Cheapest Viable Lifestyle

Have you ever asked yourself what is the bare minimum you can spend monthly to function properly? I did. Since then, my investigation has branched out into the following directives.

1. What is the cheapest diet I can have that is also nutritionally (mostly) sufficient?

2. Given my Brazilian citizenship, which mid-sized city offers the minimal cost of living?

3. Should I even bother working out and, in this case, which exercises should I do?

4. Can everything I own fit into a single backpack?

I will answer each of these in this page. However, I start with a warning: I am not aiming to preach a minimalist lifestyle. In fact, it is likely that most of the things I describe here are terribly wrong, serving simply as an unfiltered display of my ignorance about biology, finance, and everything in between. My motivation for writing this is primarily due to my recent professional missteps, my obsession with numbers, and my strong convinction that the only things that truly matter in life are having a roof over my head, food within my mouth, and books in front of my eyes.

1. How to eat cheaply?

A human body requires both micro and macronutrients. The former includes calcium, zinc, iron, vitamins, such as B12, C, A, etc., while the latter encompasses proteins, fat, and carbohydrates. Some of these, such as vitamin B12 and calcium, are intrinsically tied to animal-based food; I therefore discard a purely vegan diet from the outset.

The first question I thus ask is: to cook or not to cook? Should I withdraw from cooking, I will avoid spending money in basic cooking appliances, such as a pan and a stove and a—please—non-stick safe spoon, which may require a relatively sizeable upfront investment. Under these conditions, canned food is an economically viable alternative: as I write it, in Abu Dhabi, the following prices apply.

Table 1: Prices for canned food.

Source: Carrefour, August of 2026.

I found that half a can of fava beans mixed with a can of sardine is enough for a meal—for a total price of AED 4.75 per serving. By consuming this once a day, I commit myself to a monthly cost of AED 142.5. Besides being environmentally wasteful—resulting in hundreds of used cans per year, many of which may not be recycled—such a diet falls short of being dollar-efficient, inflation-robust, or healthy. Instead, I claim buying basic cookware is required for long-horizon minimization of food-related costs. As of today, the price of a non-stick pan, a non-stick safe spoon, and an eletrical stove are as follows.

Table 2: Prices of basic cookware.

Source: Amazon, August of 2026.

When considering the expected lifespan of these items, the joint cost of AED 159 becomes negligible. Importantly, the appliances in Table 2 are portable: as I will argue in Section 4, this is essential for building a life that fits into a single backpack. With this in mind, the cookware above naturally raises the question: what should I cook? I noticed that a diet based on rice and lentils, which jointly provide both carbohydrates, fibers, and the full set of aminoacids the human body requires, and salt and garlic, which provide taste to an otherwise tasteless food, to be an appropriate choice. The prices are listed in Table 3.

Table 3: Prices of a staple-based diet.

Source: Carrefour, August of 2026.

When mixed with water, 200g of rice and 200g of lentils produce roughly 800g of food—at the cost of 2.49 AED per serving. By comparing against the 350g for AED 4.25 you get from the mix of sardine and fava beans, we are witnessing a gain of 3x to 4x in the per-gram cost of food—depending on how the prices of electricity and water required for your cooking are factored in.

“Hold up a minute!”, you think, “Lunch is not the only meal I have during the day”. To which I respond: you are right. I propose extending the described diet with oats, peanut butter, and powdered milk. On top of being nutritious, they all have long shelf-life. The importance of such a choice cannot be stressed enough: by designing my meals around rice, lentils, salt, garlic, oats, peanut butter, and powdered milk, I no longer need a refrigerator or a fridge—neither of which can be effectively packed into a backpack. To minimize costs, it is important these items are bought from private brands—oats shouldn’t be from Quaker, and powdered milk shouldn’t be from Nestlé. Having established this constraint, the prices are described in Table 4.

Table 4: Prices of oats, peanut butter, and powdered milk.

Source: Carrefour, August of 2026.

This adds 3.39 AED to my daily costs. Together with lunch, I have hence a total cost of 5.88 AED per day on food. By occasionally eating out (to meet the nutritional requirements not covered by Tables 1-4), I may increase this budget to 7 AED per day, or AED 210 per month, which has been the cheapest diet I have recently tried. In addition, I emphasize that the approach I outlined can be applied to most places, as it is mostly based on commodities such as rice and lentils and oats, and is not restricted to Abu Dhabi.

In this scenario, after addressing the issues of eating cheaply and healthly, I now turn to the question: how to live cheaply? This is inherently tied to the affordability of the real estate market. Should I rent through a lease contract? Should I rent through an informal agreement? Should I buy? I will elaborate on these questions in the next section.