Homeless vs. Cheap apartment

Keep my stuff at my parents place, mail too of course. Works out pretty good.

 

You don't have a friend or family member who will let you use their address?

 

I think monetarily you would be way ahead foregoing the apt and the per diem, if you really felt you wouldn't use the apt enough to justify it anyway. When you figure most a pts, counting utilities will run well over 600 per month. Unless you are lucky to live in a place with very low cost of living. If I didn't have a family to consider I certainly wouldn't have a mortgage and all it entails. At a conservative estimate of 600 per month, that's 7200 per year. Per diem darn sure won't save ya that much on your tax bill.

 

Live in your truck for a year or two, save up your money and buy a nice RV or trailer.
You can put that lots of places for cheap..or even free depending on where you live.

That's what I'm doing.
It sucks living in the truck, BUT...it saves a lot of money.
I get a hotel room a few days a month to regroup and whatnot.

 

A few people have mentioned the loss of Per Diem, so lets run some numbers.

As mentioned above, the $600 rent comes to $7200 per year.

Lets say you run 330 days a year, then lets use the 2012 Per Diem rate of 80% of $59.

$59 x .8 = $47.20
$47.20 x 330 = $15,576

Now, people often confuse deductions with money you actually keep, but it's not. In reality, you only save whatever your tax rate is. Lets go high and say your rate is 30%.

$15,586 x .3 = $4672 money actually saved in taxes.

$7200 rent - $4672 = $2527 difference

So in a purely financial terms, don't rent the cheap house. Doing things purely for tax reasons rarely works out. Most tax people focus purely on tax savings and not how much money you actually have when the dust settles, so always run the numbers both ways.

BTW, I ran the numbers to favor the Per Diem.