Where can you rent on ~$50 a day, and still have money left over for food and car payments (necessary for that job), let alone things that a regular worker could afford in 1900?
Here's a very interesting book written in the early 1900s looking at families with a father in solid employment, ~~renting for~~ (edit - living on) about 1 pound a week in London. They're poor, but not the poorest - not in the workhouses.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58691/pg58691-images.ht...
Regardless of precise lines, I recommend reading this as an actual look (mixture of descriptive prose and figures & stats) at life for people of the time.
If you want to keep it in 1900's-speak, I could say "afford the payments on the overalls you need at the factory," but the idea would be ridiculous because the factory would provide the overalls.