Sometimes good things do come from bets.

I've decided to try a socio-economic experiment. Premise? Living on $50 a week. Now before you go scoffing at the premise remember that this is New York City where $5000 monthly rent paid by people who make $50 per minute. Neither of those are me, but that should make this experiment that much easier, right? Anyone? Hello??

Costs will be logged over the next week and barring any medical emergencies I will try and spend less than $50 over the course of seven days, starting with today. Basically it breaks down to $7.14 a day. I did some rough research on my expenditures and it's no a stretch for me to say that over the course of a week, I tallied up about $50-60 per day. That's just gross.

So here I embark on this experiment spawning from a random conversation over dinner ($56) after a game of golf ($38) where I lost five golf balls ($10). Can I do it? We'll see... I certainly wouldn't bet on myself.


Notes: this doesn't include my monthly expenses such as rent, car, bills, etc because there's just no way to take that out of the picture. This isn't to see if I can sustain life on $50 a week here in New York City... that's an ignorant notion. However, I will not use alternative means to supplement my stipend, it's just a countdown from 50 bucks. Oh, and what do I get for winning this bet? Nothing but bragging rights and what I predict to be some left over ramen noodle wrappers.


Monday - 7/30/2007
Large iced coffee from street vendor - $1.50
Subway $2.00
Lunch (got lucky here: delicious leftovers) - $0.00
Dinner at Halal food vendor - $5.00
Total = $8.50 ($1.31 overbudget)

Uh oh.

Labels: editorial, eric, new york

This entry was posted by eric yang, on Monday, July 30, 2007. You can leave your response.