assuming you had to just survive, but survive w/shelter, food & transportation?
i think i could get by on $700 a month post tax. But if anything came up i’d be sunk.
Probably $300/month more than I make now. I don’t know how I’ve done it so far…
Where? Cost of living varies a lot from place to place.
After I’ve paid all bills, rent, etc, I spend about $20 bucks a day.
In my general area I imagine I could live thusly:
Rent: $300. It would probably be a dumpy room in an apartment with other people, but I could find one. No way I could find a place cheaper than that.
Utilities: $40. This would include phone, gas, and electric. Up here it gets very expensive to heat in the winter, though, and the heating bill for an apartment for months like Jan or Feb can sit around two hundred dollars depending on the size of your place and how you manage the heat. In the winter we’ll add another $40 for November through March.
Car: $180. My insurance is about 140 a month, and we’ll say I’ll fill the car twice and change a month (which is a pretty conservative estimate).
Food: $100. That’s about $3.30 a day, which isn’t much, but smart shopping can make that a very manageable amount.
Well, there you go. That’s $620 a month ($660 in the winter).
But…
This assumes that you own your car (aren’t still making payments), nothing happens to your car, you don’t need any medical attention, and that nothing unexpected happens ever.
Rent and utilities and phone run about $800/month, insurance is about $2700/year, so $225/month, food, coffee, booze and cigarettes is about $20/day, so $600/month, prescriptions are about $25/month (whew! down from about $65/month), Internet is $48/month (I pay for some others’ access as well as my own), gasoline runs about $120/month, averaging car repair/maintenance, clothing, haircuts and sundry other incidentals probably adds another $400/month and toss in $200/month for entertainment and surprises (parking ticket!).
Note: I do not make Eonwe’s assumptions, rather, I take the opposite view.
Where do we get to?
$800 + 225 + 600 + 25 + 48 + 120 + 400 + 200 = $2418/month
To net $2418/month I need to net $29,016/year, or gross about $40,000 to continue living as I do.
Or did you mean if I had to go back to living like a college student?
Or a hippie?
P.S. Thanks for the exercise Wesley, it’s something we all need to do periodically.
… or like one of the many individuals who don’t make nearly that much money. 
I used to have to do this, especially when calculating out groceries. I had it figured out that I could live on $100 for food a month, but I never could do it. Something would come up.
Let me think. I live with relatives and we all share expenses (and are in a house that’s paid for), so I don’t know what the going rate is for rent.
But I’ll try to do a hypothetical here.
$400 for rent and utilities (sharing with others, living in a dump).
$250 for food (being a little generious–I eat a lot of veggie burgers). Also, cat food. (Little parasites expect to be fed.)
$100 for gas, car insurance and saving away for car maintenence. (I don’t need to drive much and car insurance is low on this junk heap I drive.)
$150 for misc. stuff–Internet, unexpected expenses, vet bills, and so forth.
That comes to $900. Huh. Interesting. Of course, if the car died or something else came up, as others have mentioned, I’d be sunk.
I live comfortably on $1000 a month, even figureing in that I pay $600.00 in rent (which is cheap around here) but do not have a car (can’t afford it!).
Being unemployed, I’ve stretched about $2,300 for about four months, includeing a very-on-the-cheap cross country trip. It hasn’t been comfortable or fun, but I’m not dead, so I guess it can be done.
When I was a student, my bank manager refused to extend my overdraft just as my finals were coming off. I had to get by on £5 a week, after rent, utilities, and a pouch of tobacco. I ate a lot of potatoes back then, and I was nice and slim. But I got an ulcer from it too, so maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.
With 2 kids and a husband we are getting along ok with 1600 a month. When it was just me and my 4 yo (then a newborn) we made do with 578 a month. We lived in section 8 housing (25$ a month) and ate a LOT of mac and cheese. I made the baby food my son ate and breastfed so that was REALLY cheap 
Before I bought my car I was living on 500-600 a month (sometimes less) but I’m a vegetarian college student who cooks everything from scratch (pre packaged food costs donchaknow) and sharing a room (which is in a very nice house luckily). I’ve only had the car for a month so I’m not sure exactly how much I will end up paying on average but I’ve estimated 800-900 bare minimum.
Umm…General? I’m more of a Dean supporter myself, but perhaps you’d appreciate a bit of campaign advice:
When you ask people “What is the cheapest budget you can reasonably live on?”, it makes them worry about what, exactly, your economic policies will be.
A college student myself, this last month my expenses have been:
Rent: 318$
Food: 50$
So I’m getting by pretty frugally by the standards you guys are giving!
Internet is split by my roomates and me so its only about $10 personally, and we get two months free anyway.
Haven’t received a utility bill yet, but once again split by 4, it shouldn’t be too bad.
Parents pay car insurance, and I’m walking distance from campus, so until I get a job, I don’t really need to use my car so no gas expense.
Gotta have at least $100k a year or me and the wife and the cat are just not gonna be happy. Making only that would even hurt a little bit.
Hey, you asked.
If we are talking absolute minimum then we need to look at alterntives for the essentials:
Housing, Food, Transportation
For Housing: There are hostels I guess, but a step up form that would likely mean having a shared accomotation. I don’t think in Toronto you could find this for less than $300 a month. Government subsidies may help (i.e. Ontario Housing which sets rent at 25% of income).
For Transportation: Assuming you needed to move around you could get a second hand bike. A step up from that is a metropass at $80 allowing unlimited travel in GTA (greater Toronto area).
For Food: I suspect $0. We have food banks and the salvation army. A step up from that might be Mr.Noodles (4 for $1) and other ultra cheap groceries. I’ll arbitrarily say $100 a month.
I guess you could commit a crime and go to jail and live for free. Of you could continuously hurt yourself and leech of the hospital, but those are illegal.
Another way aroun this is to adopt a life of crime and steal only what you need (i.e. steal food, squat in area’s for sleep). But again illegal.
Another way to answer to question is relative to my current living situation.
Under the anonymity of the Internet I will divulge some numbers:
(oh what a social taboo I am breaking here… I feel so … naughty… )
Income now:
$2,700 /month after all deductions/tax
Rent: $900
Food: $300
Transportation: $400 (car) + $150 (ins) + $50 (related, gas etc…)
Total: $1900
Assume I cut my food down to $150 and lose the car for a TTC metropass $80 and get a roomie $450 ($900/2)
Total: $680
I guess I could live off $680, or about 25% of my net salary. Wow that is quite fascinating to see.
When I was 17 I earnt £40pw and my rent was £40pw (in London, ten years ago). Occasionally I would get a day’s work that would net me a little extra money, and once I won £150 on a pub fruit machine, when whoever had been using it before me left 10p credit in the machine. It averaged out to about £45pw. After rent I had to pay for electricity, food, transport and medication - I have asthma.
I…
[ul][li]Got toilet roll from public toilets[/li][li]Collected the milk sachets from McDonalds[/li][li]Ate at a friend’s house about once a week[/li][li]Drank lime & soda water at the pub (4p for glass because the soda was free)[/li][li]Travelled on the trains without paying - or just walked a really long way [/li][li]Read my books in the light of the communal hallway[/li][li]Was a regular visitor to the taster stands at supermarkets[/li][li]Ordered the highest-calorie food I could whenever a friend wanted to buy me dinner[/li][li]Sometimes collected vegetables from the ground after the market had left - embarrassment stopped me doing it more often.[/li][li]Pretended to chemists that I was a full-time college student (sixth-form, not university), and so got my inhalers for free, though I had to change chemists frequently. [/ul][/li]
I got used to never spending pennies here and there, on vending machines and the like, but only spending what I had to. That’s still a good habit to have.
You’d be amazed how little you can live on if you have to. Wherever you live, you can find little ways of getting things for free, as long as you’re not too fussy. I know there’s a sub-culture in Las Vegas that prides itself on never paying for anything, and call themselves ‘couponomists’. (We don’t really get coupons to the same extent over here). It helps if the place you’re living is warm, of course. I was bloody cold that Winter!
TO clarify: £40 is $65 at the current rate, and £45 is $74. So that’s about $296pm.
At two different points mrsIteki and I have lived two people on about 6,000 kroner a month, for two people. A thousand kroner is at the moment about 120 USD or 105 EUR or 75 GBP. This included rent (3,500), all utilities, internet at the rate of about a buck an hour, transport (500 euro each per month), food, well basically everything. This was Stockholm, mid-late 90’s.
I am sure we could live on less even than that, we managed that comfortably enough although we never had anything extra for say a video-rental or an emergency.