Could you live on $1000/month?

Not true at all! Depends where you are and if you have large debt when you begin at the $1,000.00 month. If you are living off grid comfortably as we do and have your car and home paid for with no other bills I would say heck yeah and still put up at least 5% of it for emergencies. Buy a high deductible insurance $250.00 a month and add a aflac catastrophic insurance for $70.00 a month to help pay the deductible if need be.

Breakdown: Just an example

Groceries for 3 (less if you grow more as we do) $200.00
Gasoline (working within 15 miles of home) $140.00
Misc. items $50.00
Health insurance $320.00
Car insurance $55.00 (unless brand new car)
Savings $50.00
Chicken feed $25.00 (gotta have for eggs and meat)
Goat feed $25.00 (milk and meat)
Cellphone (prepaid) $50.00 for two phones for 1500 minutes
Clothes $50.00
Leaves $35.00 to do what you need to do or 3 mcdonalds dollar meals for 3 of us.

i have lived on less than $1000 a month a lot of my adult life..and if you are talking about $1000 per month per person..Hell Yes

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Brenda Groth
http://restfultrailsfoodforestgarden.blogspot.com/

Right, I was speaking to the posters who seem to think it means otherwise. Theres nothing wrong with sticking half or more of your income away. I never have understood spending every cent I have and depending on next month's paycheck.
I also don't understand why there is such a huge concern about health insurance. As You get older, you need to be aware that at some point you will die. You can either be in control of that and write up your living will and discuss your plans with your children, or you can take your chances. When I get sick enough, I'm outta here. The hospitals will just have to find some other body to experiment on, trying to keep alive for one more day at $10k a day. The day I can't get out of this chair and do what I want to do, I'm done. No regrets.

Not everyone can live on $1000 a month.
Many don't seem to live on any amount that they can earn.

You are so right! I had an employee a while back, that no matter how much I gave him on Friday. He had to borrow gas money on monday. I am not talking minimum wage, he had some weekly checks over $3000. His utiities were constantly getting shut off, and he never had anything. I guess he had a "good time" though?

Ususally the citiodts trying to keep up with the Jones who they do not like anyway.

LOL I have said before the rich can live cheaper, simpler than the poor.
A man with a good credit card and a cell phone could easily cross the country as a hobo. If he hit a tough spot or bad weather he could call a cab and spend a night in the hilton.
A guy with a little less would cross the country in a nice car and just buy gas but a guy with very little money will want to take a car with lots of camping equipment and tools...just in case.
Like you I have found with a few thousand in the bank its easy to live cheep and well but when that bank account is low its much harder.
If I spend $2000 buy a nice truck worth a lot more and it runs well for 5 years I have only spent $33.33 a month on my truck, cheaper than buying a $500 truck every few months and putting $100 in parts in it every month cause thats all I can get together at the same time.

What about house insurance and repairs to the house/farm/barn? Does that come out of savings? What about if the vet is needed for the goats?

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Be yourself - no one can tell you that you're doing it wrong!

Or what about property taxes? That is one thing you don't ever get out of paying at least not where I live...lol

I dont have debt.
I do have property tax.
I do have car insurance.
I do have home insurance.
I do have to pay double the electric in winter (not as bad as when we relied on furnace in winter, now we have pellet stove, but it still runs on electric)
Pay a few bucks for computer.
Each year my 2005 gmc truck needs some kind of repair, big or small (guess that's called 'maintenance'.....)
Even though I buy half pig & beef from my neighbor, could probably buy cheaper stuff on sale....but, would have to spend gas to get where the cheap stuff is...
I garden, so some stuff is home grown.
If I wanted, I could spend much less than $100 per week, but I haven't factored in the price of the meat I'm having delivered this week....
Milk is very expensive.
I buy stuff on sale when I can.
Yes, I can do it on less, but some months there are 'other stuff' that pop up, which make it a squeeze.
I try not to use my truck alot, because to 'do' or 'go' anywhere is generally a 45 minute ride one way. Gas pretty expensive.
Yes, kids can cause you to part with money; they cant be expected to be happy with peace and quiet and simplicity all of the time.

Well house insurance is an issue if you choose to carry it. If you don't mind fixing things yourself sometimes you can get a really reasonable home owners insurance excluding the roof. Sounds crazy but for some of us we built it we will fix it again if need be. We keep several medications, Vit. B complex among other things stocked up and I guess that is how you would do it. Learn how to care for your animals yourself if money is extremely tight. JMO

As others have pointed out you are missing out a few important items such as property tax and you do not mention co-pays for your medical or prescriptions or repair, maintenance and replacement costs and nothing about retirement savings. But my comment is about the 5% for emergency. On a $1000 income that is $50 a month which is inadequate to meet any real emergency particularly one that is long term.

We have no debt and are very frugal in our lifestyle. We are as self sufficient as we are able to be and our goal is independence. Independent means the ability to fund yourself if/when faced with unemployment, disability, medical and retirement. $1000 a month keeps you afloat for today but not for the future.

I also have a real issue with those who earn so little that they pay no income tax. I believe in a flat tax for everyone no matter how little or how much you earn. The tax laws as they exist now allow those who pay no tax to benefit off the work of others. Even if you do not legally have to pay tax you should be contributing voluntarily to the running and protection of your country. Five or ten percent on $1000 would be $50 or $100 a month.

Once again, living on a thousand dollars a month is not the same as making a thousand dollars a month.
Any issues you have with the income tax laws are wasted in an internet forum. Nobody here wrote those laws.
Nobody seemed to have any issues when I paid in a million dollars over the last 46 years. Except me.

Double post.

Let' see, health insurance for our family of two adults and one toddler runs $733 per month, and we have a $5000 deductible, plus we pay out of pocket for my two prescriptions. Dental we pay out of pocket.

So, nope, looks like we can barely pay our health and dental expenses on $1000 month!

Don't think so, but we are at about $2500 a month now. IF we were totally out of debt and did not go anywhere maybe we could make it. Taxes would also get us as I think they would continue to rise. Our utilities are rather high, I think due to location.

We are working on Debt Proof Living so we will be out of debt sooner rather than later.

Yes, that is the dichotomy between the doing well and the barely scraping by I was referring to. The way things are set up with our economy those who are living marginally will have a very tough time pulling themselves up and often tend to slip further down the economic security scale while those with even just a little more cushion have a much better chance to improve their standard of living and security.

Zong has a good point too though, if the question was could you live on just 1K per month of your current income and bank the rest the answer would be a lot easier to say yes for some of us that dont have debt. I just think most of us took the question to be if you only had 1K per month could you live on that.

For me, I could live on 1K per month if we lived in an urban area, rented a small place, and had access to public transportation or could walk or something but living 24 miles from the nearest grocery and having a farm to maintain pretty much puts that out of reach. I also admit to not wanting to live the life of a hermit or feel trapped by my life style, we like to travel, take vacations, we have numerous hobbies that arent cheap, and frankly after working our entire adult lives we dont want to do without in our retirement. Thats just our personal situation and not a dig at others who live differently but for me, if I only had $35 to blow a month or could only put $50 in savings I would be very uncomfortable and very unhappy.

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www.salmonslayer-simplelife.blogspot.com

My kids are grown and gone but I have to say this. We had three of our own and 21 foreign exchange kids over the years. We still ate on not much more than mentioned. I always cooked from scratch and kept the meals reasonable...goulash, spaghetti, chicken and noodles, chicken and dumplings, stew, pigs in a blanket, homeade corndogs...that type of stuff. Filling but cheap to make. Eggs in the morning and cookies for a snack. Tea and water to drink and no bought soft drinks. For entertainment we played board games, rode horses, hunted, fished, worked in the garden and played basketball on a dirt outside goal (those were sometimes intense).

Our three went to college on athletic and academic scholarships in basketball and football and all of the exchange kids have also been successful and are in contact and visit as much as they can so that tells you they were very active in extra curricular in school. However, unlike most folks we bought their shoes, etc off of clearance athletic sites online (no team shoes at $150.00 a pair) I think the most I ever paid was $15.00 for a pair of last year or the year before models which were almost exactly like the ones everyone else had. Eastbay always had underarmor for football cheap on clearance and more. I didn't buy second hand because I knew they would wear a new pair out each year and so I never thought used would make it through a season. My kids all had part time jobs on the weekends when they turned 14. Made their money for their extra's. They all showed livestock which we paid for their first year and then they used their winnings from then on. They even put their money together and bought an old pick up truck which they all loved and the kids in town even gave the name "the turd".. It was famous and you guessed it, brown. They were always told academics were how they would pay for college so they worked hard for great grades. 2 valedictorians and 1 salutatorian. The sports scholarships were just extra for their hard work. Now we have a teacher, a mental health counselor, and a construction worker.

Who knows? Maybe having to live in poverty (according to some people's ideas) with parents who would not ask for any handouts, do chores, have a job, keep their grades up, pay for their own junk food, among other horrible things made them turn out this way.. HMMMMMMM....think I would do it again.

BTW we were not responsible for the exchange students spending money. We only fed and housed them and had a lot of fun with them a part of our family.

I know it's not possible for us with our current lifestyle. Our mortgage payment is almost $1,300/month, homeowner's insurance is about $1,000/year...our vehicles are both paid for but our insurance and registration for both comes out to about $2,500/year. Our share of employer-sponsered health/dental/vision insurance is $340/month. Property taxes are around $1,500/year. I don't know the exact amount we spend on food...not much because there's only 2 of us for the most part. Then there's gas, propane for hot water heating (we heat mainly with wood we cut ourselves), electric bills, pet/livestock feed and vetting costs, household needs, maintenance and repairs, etc.

Sure, we have in the past. We're debt free.

As far as what happens when needing to replace roofs, etc., that's easy, just go work somewhere temporarily to get the money needed.

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