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Comment by ToFundorNot | Hacker News Reader

$11 per day for meals is low, most people who live alone will spend roughly $15 a day (a single meal from McDonald's for instance is $10.95). The cheapest 'eat out' option is roughly $6 for a single meal at Costco/Ikea. Even peanut butter + jelly for every meal, and water for a drink is over $3 a day. Also, for rent, it's more like $800 for a single room in a shared unit, a bachelor is closer to $1500.

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In Walmart for $11 you can buy 1 pound of chicken breast ($2/lb), 1 pound of rice ($.50/lb), 1 pound of tomato sauce ($.50), 1 pound of carrots ($1/lb), 1 pound of bread ($.88/20 oz), half pound of butter ($3/lb), half pound of cheese ($2/8 oz), and still have $4 left after tax. You can literally feed a family of four with this. Of course, most nominally poor people will spend much more, because they're not actually all that short on money.

If you take 1860s unskilled worker wage and spend it all on food, you'll get about as much as you could with SNAP benefits (~$130/month) today. The UBI is already here, it's just our standards have rose significantly.

I concur with your experience. Spouse is a great shopper. We probably spend a little more than this daily, but we frequently get 2-3 meals each out of it. Dinner for 2, 2 days lunches. We eat out 2 nights per week, one being take-out pizza and a salad. The salad always gives us enough for part of a 2nd meal. We shop carefully, cook at home. Buy soft drinks, bottled water in bulk, make iced tea, buy big bags of ground coffee, etc. We do this by choice and eat better foods than most people we know. We can afford to spend quite a bit more, but this suits our lifestyle.

This has been my experience when I was growing up, and when I was a student. Food these days is insanely cheap if you aren't going for specific tastes, or if you're good at cooking.

I'm much wealthier now, so I spend much more on food because I can, but if you're really frugal, you can keep your expenses extremely low by simply avoiding expensive ingredients. For example, a single red bell pepper costs $1.50, which is insanely expensive compared to chicken, beans, rice, or carrots, based on the nutritional value. Of course, fresh vegetables are nice, but fresh vegetables any time of the year are very modern invention, thus expensive, and you can easily do without them.

Maybe where you're from but: [1] chicken breast 5.86/lb [2] rice $.94/lb [3] tomato sauce $.63/lb [4] carrots $.99/lb [5] bread $1.38/20oz [6] butter $2.95/lb [7] cheese $3.05/8oz

Which shows that it's multiples more expensive in Canada.

[1]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/boneless-skinless-fillet-remove... [2]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/rose-jasmine-white-scented-rice... [3]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/great-value-tomato-sauce/600015... [4]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/carrots/6000191271746 [5]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/great-value-100-whole-wheat-bre... [6]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/natrel-salted-butter/6000199418... [7]https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/great-value-cheddar-cheese-marb...

Maybe Toronto is way more expensive than Houston, but a cheese burger from McDonalds is $1 and 300 calories.

Pre-made Tasty Bites are like 2.40 and you can throwthem on a bed of rice and eat 3 meals for $10 a day.

And if you cook yourself and eat mostly vegetarian or cheap meats you can easily get your per meal costs into the $2 range.

https://www.budgetbytes.com/

I know the rent is more expensive, in Houston you can easily get a ~800 sq ft 1 br 8 minutes from downtown in a nice neighborhood for $850. If you live in a 2 br with roommates or an efficiency you can get that down to $400-$500.

>Maybe Toronto is way more expensive than Houston

It is.

>~800 sq ft 1 br 8 minutes from downtown in a nice neighborhood for $850

Lol.

> I know the rent is more expensive

Yes, the roughly equivalent 1br in Toronto is going to be about $2500 these days.

Also keep in mind Texas has no sales tax, Ontario does. And we are talking CDN not USD (hard to directly compare some things). It's in general a bit more expensive in Toronto, across the board (except health care, obviously).

Houston is one of the cheapest "proper" metros in USA and Canada.

I like the quotes around proper .

Yeah we're proper in the sense we have a good food/cocktail/bar scene, and a great classical music/art scene.

But we have no public transportation and the density doesn't even get close to other metros.

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