I am a perpetual stranger, moving to a new city every year. I’m not a businessman, or an international superstar for that matter. I’m a writer. My average yearly income hovers just north of $20,000 and comes from waiting tables and manning the till at bookstores. I live on little. I plan and I save. ¶ When my itinerary was loosely designed six years ago, my main motivation was to gain greater life experience to inform my fiction. Much like people who save money to buy a house or to pay for their children’s education, I budget to live a writer’s life. ¶ Seattle will be my seventh city in seven years. I have never before set foot in this bastion of coffee and computers. I arrive with only a few contacts in my phone and a roommate whom I’ve met through e-mail and Facebook. There is no work lined up for me, and my bank account holds just enough money to last me a couple of months before paying rent becomes a crisis. ¶ This is where you panic. This is where I get started.
While my college roommates were planning careers and marriages, I was contemplating the life of an itinerant novelist. I joked with my friends that I would be homeless, but a part of me knew it wasn’t quite a joke. Before I started calling it 10 Cities/10 Years, my only aspiration was to keep moving. The project arose out of a feverish case of wanderlust and a serious aversion to settling.
Two weeks after graduating from Kansas University in my home town, Lawrence, I moved to Charlotte, N.C.I was simply satisfied to put distance between myself and Kansas. Just over a month after moving to Charlotte, I landed a job as a barista at the neighborhood Books-A-Million. That I had applied to be a bookseller and didn’t drink coffee were mere details.
I settled into Charlotte, made friends, filled notebooks with prose and poetry, went on dates, stayed up way too late drinking and woke up far too early to walk to work. When my first six-month lease was up, I found another apartment down the street. And when that lease ended, I packed up everything again and shipped it to a 150-square-foot apartment in Philadelphia that I had rented via Craigslist, sight unseen.
Over the past six years, I’ve lived in six cities and eight apartments, acquired nine jobs and become intimately entangled in dozens of lives. In that time, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, we fell into the worst recession in memory, one of the biggest oil spills in our history ravaged the Gulf of Mexico, political inaction has led to a downgrade in our national credit rating and, now, we appear to be on the verge of a double-dip recession.
In such dire times, how do I survive year to year on customer service wages and tips from waiting tables?
I know how to stretch a dollar.
Bare necessities, prudent planning
The first thing you should understand about me is that I own next to nothing. When I started out, I had more than a dozen boxes. Now, everything I own fits in four medium-size cardboard boxes, a suitcase and one over-the-shoulder bag.
Possessions tend to breed more possessions. Once I started ridding myself of them, it became clear just how little I needed and how easy it was to live without. A suitcase worth of clothing, a collection of books, DVDs and writing journals, and my laptop are pretty much all that I take with me from city to city. My furniture needs are predominantly met by Craigslist and helpful strangers.
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