Thursday, October 22, 2015

making ends meet in San Fran (but why didn't he buy an rv instead?)



When 23-year-old Brandon headed from Massachusetts to the Bay Area in mid-May to start work as a software engineer at Google, he opted out of settling into an overpriced San Francisco apartment. Instead, he moved into a 128-square-foot truck.

The idea started to formulate while Brandon was interning at Google last summer and living in the cheapest corporate housing offered: two bedrooms and four people for about $65 a night (roughly $2,000 a month), he told Business Insider.

"I realized I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the apartment I was staying in — and I was almost never home," he says.

His one fixed cost is truck insurance — $121 a month — as he doesn't use electricity, and his phone bill is handled by Google.

"I don't actually own anything that needs to be plugged in," he explains on his blog. "The truck has a few built-in overhead lights, and I have a motion-sensitive battery-powered lamp I use at night. I have a small battery pack that I charge up at work every few days, and I use that to charge my headphones and cellphone at night. My work laptop will last the night on a charge, and then I charge it at work."

The space is sparse and minimal, he says: "The main things that I have are a bed, a dresser, and I built a coat rack to hang up my clothes.

http://thechive.com/2015/10/22/google-employee-lives-in-the-parking-lot-and-saves-90-of-his-income-photos/#
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-truck-in-parking-lot-2015-10

Brandon's blog : http://frominsidethebox.com/

his post yesterday:

"This blog used to just be for my family and friends to check in and make sure I hadn't died in some horrific truck-related accident, but since I made the highly questionable call to share my story publicly, it's been a whole different story all together.

there were well over 6,000,000 views on articles about my living situation in the first day and a half. I've seen various forms of my story published on 25+ media outlets, and several live news broadcasts. This blog received 2,000,000 requests the first day alone, enough to bring it down for a minute or two right after the first article hit.

 I've been contacted by no less than 10 people internally at my company, 20 people externally, and 500 people between comments on this blog and emails. A few people tracked me down and friended me on social media (impressive, I'm not even mad). By any definition, my story went viral, for better or for worse.

I can't remember what was going through my head when I agreed to talk about this publicly, but it's pretty much the exact opposite of everything I've been advocating in my lifestyle. You know, things like subtlety, for example. The whole reason I got a truck instead of an RV was to maintain a low profile, well it turns out that works much better if you don't broadcast pictures of your truck on Good Morning America (my bad). The worst part though is that, as I've mentioned, there are plenty of other people in the area doing similar things, and I very well may have just ruined it for everyone by drawing so much attention to it. I sincerely hope that I haven't caused problems for any other truck people."

3 comments:

  1. Why? Cheaper and a better resale value.. And, nearly invisible as a residence..

    ReplyDelete