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Comment by dluan | Hacker News Reader

I did this in college for a week as part of a $2 dollar a day challenge for a student microfinance club. I knew well enough that it was near impossible to do it accurately in the U.S. where costs are inflated for basic things, and I also was discounting things like my tiny rent and what not, but I wanted to just go through it once as an exercise.

I had $14 and I used most of it to stock up on dry beans. I think I ended up with around one and half meals a day, basically of nothing but beans and rice. I didn't last the full week.

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For about a year I lived off ~$16/week(not including rent) here in Sweden (which is not known as a cheap country to live in). I could just about get by and put away some meager savings. But those savings were continuosly lost to random unforeseen expenses in the $20 range.

In my opinion it's not possible to live like that for any longer stretch of time. As soon as an emergency presents itself, you're wiped out and end up destitute. I had the luck of being young and mentally and physically healthy, and I only had to provide for myself. That being said, it wasn't an easy time for me. 1/10 would not recommend.

I wonder if this would get a lot easier with a group. Like, is it easier for 50 people to survive on $100/week of food than for one person to survive on $2. Obviously not practical for most western lifestyles, but I'm just imagining the various economies of scale around making a big pots of soup, chili, hummus, baking bread, etc. All of these things are labour intensive but can be done extremely cheaply if you're working from raw materials and your fixed costs (tools, equipment, etc) are covered.

> I wonder if this would get a lot easier with a group. Like, is it easier for 50 people to survive on $100/week of food than for one person to survive on $2.

Yes, and this is basically the financial norm for the poor. Everyone has some money coming in, and the precise amount varies, as does the need for money ("unforeseen expenses in the $20 range"). So large families provide financing internally; when you have less money to hand than you need, you get help from your extended kin, and when you have more than you need, it goes to help your kin.

This is often phrased as "borrowing", but it isn't really; these transfers aren't supposed to be paid back.

When variations in income and expenses are backstopped by a group of dozens of diversified people, you can live right on the edge of your average earning power. When you're a single atomized person, you have more need for a buffer of savings, because your income and expenses are so comparatively erratic.

To be fair, $2 probably goes a little farther in Africa than the US or Europe.

$2 a day in the US is impossibly little. I'm almost sure that food stamps would equate to more by itself.

Not impossible, I know people who did this and had fun. Hitchhiking, camping and dumpster diving (getting food from supermarket containers).

A variant is the food stamp challenge where you limit food to the standard allotment of about $6 a day. If you can get a whole month upfront, you can make bulk purchases as others point out. Also you probably need to cook most food from scratch and avoid convenience food and eating out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_stamp_challenge

I have read several stories where celebrities struggle with this for a week.

And that’s spending all your money on food, leaving nothing for anything else!

Could you guys share some strategies? The parent talks about beans. I wonder what Eyght did.

Assuming you can't go to direct barter, at $2/day you can no longer really ask someone else with specialist knowledge to do things for you as you have no way to compensate them.

You'd basically have to grow your own food, deal with getting some land to live on without paying rent, and the $2 couldn't go to daily expenses, it'd need to be saved up for basically capital expenses and surprises.

Realistically, you'd need a close-knit community of similar people in a commune-style setup.

I mean, $2/day for food probably doesn't get you a healthy number of calories after adjusting for surprise expenses. So alternatives must be found.

The holy grail of cheap food is Italian. You can buy a large bag of noodles for pennies sometimes, and making sauce is cheap, but even pre made canned sauce is cheap enough to fit the $2 a day challenge. (If not $1 a day depending on where you shop.)

If you're desperate or just old fashioned, peanut butter goes a long way. Cheap day old sandwich bread or bagels found at a bakery, and cheese, like cheddar cheese slices, make $1 a day feasible. Bananas can sometimes be pretty cheap too.

Likewise, it's super cheap to bake food at home. This is how people ate during the great depression. They'd make pancakes, waffles, and other sorts of items. I don't know what the price of Bisquick is because I just make this kind of thing from scratch when I'm in the mood, but it's mostly the price of milk. Some items take an egg, but eggs tend to be optional when it comes to breakfast cooking, especially if you're making Swedish pancakes (so good!) or crepes or similar.

Then there is the standard:

- Rice

- Corn chips and beans

- Vegetables are cheap, and quite good steamed or as a stir fry.

- Potatoes. They can be had for cheap, are quite filling, and left over potatoes from dinner can be used for breakfast. eg, mashed potato biscuits.

- Chicken can be quite cheap, but you'd be using very little. You can make a soy chicken, veggy, rice dish on the cheap, for example.

- And as odd as it sounds, there are a lot of stack foods and dessert foods you can get in super markets that are filling compared to their cost. Eg, pretzels or Doritos. A larger bag is around $2 and can be broken up into multiple meals. Or, eg, at Trader Joe's they have a box of pralines for $2 that can fill one up for a day. These foods can add variety to the cheaper foods (like rice) by eating a bit a day.

And, possibly the most surprising bit, if you're living it up, at $3 a day: Trader Joe's has frozen pizzas for $2.95 that are not only quite good, one pizza fills me up for an entire day. They have tv dinners for $2 or $2.95 too, but most of the time I'll eat multiple meals a day, so this kind of premade food comes closer to $4 to $6 a day without necessarily trying to be cheap. Trader Joe's has good cheap food.

Ultimately, if you want to take on a challenge like this, be prepared to buy everything in bulk, and be prepared stop eating meat, or eating very little meat.

edit: Oatmeal and Cream of Wheat. A meal is ~20 cents and it will fill you up.

Ultimately, if you want to take on a challenge like this, be prepared to buy everything in bulk, and be prepared stop eating meat, or eating very little.

Agree on the meat, however: Most folks that are poor simply cannot buy in bulk. If you are lucky you get paid once a month, but getting paid once a month also limits how often you can eat fresh vegetables. Canned might be your only option. If you don't get paid once a month, it doesn't matter if it is cheaper to buy 12 rolls of toilet paper if you can only afford the 4-pack. Or you might be able to afford bulk at tax time, but as soon as an emergency comes up, you can no longer buy bulk.

Not only this, but things like transportation and storage become an issue. You may or may not have cold storage, freezer space, or containers to store leftover/bulk food in. You may or may not have a vehicle of any sort to carry the stuff in. Even if you have transportation, you might not have the money to use it (or public transportation, if that is a thing where you live).

I'll mention that the unfortunate bit of $2 per day doesn't actually include only groceries, but other necessities as well. I don't know what the amount is in the states, but wherever it is, it doesn't leave a lot of room for anything but the most basic food. No spices. No chips since you can buy beans (or lentils!) and rice that last for multiple days cheaper than you can buy the bag of chips.

Most of the foods I mentioned above you can't buy in small quantity. Eg, you can't buy a single slice of bread.

Bulk here meaning usually 1 weeks worth of food. Small enough the average person buys in that quantity, including people who are paycheck to paycheck.

>'ll mention that the unfortunate bit of $2 per day doesn't actually include only groceries, but other necessities as well. I don't know what the amount is in the states, but wherever it is, it doesn't leave a lot of room for anything but the most basic food. No spices. No chips since you can buy beans (or lentils!) and rice that last for multiple days cheaper than you can buy the bag of chips.

The $2 a day food challenge is just food, nothing else. It's a challenge, not a hypothetical for someone who is homeless. Food stamps give quite a bit more than $2 a day.

Pizza at Trader Joe’s are between 80 and 380 calories. And nutritional values are terrible. You might be able to survive on that for a few weeks, but you won’t thrive, you will get weak and sick easily.

I didn't mean to imply only eating that every day and nothing else.

Also, most pizzas they sell are around 1050 calories. eg, https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/trader-joes/piz...

You can feed yourself for $2 a day in the US, not live on tho. But you can do that much easier if you have money upfront from the beginning instead of getting $2 every day. Let's say you have $60 in the beginning of the month. You can buy a 25lb of rice for $10-$15. You can then do the same for beans and you would have spent $20-$30. Some spices salt, pepper, thyme, onions and vegetable oil. Then if you're feeling really luxurious chicken. Buy multi vitamin to make up for what you're missing. Go to vegetable / farmers market while they are about to shut down and you can make out like a bandit for $5. Tons of vegetables or fruits they don't want to take home with them.

I work in an Indian Grocery Store & none of the tens of types of rice are $15 for 25LB. The cheapest is $15 for 20LB.

Edit: Thanks for the price lists of Big Stores. I only have info about Indian Grocery Store.

It has been more than a decade when I did this, but as late as 3 years ago, you could buy a 25lb rice for $10. Of course inflation and good economy and tarrifs have probably pushed up prices.

https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/save-money/costco-sams-club-...

Rice

BJ’s 25-pound bag of rice is $9.89.

Costco’s 25-pound bag of rice is $9.49.

Sam’s Club offers a 20-pound bag for $7.23.

Winner: Pound for pound, Sam’s Club’s rice comes in cheapest at 36 cents per pound — even though it’s in a smaller bag!

Beans

BJ’s has 10 pounds of dry pintos for $6.42.

If you’re looking for canned, prepared beans, BJ’s has a pretty decent deal on an eight-pack of 16.5 ounce Bush’s — they’re $9.59 at my club.

Costco has a 10-pound package of black beans for $13.69 — it may have been out of pintos the day I went!

Its Bush’s eight-pack of 16.5-ounce cans is just $8.99, however.

Sam’s Club’s 10-pounder of pintos is $5.79. It carries the same package of Bush’s for $8.98.

What would be the equivalent of $2 in the US?

Compared to where ? $2 isn't even worth the same, depending of the place you are in the US.

So true.

Won't go very far anywhere in the US, but it'll go a bit further around Canton, MS than it will in Houston, TX. But yeah, you're screwed either way.

Most people in the US are within a bicycle ride from a Walmart or similar discounter. (New York City is a notable exception). So $5 is has similar buying power throughout the US.

I know because I spent 5 months cycling through the US on a tiny budget.

For calories you would buy ramen noodles. Aim for 2000 calories per day or more. For Vitamins and fibre, buy apples ($1.11 per pound). At least one apple per day. An iceberg lettuce every 10 days or so is a good idea.

What does that average to ? Maybe $5 a day ??

It really comes down to population density. I grew up about 1.5 hours from DC and it was a 25 mile trip to any big box store. In part this is because of how roads are laid out, if you need to get to a bridge that can be a significant detour.

You can't ride a bike everywhere on 2000 calories per day.

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