How My Husband and I Lived in San Francisco on $20k a Year

Many people are asking!

If you’ve been following this Substack (or my Twitter/Bluesky accounts) you’ve probably picked up on one piece of lore, which is that for a year or two, my husband Nick (then boyfriend) and I lived in San Francisco off a combined, annual salary of around $20K-$30K. Granted, it was 2011, and everything was priced lower back then. But this was 2011, not 1950. A $20K annual salary in San Francisco wasn’t much more doable then than it would be today. And I think most people know this but just in case, San Francisco has a notoriously high cost of living. If it weren’t for Nick’s work, I wouldn’t have chosen to live there (side note but the fashion scene is also abysmal.)

2011 was a dark time.

You can find a lot of specific (true) short stories about this time in my Substack book series, Will There Be Free Food? but I wanted to get straight down to the nitty gritty since this tweet brought up lots of questions about how the hell we did this, especially after I tweeted about this:

The main question I received was, wait, what’s “it?” because evidently I forgot to specify this was a sale on chicken breasts. But my followers preferred the nefarious ambiguity of “it” meaning “general foodstuffs and substances.”

Anyway, let’s begin. How did Nick and I live off $20K annually in San Francisco?

First of all, to avoid any stolen valor, I should point out that we weren’t poor, we were broke. This is an article about goofy, cheap young people, not a serious piece about people truly living below the poverty line. Nick and I came from well off families, and we didn’t have to worry about winding up on the streets. However, “well off families” is not the same thing as “trust fund families” or even “families who pay your rent.” I assume if we were in danger of being out on the streets, our respective families would have helped us out, but that might have taken the form of letting us move back in with them (making us long distance) or covering rent one time, as opposed to buying us a house. Luckily it never got to that point so I don’t know what they would have done, but the point is our parents weren’t paying our rent, but we also weren’t in serious danger of homelessness. If you read this and your takeaway is, “Shut up, you were two privileged kids,” then congratulations, you’re not wrong, but I will not shut up, because it’s funny and people asked me to write about this!

Let’s start with the topic all the YIMBY sickos are probably wondering about: housing.

Nick moved out to San Francisco before I did, to work on his own startup (before you say “Wait, startup? Obviously he had millions of dollars!” I have some bad news about early stage startup founder salaries.) I moved out a year or two later when I graduated college and immediately found a content manager contract job (aka, paraphrasing articles online) for $15/hour which probably shook out to about $20-$25K per year depending on how many hours they let me work. I don’t remember precise details, but Nick’s startup salary was somewhere around $0 annually at this point.

Before I arrived in San Francisco, Nick had already cycled through a few roommate arrangements in the nightlife-heavy Marina neighborhood, both of which involved lying about his age and claiming to be twenty-eight. One of those roommates became a close friend (he was in his forties) and eventually realized Nick had lied about his age but didn’t really care. A different roommate had a falling out with Nick and accused him of selling drugs because he “flushed the toilet three times in a row” (he thought, I suppose, that drug dealers frequently flush cocaine down the crapper.) Nick continued claiming to be twenty-eight to find roommates, and by the time I moved out, he was living in the spare bedroom of a fifty-year-old alcoholic yoga teacher named Van, who also believed he was twenty-eight.

Van’s rent-controlled apartment was technically a two bedroom, but not terribly “nice.” Our heating barely functioned, and we only had enough hot water for about 1.5 people. Van rented his spare bedroom to Nick for $400 a month. When I moved in, it was initially supposed to be temporary. I reached out to a bunch of people on Craigslist to try and figure out a roommate situation for mysel, but nobody wrote me back so I moved in with Nick (truly, this was always what I wanted to do, but everyone kept warning me against living with a boyfriend right away.)

When Van realized I wasn’t leaving, he upper our rent to $500/month. We could basically make this work, especially because we both had a little money in savings from college jobs (I was a night security guard,) Nick selling his car, and previous paid internships. But we had to be pretty careful about other expenses. We also had to be careful about being discovered, because Van wasn’t supposed to be renting to anyone in the first place. The building was owned by a very religious landlady who frequently showed up at our apartment for no reason at all. The first time it happened, I was wearing a towel because I had just gotten out of the shower. Horrified that Van was sleeping with a twenty-one-year-old girl, she began lecturing him. Van clarified that I was just his roommate’s girlfriend. The landlady was able to tolerate Nick living there, but refused to rent to anyone living in sin. Yes, this was illegal, but it was illegal for Van to rent to anyone at all, so we were all living in the anarchic Mad Max world of living arrangements. All bets were off, which is evident in Chapter 10 of my book, detailing a “sublet within sublet” rabbit hole in which we found ourselves after eventually moving out of Van’s place.

Anyway, back to Van’s place and the religious landlady. I insisted I wasn’t living there, I was just “frequently visiting.” This meant I had to hide all my clothes, makeup, and anything else that clearly belonged to me, in suitcases in our bedroom.

At one point, I got sick of hiding and “surprised” Nick by buying plastic drawers and a very cheap lantern-inspired lamp. He was pretty pissed that I spent our money on such frivolity and asked me to return everything.

Remember how I said that Nick lied about being twenty-eight to secure his previous roommate arrangements? Well, that lie also helped him make a group of friends who were all considerably older. Most of Nick’s friends were in their late twenties or early thirties, while we were twenty-one and twenty-three. They worked in tech, and made a lot more money than we did. So we were still able to enjoy nightlife like other young people—we just had our friends pay for everything.

Nick had one friend in his late thirties who took on a role I can only describe as “platonic sugar daddy.”