The Soul of Man Under Socialism

[KGZotU]

Let me break it down to the best of my memory. (; I don't take it as a challenge to my integrity, and I certainly wasn't proposing that it would be normal to live comfortably on $15,000, we were fairly frugal. We also lived in a...well you'd probably consider it a small town.

Rent: $6,600. $550/month, 1 bedroom apartment.
Car: I'll be liberal here. The car was long since paid off, but I'll figure average cost per year at ($5,500(buying price)-$2,800(selling price) + $1,000(parts and paid service))/4(years of ownership) + $500(insurance per year) so: $1425. I took care of most problems myself.
Gas: Maybe $480. I lived right next to my college and we frequently biked during the summer.
Retirement: $1,200. Meager Roth IRA savings.
Electricity: $360
Internet: $480
Phone: $960. We were still tied to our damn Cingular contract. Now we just have Skype, no cells for the time being but the situation has changed besides that.
All other utilities were taken care of with the apartment.

That leaves about $3500 for other things. We were vegetarian--were as in the wife is now vegan--and made almost all of our own food. I'll guess $1,200 a year, we were pretty frugal. We each had $480 per year personal spending money, and $480 per year mutual spending money. Most of the time though the majority went unspent and back into the pool.

As for the circumstances, that was money from the Montgomery GI Bill. I lived next to a community college and wasn't really "pursuing a degree", except in the mind of the VA office of course. (; I was dinking around with restoring cars...but that's another story.

This was in Oregon too, so no sales tax. $550 a month got us the nicest 1 bedroom in town. (;

We were happy. I had picked up a nice projector on the cheap a few years earlier and we downloaded documentaries from UK Nova. Lots of vegetable lasagna, pasta, grilled cheese sandwiches, fried zucchini, yummy.

Undertoad: Maybe electricity is just cheaper in Oregon, but we had a well insulated apartment with compact flourescent bulbs at got away with less than $30 per month.

The one thing we were lacking in was health insurance. I was notionally insured by the VA. Supposing that we didn't intend to live forever on $15k, we were looking at a policy for about $100 a month that at least would have gotten us treatment for any problem, if a bit of debt for down the road as well. Medical debt, at least in the US, is fairly innocuous as far as debts go.

Thanks for giving me a chance to elaborate. (;

--Joe