How We Live In The Bay Area For Less Than $1,000 Per Month

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Living for less than $1,000 per month didn’t sound like too incredible of a feat to us until we moved to the Bay Area for work and were shocked to discover that average rent was around $3,000 a month for a basic apartment. Having moved from Washington where we were paying $1,000 a month to rent a lovely house, there was no way we were going to pay that kind of price. Since we were already living in our van before we moved to the Bay Area, we initially thought we’d just continue living in the van to beat the crazy cost of living. After doing some research though that uncovered ordinances for numerous Bay Area cities stating it’s illegal to sleep in vehicles, we got discouraged and decided to a rent a room in someone’s house. After a year of living in that room sharing the house with our landlord and another renter, we realized the ordinances weren’t really enforced and decided to move back into our van to save even more money. So far, we’ve been parking exclusively at the hospital I work at with no problems yet, but if you want to live in a van in the Bay Area and aren’t able to park at your place of work (it’s worth asking), we see vans parked in industrial areas and local parks on the daily so it’s definitely doable. And because of the crazy prices in the Bay Area, we’re definitely not the only working professionals in alternative living situations. Just in my ER alone there are five other nurses living in vehicles at the hospital!

So, how do we keep our expenses to less than $1,000 a month in a notoriously expensive area? The following is a breakdown of our average monthly expenses in our van rounded to the nearest dollar.

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• Health Insurance - $134

  We are both contract employees so don’t get health insurance through our work. As such, we choose to just live a healthy lifestyle and only pay for catastrophic insurance to cut costs at this point in our lives. That means always keeping the large deductible available in our savings, but we prefer to always have savings anyways, so keeping that money set aside isn’t a problem.

• Cell Phones - $80

  Cricket with unlimited data for both of us.

• Internet - $65

  Justin does telemedicine so we need high speed unlimited data and opted for a hot spot type device/plan from AT&T .

• Gym - $69

  Membership cost for both of us at our local 24 Hour Fitness so we have 24/7 access to showers.

• Groceries - $277

  This is an area of spending where we could obviously save a fair bit more, but I choose to splurge a bit when it comes to food and we buy a lot of fresh produce.

• Eating Out - $127

  Eating out is a purely luxury expense for us, so as you can see, we’re not suffering on our budget!

• Fuel - $50

  Self explanatory

• Entertainment - $13

  Cost of our Netflix subscription. Another purely luxury expense. Our other main form of entertainment, reading, is free thanks to our local library.

• Miscellaneous Shopping - $77

  Some necessary purchases, some luxury purchases.

• Storage Unit - $87

  Yes, we have a storage unit. Since we don’t own a home anywhere aside from the van, we’ve kept a storage unit over the years for outdoor gear to keep the van from getting too crowded and for items we’re sentimental about.

• Laundry - $15

  Approximately how much I spend each month doing laundry at a laundromat.

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The grand total for all of that is $994 a month. Now obviously there are months where we spend more, like when our car insurance bill comes due or we have to renew our medical licenses, but on average, this is about what we spend.

Some of you may ask why we’re continuing to live in this area if it’s so expensive. Why not just hop in the van and head somewhere else since we don’t have roots anywhere? Well, because of the incredibly inflated cost of living in this area, jobs pay equally inflated salaries so that people can semi afford to buy their very average $900,000+ family home. So, if you can come in and hack the system (i.e. don’t buy a home or pay rent in the Bay Area) you’re rewarded handsomely with a much higher than average salary. And why do we need extra money since we were already living a budget lifestyle in our van before moving to the Bay Area? Because we’re working super hard to pay off Justin’s medical school loans and working in this area has definitely made a difference. In fact, we should be done paying them off in the next three months and after that, we won’t be sticking around much longer. So why are we sharing all of this? Because we want other people in the Bay Area who may be struggling with finances to know that there’s another way to live in this area!

If you live in the Bay Area and are already hacking the system, we’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment or send us a message! If you’re not in the Bay Area but are hacking the system somewhere else, we’d love to know where you’re at and how you’re doing it. Last but not least, if you have any good money saving suggestions for us, we’d love to hear them and so would our readers, so leave your ideas in the comment section!