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Comment by pestaa | Hacker News Reader

What a sad way to waste your life. I'm sure he had other options considering he worked in an office at a "large aerospace firm," right?

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I really don't get this attitude. It's not for everyone, but it's a great way to save money. Do this for awhile and you can save up to purchase a home outright or at least have a sizable down payment.

I interviewed for a job in Chicago with a company where one of the employees lived in the office. Unlike the Salon article, this employee openly asked if he could live in the office to save himself the cost of rent. The employer had no issue with it. In his office there was a small basic cot that he slept on.

I think it boils down to "work now, play later" vs. "work now, play now" philosophies.

On the one hand you have the people who give 100% of their day to work, with the goal of building up F-U money and never working again.

On the other hand you have the people who make less & save less and plan on working longer, but take more of their day for themselves.

I don't think I can say either philosophy is wrong, but they definitely don't see eye-to-eye. They have different value systems.

If cumulative happiness over your life is the goal then the first one is clearly the wrong approach. The probability that you will die/become incapacitated/have health issues before you can either build up or enjoy for a long period of time that F-U money puts a discount on the entire end state.

Why would cumulative happiness be a goal? Happiness is not a things that accumulates.

Looking forward to the next 100 days, which is your preference?

- That you be really happy 2 days

- That you be fairly happy 90 days

... Time spent happy does accumulate.

That means he wants to have spent a life being happy as much as possible.

No, memories accumulate. And in my very normal and apparently common experience, rose colored glasses and "I earned my success by struggling" make up for any past lack of happiness I've experienced. Those memories are white-washed unless you've had some severe trauma.

So the only thing that really matters is if you currently happy, or if you are about to become happy. Nothing accumulates.

if memories accumulate, something accumulates.

If you're the kind of person that likes to go up the ladder, every step up provides you with happiness so I don't think your story is a counter example.

I guess it is an variant of the age old "live to work vs work to live".

> this employee openly asked if he could live in the office to save himself the cost of rent. The employer had no issue with.

I'd be interested how it affects insurance.

That's a good question, but I wasn't privy to that level of detail. In that instance though it was good for the employee and he didn't have to worry about hiding anything.

If the building is commercially zoned, doing this would technically be illegal.

So if they found out this was a factor in something they would normally pay out for, you can be sure they wouldn't.

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't pay out even if he wasn't a factor. I think they'd try to claim that him being there makes the insurance invalid.

I didn't know the guy but I heard he was an engineer and engineers were paid fairly well at that company so he should have had other options. Maybe he got taken to the cleaners in a divorce and was unable to afford a place to live. That was the issue with one of the guys who was living in his car in the parking lot.

Glad we don't have Alimony here,not that I plan on getting married anyway.

It may seem like a waste of life to you. To me, it sounds like an adventure. Potato, Potatto, hakuna matata.

Agree. I slept in the ceiling (rafters) of my ex-girlfriends house. She lived with her mom, her mom hated me, this was 10+ years ago. I had to be at her house every day no later than 6pm to get up there, once I was up, I was up. I had to stay extremely quiet. I got a lot done and the WiFi signal worked. I couldn't talk on the phone, only text.

In the end I ended up saving for an apartment and got my own place, and broke up with my girlfriend it just wasn't working out. It was a story and an adventure I'll never forget :)

Wasting money on rent is the bigger tragedy.

Yep, every time I sign a check for Bay Area rent, I consider how I'm in the wrong industry, since the land owners have to do very little to continue to extract rent from their one-time-purchase of land (I know, tax is a thing too, but pales in comparison to the returns they must be getting on the land).

I'm not super interested in buying a house here, since >half a million for a tiny spot of land in the suburbs with a tiny 2-bedroom house that needs major repairs is absurd to me. I'd much rather live in an office while paying off a house in Fiji, then move into that in 20 years and work a lot less.

Another alternative is living in an RV. I've considered this, and since Bay Area rent can pay off a really really really nice RV in ~5 years, it's s viable option. The biggest hiccup is where to park it; national parks would be awesome, but they're not free, Internet access is spotty, and it'd be a long commute every day. Even working remotely, month-to-month RV park communities can be over $500 a month, so that doesn't quite feel like you're beating the game of rent-seeking by property owners as much as I'd like. RVs also require maintenance and probably won't last as long as a house, but even if you get 20 years out of it, or buy it used and sell it where the depreciation is much less per month than rent would have been, you can come out ahead.

There are people who stealth camp on the city streets in conversion vans or smaller Class C RVs. They never park in the same place twice, and once it gets dark, have to be careful to not give themselves away (interior lights, movement, etc).

http://www.donniemyer.com/were-doing-this/1096

Here's a plan I often thought about for living in the big city while skipping out on paying rent for an apartment:

Spend about 10k for a used casita travel trailer. The trailer fits in an area the size of a compact car. Rent/buy a parking spot and setup the trailer. In the big city you can get gym membership to cover sewage and showers. For internet you can easily purchase some sort of cellular or wifi service. Almost everything I need would be covered.

It's not for everyone but for myself, I have no qualms about small spaces, so I'd totally execute this plan if it wasn't for the complication of accessing the power grid. There's really no easy way to get a power line up into the trailer if it's in some parking garage. Perhaps solar? but that leads to other complications.

The Victorian era had the concept of "retire with competence". basically means building up a portfolio that one could live of the interest/rent/dividends from.

Problem is that it could barely work as long as the nation was a globe spanning empire.

Mini van, parking garage :) I knew a guy on college who had mini van xe ked for camping, could easily do as a min rv.

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