The two most important words in your new life:
Kraft Dinner.
I don’t see how $20k/year is poor in any really significant sense, unless we’re talking as an income for a family of 3-4. I’m in that vicinity, and I have no problem affording my own apartment, an old but reliable car, whatever food I want, and still have a couple hundred in discretionary spending every month. Granted, I’m in a low cost of living area, but still. My “tough economic decision” is whether to buy a new $300 video card now, or to buy a dvd player and the LOTR:EE set now and wait a month or two on the card. Sacrificing broadband and cable TV isn’t even a question.
20k isn’t poor it is lower middle class considering that you will have a roommate (most likely, unless you live in bumfuck, flyover state where a 1 bedroom is $200/month) and the median income in the US for households is $43,318. A roommate who also makes 20k sharing your 2 bedroom apartment will make you a median household in regards to income, so its not like you’ll be desperately poor. Actually you’ll be in a better position since you’ll have no kids, and be young and relatively healthy. Too bad you’re in Canada and I have no idea what the stats are up there, but since your healthcare will be taken care of you will be alot better off than you would down here. I am reading a book right now called the two income trap that says 87% of bankruptcies are due to either a medical problem, a broken marriage or a job loss (in the US). Since you’re in Canada a medical problem won’t bankrupt you and you are not dependent on a spouse for sustinence. And you can always move back in with your parents so going bankrupt doesn’t sound like a serious risk. As far as cable and the internet, having 3 roommates in a 3 bedroom apartment should cut the cost down to $30/month, which is not a huge price for a major form of entertainment and an outlet to the world. You can always buy used TVs from the classifieds (they usually go for about $50 for a 25-27"), and hell a 25" TV goes for about $160 new and will last you 5 years.
Suffice it to say being poor sucks.
Not necessarily. Where I live a 2 bedroom is $500/month. That is $250 a person for a nice apartment that is free of mold and that we pay a flat gas bill for ($30/month which is included in the $500 figure) so heating isn’t a problem. The showers have no pressure problems.
My older brother and his wife lived in a small town in Ohio when he was getting his masters. Their combined budget only came to $1200-ish a month even though they made $1700 a month after taxes. I don’t have their budget onhand but it was something like:
$310 rent for a 2 bedroom apartment that was free of mold and had ‘free’ heating since the gas bill was a flat $25/month
$140 food
$150 car payment (they had 2 cars. one was paid for and was a Geo metro the other was $150 a month and was a hyundai accent)
$40 health insurance for the wife. My brother got health insurance through college
$20 cable tv
$0 internet (the days of free ISPs)
$90 gasoline
$80 car insurance (averaged)
$100 electric, gas & phone
I forget the rest but it was the usual stuff like clothes, small purchases, etc. etc. Suffice it to say on a combined income of $1600-1700 a month they saved about $4000 in 6 months to go on a honeymoon. And their apartment was nice, free of mold and mildew with good plumbing, and it had heating. But it was a small town in the midwest where real estate is cheap. Aside from their shitty food budget (I couldn’t live on $70/month for food) and the fact that they had free dialup service their lives were not bad at all.
We’re talking $20K Canadian, rather than USD, right? So we’re talking about almost $17000 USD for a single person. I dunno as I’d really call that poor, at least in a place with a reasonable cost of living. That’s about what I made when I first started at my last clinic, and I was able to afford everything I needed, as well as a fair bit of the stuff I wanted. I wasn’t living fancy, of course, but I wasn’t going without, either.
My apartment was furnished in the style my husband refers to as Early American Garage Sale, shabby but comfortable stuff people had given me or that I’d bought at junk shops, garage sales, and discount stores. (And when I say discount, I ain’t talking WalMart. I’m talking Dollar Store and Big Lots.) It was a reasonably attractive place, though. A little ingenuity and a couple of bedsheets can go a long, long way. I bought most of my food at the off-brand grocer across the street. My clothes were an amalgam of thrift stores, discount stores, and gifts.
What kind of experience it is really depends on how you’re used to living and what your priorities are. If you’re going to feel deprived without cable tv and designer clothes and things that match, you’re likely to be pretty unhappy. If you’re content throwing a clearance-sale sheet over the fugly 70’s couch somebody was going to throw away, having assorted mismatched everything, and shopping thrift stores and such, it’s no big deal.
My family’s income is currently around AU$26,000 a year - that’s for the three of us, me Mr A and a baby. (I suppose that would be around the same number in Canada dollars)
From my POV one of the most important things is - what are your friends on? We have enough money to buy stuff we need - housing, food etc - but if we had friends with expensive tastes, whose main entertainments involved things you had to spend a lot of money on … well, that would be a problem.
But we don’t, so that’s ok. It’s a lot less stressful not being able to afford to go out if your friends’ budgets run to “stay in and watch a movie” too.
I don’t think $20K sounds too bad. My advice: try to save some money each week, no matter what. There’s nothing so stressful as not having a reserve for emergencies.
One of your biggest costs will be eating out so do your best to avoid it. I wholeheartedly agree with the last poster insofar as you should try and save as much as possible. The more you can put away for a rainy day the better. This will also help you to avoid credit card debt as well.
A little trick I learned while living on $8,000 a year was to go to happy hours at bars. The usually have free food so you can buy a cheap beer (check for the draft specials) for around $2-3 and then eat away. If you do it regularly enough then it is important to overtip the wait staff or barman. I used to go to the Burwood Tavern in Chicago every Wednesday and Thursday night. I would avoid paying for lunch because I knew I could stock up on food in the early evening. They knew me there so I never had a problem. A pint of Miller Lite was 2.50 so I would give the bartender $5 and then go to town. Indeed, I was so well-known there that they allowed me to take left-overs as otherwise they would just throw the food away.
It’s the little things that can stretch your dollar.
I think it’s important to note that there are two kinds of poor: There is the poverty created by temporary circumstances, such as going to school or sinking all your money into a home purchase, and the grinding poverty of a permanent nature, such as someone having a low income job and no prospects for improvement.
The first is not so bad, even when in absolute dollars you may make a lot less than people in the second category. When I was in school, I was poor. I lived on a part-time paycheck of never more than $1000 a month, and often half that. A couple of years I made it by on $4,000 in student loans and a summer job that earned another $4000.
But that was college. I was young, no health problems, no commitments, no children, and with a roommate. Entertainment was next to free (everyone’s going to Dave’s apartment for a party! Whoo!). I had access to all the resources of the college - library, computers, study facilities, etc. It was a gas.
But most importantly, I knew it was temporary, and I was surrounded by people in exactly the same situation. It was part of the culture.
But I’ve also been poor when I wasn’t in school. When my friends had more than me, and I had to turn down invitations to movies or weekend ski trips. When stuff around me was wearing out and I didn’t have the money to replace it, and no prospects for being able to do so soon. That sucks. And it’s doubly bad if you’d like to start a family or buy a house, or go back to school to improve your situation, but simply do not have the resources to do it. When an unexpected car breakdown changes your entire lifestyle for months because you don’t have the money to fix it. The temptation to run up credit cards, to live on the edge where you are always paying bills just before the ‘we will cut off your services’ deadline is overwhelming, and if you get into that situation, very stressful.
What concerns me is that, at 22, you still haven’t “lived poor” in the temporary, student sense that people are talking about. You haven’t been kept up till 3 a.m. by the neighbor’s television, awoken at 5 a.m. by their radio, carried three loads of laundry out to the laundromat in the rain, had your fridge stop working and the maintenance crew ignore the situation, thought that getting a ride to the mall was the biggest treat of the month even though you couldn’t afford to buy anything, hauled groceries up three flights of stairs, had to figure out what to eat for every single meal of every single day, or lost hours of every day to stupid inconveniences simply because you can’t afford something that’s relatively standard, etc etc etc (or at least, I assume you haven’t–I assume your folks live in a house). After three or four or five years of that, people get sick of it and are delighted to get well-paying jobs and all the conveniences that come with more money.
You will be okay on 20K, but probably not forever. You will, eventually, get sick of it. Promise.
I had this teacher in college who was a really great teacher. Sort of like Yoda. Anyway my sophmore year he retired and at the party he pulled me aside and said. “Look around.” (He had a nice house on a small ranch. A few horses etc.) “All of this on a teacher’s salary. Steve, it’s not what you make, it’s what you do with what you make.”
It doesn’t matter if you make only 20k a year. What will you do with your money?
You need to learn how and why to budget and how to save. You may not want a house now but in the future? You won’t always be making 20k a year. But being able to budget and save is important if you make 20k or 50k or 250k a year.
Being poor sux in more ways than it is possible to recount here. Let me list just a few that stand out in memory from my days of poverty:
- It sucks being cold all winter because you need to keep the thermostat turned WAY down lest the heating bill overwhelm your budget (and you will need to have and adhere to a budget). Wearing layers of clothing indoors does not make having the thermostat set at 50 degrees as comfortable as having it set at 65 degrees.
- It sucks when any mechanical device on which you depend whether it’s your car, furnace, washing machine, or whatever breaks down and you have to figure out which other parts of your budget to rob in order to fix or replace it.
- It sucks having to either turn down invitations to go out with friends or always go out on their dime.
- It sucks wearing 2nd hand clothes all the time.
- It sucks having to wear shoes long after they should have been replaced.
- It sucks not being able to give nice gifts to people you love for birthdays and holidays.
- It sucks eating the kind of stuff poverty constrains you to eat on a continuing basis. I like ramein noodles and rice and such quite well, thank you, I like having them as part of list of choices that includes things like steak and pork chops even better.
- Like beer and wine? I do and it sucks drinking cheap brands (and little enough of those) because a case of beer is a major expenditure when you’re poor.
- Movies? Plays? Concerts? Unless they have them for free where you live, it sucks not being able to go to those things w/o throwing The Budget out of whack elsewhere.
- The biggest part of the suckitude that is poverty is the way it limits what you can do on a whim. Every aspect of your life is controlled by that Almighty Budget and if you don’t bow to it’s might, you can experience other joys of poverty like repossession, collection agents, and eviction.
Yes, even if you are comfortably middle-class you still have to budget, but it is nothing short of amazing how much more pleasant life is with a bit of discretionary income as part of the picture.
Alot of these things are due to bad luck and poor planning as well as economics. Cindy Crawford was suing her apartment complex because she could hear the toilets flush in the nearby apartments and she paid millions for hers. Alot of people have to go to laundromats, not just the poor and some apartments have W/D hookups in the apartment or in the apartment complex.
When my fridge stopped working it was replaced the next day. I have not had problems with noise in neighboring apartments, and neither did my older brother. Noisy neighbors is not necessarily due to economic deprivation as much as living near assholes, and assholes come in all income brackets.
Normally I am very liberal but I agree with Sam Stone on issues of personal poverty. There is a difference between making good, well thought out decisions and living frugally and relatively safely as a result.
Scumpup
- Some apartments offer a flat gas bill. Ours is $30/month and no matter how much heat we use it is still $30/month.
- A car can fall apart and leave you stranded but a person can make a decision to read consumer reports and discover something like a toyota echo or hyundai are very reliable then go on ebay or autotrader and find a good deal on one (a 2000 hyundai is about $2500 on ebay. Plus the $100 or so in greyhound fare to go pick it up) or they can buy the first beater they can find for under $1000 which may be a 1984 lesabre. Many appliances are available in the classified for $100 or so. And again consumer reports is your friend on this kind of thing.
- I buy my clothes at walmart. $10-15 for pants. I am too fat/muscular to wear normal sized shirts bought at stores but I see normal sized shirts on sale for $10 all the time.
- I bought reeboks a year and a half ago for $30. $30 name brand shoes like nike or reeboks or fila can be found at places like Sears or JCPenney.
3, 6-10. Yes it does suck.
I know this was more of a rant on your part I just wanted to point out that thigns do not have to be that way, at least not as intensely as they may be for you.
Normally I am very liberal but I agree with Sam Stone on issues of personal poverty. There is a difference between making good, well thought out decisions and living frugally and somewhat safely as a result (a major disaster can still ruin you even if you plan ahead) and someone who doesn’t know that with a little planning they can make things easier on themselves. Life is still hard and things can fall apart on a dime with a car wreck, job loss, illness, etc, but not as hard if you plan and look at your options. Not that I am somehow above other people with issues of money (I still don’t have health insurance, but I just found a policy for $580/year that I am in the process of signing up for) but it really is to a degree how you plan ahead and look at your options.
Well, first off, since you’re a musician I’m assuming you’ll be urban poor, not rural poor. Neither is a picinic, but, having been both, I can testify that urban poor is a comparative paradise. Libraries, (some) free-admission festivals, walks through interesting neighborhoods. Against this all rural poverty offers is free squirrel meat if you can elude the game warden.
Urban poverty does have the higher possiblity of violent crime, but as a male you’r risk of this is somewhat lessened. You may not be able to keep a 300.00 balance, so you’ll need to find someplace to stash your money. If you can make a trusted contact with one of our regular gigs, they might let you keep an envelope in their safe, as well as pick up your messages from their phone. Usually for het males, a vow of poverty is the same as a vow of celibacy, but again, as a musician, you may find yourself exempt from this one.
Even if you don’t break through and become the next jeans-creaming rock star millionaire, if you make a name for yourself as competent and dependable and remain unattached and ready to relocate, you will find steady work. If you keep a lot of the thrifty habits you’ll learn now, and instead of blowing your money when t finally comes in you invest it in a solid business venture or a portfolio, you can succeed. Just do the right thing as it needs to be done every day.
Being poor isn’t THAT bad. Granted, my experiences in poordum are in one of the cheapest places on the planet to live (Peoria, IL), but I look back on those experiences fondly.
At age 21, I was self-employed and working part time to fill in the gaps, making around $15K/year. I lived in a 3 bedroom apartment with 2 buddies. Our entertainment was playing video games and walking to Taco Bell. It sucked at the time, not being able to have the latest toys but we managed. About once a month, we’d throw a huge party… the kind that needed cops to break them up. We’d all chip in and get a keg and mix whatever we could for drinks and charge a few bucks at the door. Without fail, they made us $200-300/month that we split between us. We’d then throw a BYOB party and count on people leaving half-full bottles of hard liquor, then use those at our next shindig. Profit from your entertainment… that’s the way to do it.
I got a full time job making around $20,000 a little later and felt rich. I’d really learned to watch my dollars and get stuff cheap, so I was able to splurge on satellite TV and DSL and a cell phone. Still, most of my clothes came from thrift stores or gifts. When going out, my friends often had to pick up the tab and we always had to hit bars with drink specials. I was lucky that my car never broke down. I relied a lot on credit cards when I couldn’t pay all my bills in their entirity. I racked up about $6500 credit card debt.
Finally I got a job in the field I went to college for, making $33,000/year. I’m now 25. Let me tell you, I feel so rich, mostly from knowing how to manage my money. My credit card debt will be paid off within 2 or 3 months. My car is paid off and still hasn’t needed a whole lot of repairs, so I’ve been lucky there. Still, I take trips with my friends and seem to pick up the tab often now when we go out. I buy DVDs constantly and now shop for new clothes, although it’s in lesser-priced stores like Kohl’s.
As has been mentioned, the worst part of having no money is not being able to buy stuff for friends and family on holidays or birthdays. I’m an illustrator, so I was lucky that I could paint murals or do portraits for gifts, although it was always up to the gift getter to get a frame or supply a wall. I didn’t have to turn down many invitations, since my friends were always the type to offer to pay for me if my excuse was that I couldn’t afford it.
Just remember to make the poorness temporary and try to enjoy it rather than complain to much about it. You’ll learn a ton from the few years you spend broke.
For 22 years, I knew nothing but poverty. Too many of those years were spent homeless, in shelters, not on welfare, not able to get any because I had no address, and unable to get a job for the same reason. I had to eat at the places where the extremely poor have to line up to be fed stuff that can only be called ‘food’ in the literal sense. I can’t talk about any movies or TV shows that came out during that period with anybody, because I never got to see them. I can’t describe to you adequately the degree to which that sucks.
Now my life is completely different. I make $20K before taxes, my wife makes somewhat more than that, and I gotta tell you, it’s like living in the lap of luxury. Before, I could only dream about what it must be like; now I’m doing it.
You don’t want to experience what being poor is like. If you have a support network, if you have a nice, stable life, if you don’t know what the inside of a Salvation Army dormitory looks or smells like, you’re not poor and you likely never will be. If you have reasonable expectations and can establish practical financial management, you can live on $20K by yourself just fine.
When I moved to D.C. (a very expensive city by most standards) I started off making $20,000. Contrary to the doom and gloom scenarios painted by most people on this thread, making $20,000 didn’t make me “poor” nor did it mean that I was deprived of much.
I had my own place (no roommate, although it was in somewhat of a ghetto), did pretty much whatever I wanted to do, and ate well (in fact, I gained 20 pounds). Of course, I’m not the kind of person who likes to waste his money going out, my diet sucked (not because I was being cheap – it was just easier to live off of macaroni and cheese or other processed pasta foods), and I’m sure I’d have a hard time going back to those days now that I make a lot more money. But don’t let people tell you that you’re poor if you only make $20,000 or that your life will be over. It’s not that bad. Just be sensible about your money.
Hell, I lived for a stint in D.C. before I moved here permanently and I was only making minimum wage. I did just fine then, too. More money usually only means that you’ll be buying stuff you don’t need anyway.
(pssssst, that would be the 20k a year minus 450 a MONTH which brings the total per year down to $5400, YIKES)
Well darn it, I HAD a decent post, but it was eaten by the hamsters. What kunilous says above.
Take your last few months (or however long you have left at school under your parent’s roof) and do some serious research.
Everything under the sun just about costs money to live. If I were to do it all over again as a young person getting ready to leave home? I’d spend some serious time learning about budgeting and real world costs of things.
You say you “don’t need much”. So, you don’t mind cooking and reheating every thing you eat on the stovetop or in the oven? If so, you’ll need a toaster, a microwave, etc. Like a clean house? You’ll need a vacuum, cleaning implements, and renewable cleaning supplies.
Even used small appliances cost money.
How much do you eat a week? Keep track of how much you eat for a day, or a week in a notebook, then go to the store and price the items multiplied by how much of said item you eat.
Check out how much the apartments are in your area. Be sure to add in elec, heat and water if applicable.
What about a car? That’s insurance, gas, repair, upkeep and maintenance, tires, and so on. And payments if it’s not already paid for. If you plan on taking the bus, or other public transportation you need to budget in for unexpected outages, or if you miss your scheduled bus or train, so that you can catch a cab to work if need be.
There is so much more, that I can’t even think of right now. Best of luck.
My approach, which you will appreciate as a fellow midwesterner, is that any apartment will be noisy–one wants to live in a house instead. Yes, one may still have to hear the neighbors talking in their driveway at 1 am, but at least you don’t hear every bump, thump, and, yes, toilet flush they make–and if you live in an apartment you will hear all this and more. Also, having a washer and dryer makes an apartment significantly more expensive.
As a midwesterner (from central Indiana, no less), you will also appreciate the fact that it has been raining for five days and will rain for five more, and laundry needs to be done sooner or later.
As a fellow apartment dweller, you recognize the fact that one cannot accurately judge the cooperativity of the management before actually moving in.
If Cindy Crawford paid millions for an apartment, she deserves to hear the neighbors’ toilets flush.
I haven’t had any noise problems in the 2 years i’ve been in my apartment. Sometimes my upstairs neighbor has his TV on too loud but thats it.
A W/D hookup is not necessarily more expensive, although it can be. Some apartments offer hookups, and some have on site laundromats so the walk is mild and short. And it doesn’t rain 24/7 so you can put it off if at all possible. What is weird is that all the snow already melted, we got 14" of snow here and it melted in a week. WTF.
You are right that you can’t really judge an apartment before you live there. There may be (and probably are) sites where people who live in apartment complexes talk about their experiences and give recommendations but I dont know where to find them.
Poor is really relative - as you can see from this thread.
It sounds like your parents are pretty well off…in which case $20k will seem poor to you. My sisters ex was poor on a $45k a year job out of college - his dad made mid six figures and he was used to Tommy jeans and Vail vacations.
Make a budget and before you graduate and move from the comfort of home - live it. Put any extra aside, savings will be instramental towards success.
I know 15 years ago I made about $15k graduating from college. Was married, but he wasn’t good with money (making it or knowing how not to spend it). It was tough, but not impossible. It was worse several years later when he left (thank god!) because I then had a car loan. Don’t get youself in over your head! Don’t take on debt (car loans, credit cards).