How do YOU survive during tough times?

Easy answer: leave SF and get to a lower rent situation if you truly cannot afford rent.

When I wanted to cut down costs, I built some software to take advantage of referral programs from startups and used that to get free food for a few months. But if I found myself in a situation where I truly feared my ability to pay rent, I'd start contracting and look into moving elsewhere.

> sell cereal

Huh? Breakfast cereal? Is this something people do in SF to earn money on the side? Or is it a joke I don't get?

Access to a locale with a vastly cheaper cost of living.

How long have the tough times been going on and how much longer do they look to continue? If this is a rough patch, getting a second job, selling some belongings or renting out an extra room/space could be feasible (even renting out your apt and staying in the office if you have one).

If the tough times look to be continuing indefinitely they aren't tough times they are life and you have made some bad decisions about where you could afford to live..

If you're building a company in SF without OPM (Other People's Money), you are making a big mistake.

Freelance, or live in a car + buy gym membership to shower.

Go back to school by taking advantage of student loans.

Mods, please add the "Ask HN" prefix for this one. It's not a link to another site/article.

Join a company that pays good salary. Save up enough to have a cushion for the startup's tough time.

Startup is high risk business.

Not joking: Get your spouse to sponsor your startup. Give them some ownership of the company.

Get a job at a lame startup with lots of processes and code reviews - things that leave you with a lot of free time waiting for others to approve the minutiae. The more designers they have the better - especially if they work remote. That company will fail horribly but, you will have the time and funds to work on your project.

This is the wrong question. A better question is "would 'tough times' affect you at all?"

Never couple spending to income. That's a recipe for always feeling poor. Instead, find a baseline where you can live and make sure that it lies at such a tiny fraction of your normal income that you never need to think about thinks like "budgeting" or "saving".

So if you're fresh out of school with your first $50k/year job, make sure you can fit your entire life into $20k/year.

When you take that $120k/year job a few years later, live on $20k/year.

When you crack the $300k/year barrier with your RSUs from Google, live on $20k/year.

That is how I've always approached things, and it makes life a lot less stressful (since it removes the number one worry that everybody else has from the equation). There were several years when I was traveling and consulting where I'd only take one little $10k gig a year (or nothing at all), and there was never a question of running out of money because it naturally went out the door so slowly.

If you do what everybody else does and ramp your lifestyle up to meet your income, you're just ensuring that you'll be in trouble if things go south. But once you have a dozen years of accidentally saving (n-20) per year, you can survive for years at a time with no income at all, so bumps in the road don't feel bumpy at all.

Fix that and you'll stop needing to ask questions like this one.

i forward project my buffer (savings) to 2 years to cover living relatively modestly. I think it's important to not feel desperate to take whatever the next thing is.

I fish for contract work when it's available and try to generate passive income where possible. If you're living on $20k, the 3-4K you get from your asset portfolio goes a long way.

If I had no assets at all, I wouldn't be willing to enter the start up game . I'd look to ratchet up the ladder to a bigger buffer first then role the dice.

If I had to ... I'd consider taking s part-time job doing whatever and finding a living situation that the part time job could afford (e.g. Sharing an apartment uncomfortably). I'd spend the rest of the time on my start up or trying to ratchet up a better living situation.

What's that saying about logistics winning wars?

If I didn’t prepare a buffer before reaching a point where I had to think about “staying afloat” then I’d just be more aggressive in taking on contract work (I’m a consultant but favour my discretionary time over filling every day with work). I’d pause my main project until I had a buffer again or do the new work around my project.

That aggressiveness comes from reaching out to my existing network more, stretching that network to more people and also removing things that compromise in the contract work search (bonus if they’re also sapping money). So things like Netflix, eating out regularly, or anything else that’s definitely a Want but not a Need, are put on pause as well.

But this would be a lot easier if a buffer was created first so you wouldn’t reach this situation in the first place. Or if you did then you’re prepared better for weathering it out. You build a buffer to help you financially and also mentally: build up a war chest with either savings or investment money and do things that make you uncomfortable while you have the room to do so, so they don’t make a mess of you later.