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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad I don't have to fit my expenses into a minimum wage budget, but some of your numbers are pretty high.

I buy gas once every 2 or 3 weeks and spend $45 on a phone plan with 4 GB of LTE (US; I guess that can fit the definition of basically no internet). My car insurance (with collision and unlimited medical) is less than $500 for 6 months.

I would probably balk at paying much more than $800 in rent. The rental market here is pretty thin (I think part of it is I don't know where to look), but I see a listing for $1100 for a 4 bedroom house. Electricity+water+gas would be in the range of $250 for 1 person (and less for several as heating is a major utility cost here).

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> but some of your numbers are pretty high.

Cost of living across the US varies wildly. The numbers are pulled from my most recent billing cycle for Houston and partly extrapolated to minimum wage (which I am most definitely not, but have friends who are).

My rent is $1500/mo for 920sqft inside the 610 loop. The leasing office wanted $2000/mo for new contracts in October last year.

It's really hard to find places for $800 within a 30 minute drive of any office in Houston. All of my friends have the same problem. I'm looking to buy a home for a similar reason.

Living far enough out to have rent reduced to $800 is offset by increased amount of time driving and therefore increased costs in fuel. So I bought gas twice a month before the pandemic with a 5 minute drive to the office. When I lived 30 minutes out, I bought gas twice a week.

Car insurance depends a lot on vehicle, driver age, etc. $300/mo was quoted to some younger family last summer -- they were outraged because it was half-again their car payment. I pay $600/6-mo.

Are people doing office work for $7.25 in Houston?

I agree that prices vary widely, I'm not sure it makes sense to take expensive places as typical.

Those office workers rely on a huge infrastructure of other services -- food preparation, cleaning, maintenance workers, parking lot attendants, etc. etc.

The people who work those jobs should have the same access to their worksites as anyone else. Our willingness to tell people who make less money they should just "live farther away" and have longer commutes is awful. No, we should fix our cities so that we support a range of incomes and workers in one place.

> Are people doing office work for $7.25 in Houston?

In that it's in an office building, yes. But it's not office work like sitting at a desk.

It may not be office work, but I bet it's location dependent (restaurant, janitor, grocery store).

Office jobs are less interchangeable than service jobs though. I'd expect someone with a job in a grocery store or restaurant to always be looking for a position closer to where they wanted to live compared to an office worker looking for suitable, better positions in locations that that would have a shorter commute.

(the service workers would be looking for better positions too, but the pay differences between similar positions are smaller there)

Does that matter when there are plenty of other businesses and services doing not office work to support the office workers?

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