Working at Google did not make Brandon want to spend his days on a pricey San Francisco apartment; instead, he opted to live in a 128-square-foot truck.
Although the salaries in technology places such as San Francisco and Silicon Valley are high, real estate moguls make sure to gain from it by excessively high rents. This was the reason why Brandon, who preferred not to tell his family name or picture, chose to live on the streets, in a truck.
He told Business Insider that during his internship at Google last summer, he lived in the cheapest corporate housing with two bedrooms and four people. A night costs $65 and roughly $2,000 monthly.
"I realized I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the apartment I was staying in - and I was almost never home. It's really hard to justify 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 - and that was really hard for me to reconcile," he said.
After that internship, he started planning for his future in San Francisco as it seemed that he would be coming back for a full-time work. He, then, purchased a 16-foot 2006 Ford with 157,000 miles on it.
The $10,000 he used for the purchase of his home on wheels is the money he got from his signing bonus. And he has been tracking down his savings since then. According to his blog, the breakeven time that he would have been able to cover his truck spending was on October 21 at 4:50 P.M.
Looking at his blog as of writing, he already has $259.96 savings from rental fees. He used a simple breakeven formula for this which is:
Savings = Time in Truck*(Cost of Rent - Truck Insurance) - Cost of Truck
And his final formula looks like this:
Savings = Time*(2180 - 121) - Cost of Truck = Time*2,059 - 10,000
According to Business Insider, Brandon graduated with $22,434 worth of student loans, and has paid it down to $16,449 over the course of four months.
"As a conservative estimate (and taking bonuses into consideration), I expect to have them paid off within the next six months, saving thousands of dollars over the standard 10-year, or even 20-year plans," he says.
"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. Plus, there is never going to be a better time in my life for me to try this. I'm young, flexible, and I don't have to worry about this decision affecting anyone else in my life," he writes.
What do you think of Brandon's truck life despite earning a lot in Google?
