aches or pains in his joints, unlike the other 50 somethings he knows who work 40+ hours a week and that after finishing his job the rest of the day is his to do what he wants. He seems happy with a life where he didn’t subject his body to excess wear/tear by working 2000 hours a year, he lives in a nice city (madison), and he planned his life of relative poverty well so he makes ends meet.
When I was in college I got a lot of enjoyment out of just walking around town, hiking, going to the library, the dollar cinema, the park, watching visiting lecturers, being with friends. etc. All cheap and free activities. It can be done. However if you ever want to have kids you can’t really keep that lifestyle up.
When you are in college it doesn’t count. Half of the reason working minimum wage sucks is the hopelessness.
My son’s soccer coach LOVES youth soccer. He spends almost all his time and energy into coaching, attending games, and planning new strategies. He works a part time job, with as few hours he can in order to survive. He has no wife or kids. He has a tiny apartment, rides his bike everywhere, and gets all his entertainment from the library.
He is broke, but prefers it that way. He can spend more time with the kids who play soccer.
I did this too when I was in grad school.
But like I said before, it’s because my lifestyle allowed me to. If I didn’t want to go to the lab, I could just not go and take the PATH train into Manhattan. I’d burn hours just walking around the city and soaking up the life around me. I felt more well-to-do than I was because I could live in a fantasy.
And then the next day I might decide to go into the lab…for about five hours…just so that my advisor would see me working. The whole time I might be playing Snood on the computer. Maybe I might work on some statistics or something. Probably not.
Totally different experience from someone working a typical minimum wage job, full-time. You spend eight hours on your feet all day and the last thing you want to do is go for a nice stroll after work. You can’t pick your schedule, so that lecture you want to check out? Yeah, good luck with that. And even if you signed on to work the swing shift, that doesn’t mean you won’t be randomly assigned to work the day or night shift…totally ruining your plans at the last minute.
And being with friends is great…as long as they aren’t making more money than you are. It won’t be fun being the poor sack that can’t afford to buy a suit for a friend’s wedding. It won’t be cool having to always order off the appetizer menu because you can’t afford the $20 entrees everyone else is ordering.
(This is where being schizoid has it’s advantages.)
Another thing to remember–and man, I’m going to sound like a snob for saying this, but here goes–is that many people who work minimum wage jobs for life are not very…“high brow” for lack of a better word. I’m tempted to say they aren’t smart, but that’s not true. It’s just that if you expect to ever have a conversation about politics or current events at work, forget about it. So that might mean not making friends at work. It might mean being the “weirdo”…the guy who’s not hip to the slang or the culture and is always off in his own world (think McCandliss in “Into the Wild” when he was working at Burger King). The one everyone laughs at and addresses with nicknames that are borderline offensive (my nickname at Six Flags was “the Specialist”. Yeah, it was just like high school.)
It might even make for hostility.
Unfortunately, I speak from experience.
The scenario I am thinking of isn’t one where you work 40 hours a week for minimum wage, I am more referencing a situation where a decently educated person who makes 2-3x the minimum wage chooses a lifestyle that is sparse enough that they only need to work 20 hours a week to make ends meet (like the guy I referenced in my earlier post who lives in Madison. He works 3-4 hours a day 5 days a week and is a college graduate). The monthly income would be the same irrelevant of whether you worked 40 hours a week for minimum wage or 20 hours a week for 2x+ the minimum wage (maybe $1200 net income) but the situations would be different.
In college everyone was poor so the environment reflected that. Restaurants had great deals and nobody looked down on you for only having $5 to spare.
Americans also have a significantly lower minimum wage. In my state it’s $7.25 an hour.
AND we don’t get healthcare automatically.
In a way, yes, it’s doable, but it partly does depend on what your minimum wage is coming from- I have several friends who barely scrape by on much less than you’re suggesting. However, they’re mainly freelance circus performers, (often buskers, though most do paid gigs too).
I know people who live in vans, scavenge wood and dumpster dive for food, shower at friend’s houses, use the free library computers, but then travel the country (and mainland Europe), work the festivals for free entry and meal vouchers, and every now and again settle in a cheap flat in a city for a while. They’re some of the happiest (and most interesting) people I know.
That? Yeah, it’s doable, and yes people mostly stop after a while (though several of them are in their 30s, some older); doing something you love and surviving on the little it brings you is one thing, and it can be OK, but that’s not what you’re talking about. Working a boring job, and living hand-to-mouth is OK for a while, but getting out of it gets harder the longer you do it, and it wears you down. I’ve done it short term, and I’ll probably have to do it again, but it just all seems so pointless after a while. You don’t have to spend on a TV, (I’ve never had one, neither have my parents, come to that) or a car, but if you do get a bit more income, you have so many more options. Especially the option to change your mind. 20 is pretty young to have decided that ‘I will never want x’. You cannot know what the future will bring, and deliberately aiming for as low as you can just strikes me as a bad idea.
Minimum wage in Colorado is about $15k per year. It’s not much, especially when you don’t have health or dental (though I think on 15k, you may be eligible for Medicaid- not sure - they’re cutting it again).
I went without dental for a year and a half. Still don’t have it, but I got a p/t job and saved to go to the dentist. A filling I got a year and a half ago wasn’t done properly and now I need a crown as there is more decay and the tooth cracked. $1,100.
So I’d say that too much shit happens for people to be ‘happy’ on minimum wage. Part of happiness, imho, is feeling secure. I’m not sure how to fix this dental thing and replace my two front tires (another $300).
I think no matter what the long term answer to this question is no.
The problem isn’t that living sparse can’t be enjoyable, it’s that when you’re bringing in $1500 a month it’s difficult to build a savings. Putting away 10% is such a small amount. As mentioned above, eventually you’ll get hit with an unexpected expense or a period of unemployment, that will wipe out your savings, and cause you to get into debt.
This is true for most incomes, not just minimum wage.
Once in debt, the interest payments will shrink the rate at with you save, and eat into your earnings.
And then something else catastrophic happens. Now there is no choice but to use more debt, meaning more interest, meaning even less income.
It’s that sort of one two punch that sinks a lot of people both rich and poor.