When's the last time you spent only $219 a month to live in the Bay Area, everything included? Never? Gee, me neither.
A month or so back, SFBay reported via SFist about “hacker hostels,” the newest and cheapest “it” way for tech-geniuses-on-the-rise to have a roof over their heads while they push for their start-ups to make it big.
After reading about these super nerds paying a mere 100 bucks a month for a bed to sleep in, I was even wondering if I had gone into the wrong profession. Or just need to find myself a writer hostel with significantly cheaper rent.
But it seems that Kurt Varner, founder and designer of DailyToaster, might have found a way to make these IKEA-decorated hostels look like five-star luxury hotels.
Varner lived out of his ’04 Honda Civic for four months — count ’em, one-two-three-four — in Palo Alto while trying to launch his app. And he’s no slumming-it early-20-something either. Varner is newly married, making his regular home down in Los Angeles.
But with the need to see his product succeed, he headed north to Silicon Valley and made his ride his casa.
Luxurious? Heeeeeeeck no.
But Varner did save an obscene amount of money by honing his “voluntary homeless-ness.”
With a $39 gym membership so he could shower and brush his teeth, and $100 at the local hacker co-op for meals and WiFi, Varner was living off around $219 a month.
C’mon people, when was the last time you spent only $219 a month to live in the Bay Area, everything included? Never? Gee, me neither.
Thanks to a profile in Inc. Magazine — in which writer Leigh Buchanan even attempts to sleep in the back of his own car as part of the story — and a blog about living out of your wheels, Varner is starting to garner a bit of attention.
Hopefully the attention will, oh I don’t know, help get his product off the ground so he and his wife can afford an actual house. Raising a family in the back of a Civic wouldn’t be too stylish.
