[freethinky]

I'm not from the US. But in Europe nothing of this must be expensive. I'm almost 40 and lived almost always in shared flats (ca. 2500€ year). Often we got a very old cheap farmhouse half an hour away from a bigger town, which is still accessible by public transportation. Food I sometimes buy and sometimes we get it from places where they would throw it away. Also planting our own stuff. Sure you have to sometimes eat zucchini for a week, or now pumpkin for several weeks :D but you get creative. While travelling I used internet pages like Couchsurfing & HelpX and many others. Some months I spent less than 50€. I met a lot of amazing people on the way which lead to a lot of very nice opportunities. What I learned this way that it is trivial for me to find a place to sleep everywhere on the world. People are helpful and when you help them, they often give you new opportunities, at least that was almost always the case for me. Overall the most expensive things for me is the yearly health care (ca. 3500€). When I work, normally, for one year, this allows me quite easily live for 3-4 years. Knowing this gives me also quite some peace. The good thing is I met people abroad, which also realized that travelling in a more simple fashion could really be very cheap and gave up their job, started to travel around. So far several Couchsurfing couples visited me back from countries which are not really known to make the average person rich (an the couples I met, by no means were). I don't claim I figured out live, but it is definitely possible to life differently.