If you say hypothetical guy doesn't want to take any gubmint money, he's getting $4800-ish a month after taxes.

I kind of ran this in the Houston area. Not super expensive, but not backwoods cheap. Somewhere you could actually get to 3 part-time jobs.

I think mobile home/tiny house would be the only way. Probably in a trailer park, because a land payment is out of budget. Assuming no helping hands here with spare land, etc.

Figure $750 for a car/cars, insurance, maintenance, gas. Can't be a crap car, because it needs to run 3x a day 7 days a week.

Groceries, trying to live a healthy life, feeding a family and a working man 7 days a week, I figure $1500 a month.

Phone, electric, gas, water, trash, probably $350 a month.

That's $2600. So $2200 left to cover that mobile home in a trailer park and clothes, medical, savings, vacation, etc. That's a rough life unless you get a lucky break in there somewhere.

And you have to work 90 hours a week. And inflation steals it away faster than you can get a raise.

I paid for most of that stuff with extra money falling out of my ears on $14/hr at 40 hrs/week a mere 20-ish years ago. Pretty crazy. I guess that was the point. I just caught myself thinking about how it would shake out today. I could basically do it, but at double the hours with nothing extra and no life to live. Bitcoin fixes this, if you have anything left to buy it with, or time to earn it.

I also considered that the dude could be making $30/hr on 40s as a degreed higher-skill worker and still have most of the same problems. At that pay, he'd have no extra at all because he'd have student loan debt and probably bought a suburban house with that leftover $2200/month. Yuck.