In SunDog, you'd start out without much cash, but you also started with a spaceship. Now, in order to keep the spaceship you had to fulfill a contract. To fulfill that contract, you had to make money to keep the ship going, and you had to explore a bunch of planets. The spaceship was reasonably roomy, could land on planets, and had a large all-terrain vehicle for exploring the surface and bringing back cargo.

I could see not needing an apartment, if I had an FTL spaceship like that.