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I pay between $75 - $150 a week for groceries as a single dude that only shops for himself. On a monthly basis that's my highest expense besides rent at about $300 - $400. That's how much my parents used to spend to shop for a family of 7 back in like 2010. The federal minimum wage back then was $7.25 an hour and even then it was still a struggle. And here we are 15 years later and the federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour.
I am in roughly the same boat.
$600 for rent + utils, cheapest, roach tier studio I could find, but I somehow lucked out and got a management team that, though they're not exactly flush with cash, they do genuinely give a damn about the stuff they can actually afford to handle, throw out the dipshit trouble maker types pretty quick.
So, slightly higher rent, but I manage to get my food costs down to roughly $250 a month, so its about the same total monthly spend.
But, yeah, holy fuck, if the min wage had kept up with housing costs, so an FT min wagie could afford a studio, 1/3 rent to income rule?
It'd be between $30 and $35 an hour.
That's how fucked this all is, the US median wage is roughly what the minimum wage should be, if you want a ... basically functioning society where 2/3rds (thats about the paycheck to paycheck % now) of people are not one disaster away from becoming homeless.
So, of course, instead, its now literally illegal to be homeless, and Trump wants to build concentration camps.
People are either gonna let this happen, or they're gonna ... perform an executive override on the situation.
If I may ask, where are you that rent is 600? Or is this a roomate situation?
Hahaha...ha.
Hah.
...
Short answer: South Dakota.
Long answer:
Following a uh, calvacade of compounding catastrophes, several years ago now, I ended up homeless, roughed it for a good long while, got the shit kicked out of me in one way or another on roughly a biweekly basis, got held hostage by a fentanyl addict for a week once, barely escaped that alive, almost froze to death, almost died of heat stroke...
... eventually got SSDI to kick in, after continuously struggling to stop having all my ids and paperwork stolen from me...
...and I correctly deduced that Trump would win, and the big west coast city I used to live in would soon be cracking down hard on the homeless, as well as Oops! no more funding for homeless shelters that are already at max capacity...
So, when the SSDI kicked in, I got on a bus and headed as far as my those bus wheels and my broken body could carry me, which ended up being South Dakota.
Pretty fucking low CoL, and I am still just full time doing PT to recover from all my injuries, so... not like I'm missing much by not living somewhere else.
Immensely ironically, this shit ass roach motel, that was literally a roach motel and now just... does 6 month, year, month to month leases?
Only place I have ever lived in my entire life that just came with an AC unit.
My 'long term' plan is somewhere in Minnesota... by every study and composite map I can see, its basically the best combo of a decently blue state, with decent CoL, and lots of fresh water, and a pretty low expected increase in climate disasters.
In summary: God Bless America.