Cheapest Viable Lifestyle

In June of 1889, Andrew Carnegie wrote an essay titled “The Gospel of Wealth”, claiming his enormous wealth was the outcome of an efficient market allocating proportionate resources to the most capable and wise. Self-serving and fallacious as it sounds, Carnegie’s words still echo in modern techno-optimist manifestos that, promoted by an increasingly powerful elite, promise an ever-approaching period of over-abundance—as long as their future-building ambitions are not disrupted by progress-stifling regulations developed by vetocratic governments.

The truth, however, is that most people barely scrape by most of the time, a scenario that is unlikely to change in the near future. I hence posed the question: what is the bare minimum I can spend monthly to function properly? 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. Which mid-sized city offers the minimal cost of living?

3. Should I even bother working out and, if this is the 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 a feeling of stark disillusionment and my long-held 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, 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 pan, a bamboo 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 (commonly around 15 years), the joint cost of AED 179 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 are jointly complete sources of carbohydrates, fibers, and the full set of aminoacids required by the human body, 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 2.23 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. Alternatively, green lentils may be replaced by other pulses such as pinto or soya beans; the trade-off is that cooking them requires either sophisticated appliances (a pressure cooker) or several hours of soaking.

“Hold up a minute!”, you object, “Lunch is not the only meal I have during the day”. You are right. I propose complementing 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 AED to my daily costs. Together with lunch, I have hence a total cost of 5.23 AED per day on food. By occasionally buying additional food to meet the nutritional requirements not covered by Tables 1-4 (e.g., Vitamin C), 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. Correspondingly, it also completely bypasses the need for owning a knife, which—for being considered as a weapon by certain mass transportation companies—is an item of constrained portability.

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.

2. How to live cheaply?

If you ever lived in any large city, you likely noticed that encountering afforable houses is as rare as finding a payphone—while both still exist, they are in the road to extinction. Regardless of the reasons for such lack of affordability, which stems either from the limited availability of buildable land due to strict government regulations or from the deliberate scarcity of rental properties promoted by greedy investors and landlords, depending on who you are talking to, a person has to invariably decide whether to rent or to buy their own shelter.

Although the costs of such decisions are not always comparable, as rent prices may vary wildly even within the same building, I like to think that the rationally minimum price of a yearly lease contract for a property of value \(X\) in a market economy with a risk-free annual interest rate of \(r\) is \(X \cdot r\). In this context, I will restrict my search for regions having the smallest average property value per squared meter, ignoring reported rent prices, and focus on Brazil, the country where I have citizenship.

In addition, I will include the following convenience constraint: the city should be mid-sized, ensuring public services such as transportation and healthcare are generally accessible and property listings are available online, and have a population of at least 100,000. I list below the most affordable cities abiding by these conditions.

Table 5: Cities with the smallest property value per squared meter.

Source: Gemini-fetched data from Índice FipeZAP, August of 2026.

Table 5 highlights the best candidates are distributed across the states of Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. Interestingly, in addition to their climatic and cultural diversity, some of these cities host campuses from well-established public universities. As regular employers of temporary professors, this points to the existence of a potential regional market amenable to those holding a doctoral degree.

More importantly, universities are the natural habitat of students—which, as I can confidently state by being a former and occasional student myself, are often searching for a cheaper lifestyle. Their presence is also suggestive of the existence of an informal rental market with less strict requirements for securing tenancy—e.g., bypassing income verification or a security deposity.

This brings me back to my initial inquiry: to rent or to buy? I am concerned I will not provide a definitive stance in this page. Both buying and renting commonly invite financial scrutiny upon myself by adversarial third-parties—e.g., in case a bank loan is needed—demanding monthly income to be as large as two to three times the value of monthly installments. Should this demand be unmet, an informal lease agreement becomes the uniquely viable alternative. In Brazil, I found WebQuarto to have a decent offering of budget rooms.

Uncircumstantially, monthly payments from R$ 300 to R$ 500 for maintenance fees and taxes and basic hygiene are the cheapest I have found throughout my short life and quick Googling. The value of rent for small apartments in the referred cities can often be two to three times larger than that. This adds between R$ 500 and R$ 1500 to the floor I established in the prior section. However, a deeper investigation is warranted. Importantly, in case external forces restrict me to stay in more expensive cities, a similar search should be carried out at the neighborhood-level, considering transportation costs and safety—as being robbed or forced through unwanted medical bills can be drastically more expensive than any of the costs I until now laid out.

In speaking of medical bills, I think it is clear for anyone who has been alive long enough and has not been stripped of their senses—either forcefully or voluntarily—that we inhabit an increasingly hot planet. (An obvious consequence of Climate “Change” or, as we may also call it, Climate Catastrophe or Climate Crisis, as a change can be beneficial or detrimental). Notably, to survive under the upcoming extreme weather is costly, often requiring reliance upon fans or air conditioning (AC).

I have then been considering two cost-effective alternatives to both these equipments. The first one is to stay as much as possible in public, government-sponsored climate-controlled spaces, an extra reason for which I should focus on sheltering in mid-sized cities providing basic common services such as a public library. The second one is, while staying at home, to move my equipments closer to the entrance door, ensuring I maximally enjoy both the building’s and the neighbors’ ACs while avoiding using that of my own premise; in fact, I also considered occasionally leaving the door open, although I have not followed through with such approach. Importantly, as I write this, Google tells me the temperature outside is \(46^{\circ} C\); I thus emphasize the described survival techniques do not stem from vague speculation but rather from lived experience.

Having said that—and knowing that I left several relevant aspects of the concepts I am describing either unexplored or insufficiently detailed—I wrap up this section. I now turn to the more suppositional part of my investigation. The central issue I address in the remainder of this text is how to minimize the impact of certain exogenous events, such as the loss of a job or a sudden rent spike, on my personal life. The answer to this, in my opinion, is mobility: I should be ready to leave any place at a moment’s notice as cheaply as possible. This requires both physical ableness and owning strictly portable items, which I respectively describe in the next sections.

3. Working out?

If I know very little about most things, I know nothing about working out, so I will keep this section short. The reason I bring this up in this page is that I see my body as my only permanently illiquid, untradeable asset whose ownership cannot be tranferred in exchange for cash. It is also, save rare exceptions, irreplaceable. As a consequence, the body is something that should be cared for. The natural question that comes up in this scenario is whether a gym membership is required. With my objective being to minimize expenses, maximizing mobility, and reduce reliance upon unreliable agents, my answer to this question is clearly no. This does not mean I am against physical exercises; however, many bodyweight and aerobic exercises can be freely practiced anywhere, requiring very little instruction and no specialized tools. As Thoreau beautifully wrote, “bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do”. And that is all I have to say about working out.

4. A backpack for all my earthly possessions?

“In retrospect the most remarkable thing is that […] all of my earthly possessions could be contained in a suitcase”, Serotonin (Michel Houellebecq, 2019).

When the time to leave my current accommodation arrives—either willingly or not, but chiefly in the latter case—I feel no greater displeasure than being forced into several round-trips to completely remove any sign of my existence from the place I had up to that moment called home. This frequently requires carrying my personal property with me, finding an agreeable recipient for sporadic donations, or a large enough trash bin for eventual disposals. After each iteration of such process, I have asked myself which measures I can implement to reduce the inconvenience of moving from a site to another. The natural culmination of this repeated interrogation is to own only enough to fill a reasonably sized backpack.

As such, prior to enumerating the items I deem essential, I must understand which backpacks will best serve me. In this regard, I found hiking variants to jointly provide convenient daily usability, spacious storage, and generous warranties. They can also be found in most major stores: Decathlon sells a 35-liter backpack with a 10 year warranty for 240 AED (Quechua MH100), and Amazon offers cheaper and correspondingly sized items from Chinese online brands. Given their negligible cost—when conditioned on their expected lifespan—I have opted for the former instead of the latter, which I observed to be capable of storing both the cookware of Section 2 and the few clothes and electronics I possess. Importantly, taken together, these items weigh less than 10kg and can support me in both hot, rainy, and (mildly) cold weathers.

A limitation of this setup is not being compatible with a mattress. Having slept on the floor several times (often on top of a blanket or a sleeping bag), however, I regard it to be a sensible alternative to owning a human-sized bag of foam—as long as a pillow is available. In contrast to mattresses, pillows are cheap, light, and adequately fit into a 35 L backpack with the possible help of a vacuum storage bag. That said, I may buy an affordable mattress in case its daily cost, conditional on how long I expect to use it, is no larger than a fraction of the daily food costs I outlined in Section 1. Also, as long as basic hygienic measures are taken, bed frames are of no use.

In summary, to answer the question I posted in the opening of this page: yes, I can fit everything I own into a backpack. As Labrouste, the protagonist of the referred Houellebecq’s novel, I found it impressive how little value most of the things I once had have on my current life.

Conclusions

The primary conclusion I draw from my investigation is that I can effectively reduce my cost of living to sustainably low values by restricting my diet to be mostly composed of commodities and having the willingness to move away from overpriced real estate markets. I reaffirm, however, that this is not meant as a normative prescription for a rational lifestyle under strictly financial considerations. Instead, it should be understood as a reasonable baseline for a decently enjoyable life that is also robust to plausibly adverse circumstances.

In closing, the main objection one might raise is that my description severely underestimates long-term healthcare-related expenses. To this I can only say that the most incurable of states happens to be the global minimizer of the optimization problem I have so far considered.