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Hmm … another day, another news report of a presumably well-off Bay Area tech employee living out of a vehicle. It’s our second story along these lines this week—and it’s only Wednesday!
Yup, you know the backstory by now: The salaries in San Francisco and Silicon Valley—where the average tech worker makes over $200,000—are high, but real estate prices are positively meteoric. In fact, they’re the highest in the nation. So people are taking some extreme measures.
That’s why a 23-year-old Google employee, known (by us) only as Brandon, is living out of a 128-square-foot truck, which sits at the edge of his company’s own parking lot.
Brandon’s first housing experience in the area was a two-bedroom corporate apartment for $2,000 a month that he split with three others. (Average two-bedrooms are $3,921, so this was a rather good deal.) Since he was hardly ever home, Brandon told Business Insider, he was “throwing that kind of money away. You’re essentially burning it—you’re not putting equity in anything and you’re not building it up for a future.”
So for five months worth of rent (covered by his signing bonus), he bought a 2006, 16-foot Ford truck with 157,000 miles on it (who cares, when it’s mostly parked?). On his blog, Thoughts From Inside the Box, he calculated how much he’d save once subtracting his only expense: $121 a month for insurance.
He estimates he’s able to save 90% of his income, since he showers—and eats most of his meals—on the Google campus. Also, he has one of the nation’s shortest commutes (on foot, of course).
“The truck has a few built-in overhead lights, and I have a motion-sensitive battery-powered lamp I use at night,” he wrote on his blog. He charges his laptop and a battery pack at work, then uses that to charge his headphones and phone.
Brandon’s place, as you can imagine, isn’t glamorous. He has a bed, a dresser, and a coat rack. He has a few stuffed animals. (At 23? OK, dude, whatever floats your … truck.) That sparse lifestyle, he says, will help him pay off $22,434 in student loans quickly—he thinks he’ll be free of education debt in six months.
The Google security squad hasn’t ousted him from his automotive home, telling him he had a “sweet setup.” Well, a few things aren’t so sweet: no heat, no air conditioning, and no bathroom (we won’t ask about middle-of-the-night bathroom calls).
Overall, he’s honing his survival skills: “If I do plan on traveling the world, I’ll need to be comfortable with unconventional living situations, and this is certainly a good place to start.”
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