Home is where the heart is.
So we had a budget of $260 bucks set aside for our abode unfortunately that isn't going to cut it around where I currently live. Thankfully we have $160 bucks of wiggle room and we will be digging into that for our housing.
A typical housing allowance is 30% of the budget, in our case 240 bucks. Now while you could stick strictly to 240 this limited the options in my area a little to much we needed to move up to $350 to provide enough options to ensure a very short commute to work.
The big thing about picking a spot is making sure you can get a solid 8 hours of sleep each and every night. So this means location, location, location. A lot of the cheap options are going to be near things like airports and railroad tracks or along busy highways. While the price point might be right unless you are a particularly heavy sleeper your going to need to invest in some noise canceling head phones. Personally as a light sleeper the recommendation would be to just avoiding those areas completely.
The other thing that will stop you from sleeping is concerns over security. The goal is to make sure that stuff is safe while away at work. Also you want to be safe while your sleeping. While it is possible to buy a very small starter home it would take a 10-20% down payment. Starting out - that just isn't an option. Until we get our bearings for the city we are in. The one that jumped out at me was for 400 all utils included fully furnished. A little bit higher then 350 but for month one this seems like it will work. This leaves me with 0$ bucks wiggle room - OUCH!
Note that I'm looking for things with roommates. This introduces some risk - because well crazy roommates. It also brings in additional security and splitting of costs for some of the essentials. If the roommates are stopping a solid 8 hours of sleep happening or are security concerns themselves than it's time to leave.
If you think about it if a human gives off as much heat as a light bulb than adding a room mate ups the cost of cooling by how ever much it takes to cool off a light bulb and they get to pay for a cut of cooling the rest of the joint. This cost sharing applies to refrigerators, stoves, TV's.
The other reason for room mates is we just got stranded in modern society, we've got 0$. We need to get that job going to get our first paycheck, for now we are living off of - gulp - credit. Housing is getting paid off a cash advance on a credit card or some other terribly expensive interest payment. I need people that will work with my circumstances, not a place that needs a down payment plus a months rent up front. Until that first paycheck comes in i'm living on credit. (Now if your credit situation is such that you maxed out the credit cards you should have something to show for it IE Stuff so you'll have to figure out how to turn stuff into food and shelter long enough to get the first paycheck)
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