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It ain’t pretty, but here’s how I got through it until I started bringing in good money:

1. No takeout or eating out ever
2. Get a water filter pitcher and a nice water bottle. Drink only water.
3. Every paycheck, take out $200 or whatever you can afford. This is your “fun and gas” money. Your gas, hobbies, social life, and dating comes out of this fund. Whatever is leftover when your next paycheck hits goes into savings.
4. If you can rent a physically smaller place, do so. It will save on utilities.
5. Don’t buy a car unless public transportation or biking is not viable in your area.
6. Meal plan with the goal of zero food waste. So if you plan to buy an onion and will use half of it in one meal, make sure you have another meal planned that week that uses the other half. Do this with every ingredient. If you’re careful and creative you should never have to throw away food. - On this note, get good at cooking. It’s much cheaper to cook from scratch.
7. Cancel your streaming services and learn to pirate safely.

This works but isn’t a great way to live. You need to combine it with a plan to either make more money or relocate to a cheaper area while maintaining your current income.

A lot of the good answers are already posted. I’ll share my experience.

A bunch of people I know, including myself, rose out of retail hell through customer service jobs. My first one was making $55k/year (in 2023 dollars. This was a while ago because I’m old) and jumped decently after a year. Plus it was steady work at a desk with insurance. I switched to another company doing the same kind of thing after a year or two, and was able to transfer internally to IT. A couple years later I made the leap to engineering. I don’t have a computer science degree. It was all experience and teaching myself.

A bunch of other friends took similar paths, and now have higher paying jobs.

But this was in new york city, where there are a lot of startups looking to hire people. And because the companies were small, the jobs weren’t a cubicle hell where you read from a script. I got to actually help people troubleshoot when I was doing IT. That first job I could just talk to people like people.

I don’t know how different it is now or in other parts of the country. I’m not sure how much the pandemic and AI hype has changed the market. But getting a first foot in the door is really helpful. You can meet people and get on the job experience.

A lot of job listings might require a college degree, but enough experience can be a substitute. Also knowing people helps a stupid, unfair, amount.

Going to be USA centric because I don’t need you doxxing yourself, just giving you ideas of what to look for where ever you happen to be.

If you’ve got solid internet access and enough work/life stability that you can start doing research into any government assistance programs and community groups that help navigate the processes that are in the area.

I live in the USA, and my partner and I finally got poor enough that we could get enrolled in Medicaid (Medicare is for the old folks). Partner found that the Medicaid would pay for a pretty serious surgery they’d kinda been needing for years (the final price that the government paid was a bit more than $30,000).

Back when I spent more time in Reddit, there was a post on in r/AntiWork about some USA government assistance in paying for internet (and possibly a cheap smart phone). I looked into it, found we qualified, and the process wasn’t too hard to navigate on my own.

There is a program called LIHEAP (i think that’s the name) that is assistance in paying for energy bills. We didn’t qualify for it last year when I looked into it but my good paying job last year was temporary and now I’m in a job making about 600~800 less as a part-time but permanent employee. I should probably find the website and see if we’re poor(er) enough to qualify for some help paying for electric bills.

Food stamps (WIC, SNAP) for assistance buying groceries. This one can get weird as they tend to be run state by state in the USA and the requirements can often times be super shitty. If you’ve got a stable job, even if its shitty, that might make things easier.

Look around for local food pantries and see how they work. Don’t be surprised if they’re run by churches and you’ve got to sit through a sermon before you get a bag of groceries. You might get lucky and the pantry is funded by a grant and needs part time workers they will be willing to kick a bit of paid work you’re way (assuming you have the time).

Its desperation money, but there is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program. Piecemeal work online or doing survey’s for a few cents a pop. It can help buy a tank of gas or replace a cheap busted cell phone but I’ve never made much more than that when I spent a whole lot of time on it. When my anxiety about money gets really bad and I need to put the energy somewhere I’ll fire up my account. I’m pretty sure this has an international reach so it won’t be geo blocked. FYI, it doesn’t play will with VPN’s.

I’ve tried a few “do consumer survey’s online for money” websites and the only one that I ever had any “success” with was called InboxDollars. And by success, I mean that a few times over the years, I could spend many hours during a month and scrape together about 30$. Though I think its a USA based company and its geo locked. FYI, it doesn’t play well with VPN’s.

During the pandemic in the USA, i spent most of the time without work of my own (I live on a working farm with my spouse so one of us had an income) and spent about 18 months out the first three years of the COVID pandemic selling blood plasma. If you’ve got two days a week that you can spend hooked up to a machine that drains your blood, separates it, and pumps in back into you (and leaves you feeling pretty crappy for the rest of the day) and can handle lying pretty still with a huge needle in your arm, the pay was kinda okay. I’d get kicked in the summer months when it got too hot for my body to recover well enough between visits but I also have to do outside farm work that you might not need to do. If you do this regularly, it does leave some pretty gnarly scars in your elbow pits, which can lead to some amusingly random conversations with strangers in public.

In the USA, its seems like the US Post Office doesn’t like to post their open jobs outside of their internal job posting database. Though it seems like USPS jobs are either “work crazy hours, where ever we tell you” or “barely work any hours”.

I spent about a year and a half working at a University museum as a museum curation lab technician, no experience needed, didn’t have to be a student or plan on going into the field. Which, maybe it was just me being lucky, but it was a pretty sweet job. Flexible hours, chill work environment, chill coworkers, surprisingly decent pay, got to play with old arrow heads and spear points and pottery sherds and sort through boxes and do paperwork about what was in them… the two negatives were that in my case what I found was a temp job and I spent an whole lot of time alone without human interaction (which I’m super cool with, but not everybody else is). This is another one of those things that probably won’t be posted on public job search websites so you’re going to have to dig around local university/colleges with museum collections and find their internal job posting site.

So yeah, I know in my mind taking advantage of assistance programs feels “wrong” but I’ve had to start getting over it and the things that I’ve managed to figure out how to apply to and qualify for have definitely been worth it.

Back in my twenties we never went out, no cellphones, set goals, and did things cheaply.

You get some space by taking a better job and/or better budgeting

OR

You become numb to the grinding system

If you don’t mind sharing, what education do you have, and what are you currently doing for work?

Organize with socialists, make use of mutual aid. Provides an IRL version of what you’re seeking here- uou are in no way alone. This is how most people live and it is by systemic design.

There’s a lot of power, and value, in making local irl connections so that when you need help or just to talk to people, you’ll know that you have options. Also, some options take time, so getting on top of them now will pay dividends. Examples include food stamps and subsidized housing. Finally, lefties sometimes like to help each other get better jobs.

Of course I can also suggest ways to live cheaply, but there is a hard limit under this economic system and you might already be there.

Also please feel free to DM if you want to talk about anything.