The cost of housing, whether through renting or buying with a mortgage, is the most significant expense for most people. However, it’s a necessary expense because no one wants to be homeless. Not everyone, though, approaches housing in the same way.
A few years ago, Business Insider reported the story of Brandon, a 23-year-old software engineer who moved to San Francisco in 2015 for a summer internship at a Google office. However, he encountered a very expensive rental market. As such, instead of renting an apartment, Brandon chose an unusual solution: living in a truck to save money and pay off his student loans before buying a house.
$2,000 for a shared room. When Brandon moved to San Francisco, he secured a spot in one of Google’s corporate apartments. In the city, he found himself sharing a two-bedroom apartment with four people, which amounted to about $65 per night, totaling roughly $2,000 a month.
“I realized I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the apartment I was staying in–and I was almost never home,” Brandon told Business Insider. This realization prompted him to start thinking about his future housing arrangements.
Moving to a house on wheels. The following year, Brandon resumed work full-time at Google. However, he didn’t want to spend all his savings, so he developed an action plan.
Before moving to San Francisco, he purchased a 2006 Ford truck with 157,000 miles on it for $10,000 using the signing bonus he got from Google. This truck would serve as his new home and would be parked in the office parking lot, ensuring that he was never late for work.
Everything he needed, but cheaper. Brandon only had one fixed expense, which was $121 a month for the truck’s insurance. He didn’t have to pay for electricity as Google covered the cost of his phone line. The truck’s bed provided him with 128 square feet of space, which was more than enough for sleeping and storing his personal belongings.
The young man said that he only needed a battery-powered lamp to light the inside of the truck and a 15,000 mAh portable battery in case his phone or headphones ran out of juice. In any case, he would recharge these at work. The truck’s interior was simple, with a bed, a chest of drawers, and a rack for hanging clothes. In fact, the truck already offered him more space than the $2,000-a-month Google apartment.
Living at Google’s office. Brandon created a blog about his day-to-day life living in a truck. In it, he wrote about his time working as an engineer at Google during the first year of his internship. He would spend all day at Google’s facilities and eat all his meals in the employee canteen on the Google campus. He also had showers in the campus gym. All this allowed him to minimize his daily expenses.
Thanks to this strategy, Brandon was able to save approximately 90% of his take-home pay, using those funds to pay off his student loans and make investments. Brandon, like many U.S. students, had $22,434 in student loans to pay off, a good portion of which he had already covered at the time. “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 told Business Insider in 2015.
Another way to experience San Francisco. Brandon suggested that living just minutes from your office has many advantages, allowing you to avoid the drawbacks of San Francisco. One benefit is the ability to walk to work instead of dealing with morning rush hour traffic.
Additionally, not having the financial burden of a monthly rent allowed him to dine out at different restaurants and enjoy the ambiance of the city a lot more.
It’s not the first time this has happened, and Google’s security team is aware of the situation. As Brandon himself described on his personal blog, this wasn’t the first instance of a Google employee choosing to live in the company’s parking lot.
Brandon didn’t have to deal with Google’s security personnel until his third month of living in the parking lot when, in the middle of the night, he was approached by Google security. However, the situation was resolved smoothly after he showed his corporate badge and confirmed that there was an error in the vehicle registration. After clearing up the misunderstanding, the Google campus security team apologized for waking him up and never bothered him again.
Brandon has been living in an actual house for more than two years now, but should he decide to go back to the truck life, at least Google won’t have to force him to go to the office against his will. He clearly felt right at home there.
This article was written by Rubén Andrés and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.
Image | Sascha Bosshard
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