I'm a relatively frugal recent college grad living in Houston.

My baseline costs per month run about $1600, though for one reason or another I only hit this about half the time (christmas gifts, expensive doctor visit for contact prescription, splurge on a laptop, etc). The rest of my salary goes straight into savings.

It breaks down like:

* ~$800 for rent + internet + electric. I have a one bedroom apartment, but fully half of it is empty an unfurnished. I keep telling myself I'll get a roommate, but it's been over a year and I still haven't. As your biggest expense, this is where you will make or break yourself.

* ~$400 for food, alcohol included. I like good food and beer :P You could do a lot better.

* $250 on student loans

* <$10 on transport. I take the light rail occasionally and occasionally get flats on my bike.

* The last $150 goes to smaller things that seem pop up once in a while.

Around here at least, you could probably live on $800/month the way you're talking about, and still be fairly comfortable. I don't know how well other sections of the country would fair.

Damn... I could be doing a lot better.

It depends entirely on the person and their spending habits.

Try making a list of what things you will spend money on / buy and then estimate a monthly cost for those items.

Food can be one of the hardest things to quantify, especially if you cook all your own food (a great way to save money). You can try to figure out how much on average you think you will spend on each meal. This is higher for me than other people because I eat a lot of food and a lot of meat. I spend on average $20 per day on food.

I think a good rule of thumb is that you'll end up spending around 2x your rent if you're conservative and 3x your rent if you're not. In your case I'd assume $800 minimum.

If your room is 400$/m, you can likely get by on 800$-ish a month, being very very cheap. Read some frugal blogs to learn how to eat really cheaply (the simple dollar is a good start).

Let's say you get a room at 300$, and hobbies are cheap (ie. walks, ...), and food is cheap (rice, ...), then 600$/m should be possible. If you make it a sport to be cheap, you can go lower.

Though there is a fine line because you will often be trading your time for saving a few dollars. This is subject to diminishing returns after a certain point.

Beans and rice are good, but beans, rice and eggs are much better. That's what I've regularly eaten for dinner for the past one year and still am (I'm in college). It's probably as cheap as you can go on food if you want tasty and somewhat nutritious meals. Add some Thai sweet chili sauce or teriyaki sauce for flavor.

Yup. I was planning on experimenting a little, while retaining cheapness. :-)

I think a good place to start this discussion is by asking how much money you have on hand right now? $500? $5,000?

~$1000

It all depends. You can get VERY frugal if you really want to.

Also, consider the possibility of spending 500$ on a plane ticket and 500$ on a cheap place somewhere sunny (with internet). This should buy you about a month or 8 weeks, depending where you go.

Hmmm... travel expenses add up very quickly. If he does that, hopefully it's somewhere within the poster's country (U.S.).

And "sunny" is a very broad definition, I've heard Arizona is cheap this time of year :)

Also, can't he find very cheap travel and accommodation using the tools the HN community provides? (flight planners and AirBnB?)