Living Alone Is a Luxury, and the Price Shows Up in Your Budget

I'm sorry, but you don't get to complain about the cost of rent while also refusing to get a roommate. Those two things can't sit next to each other.

The cost of living crisis is real and it has gotten out of control. I'm not pretending otherwise. But I think we've forgotten that living alone is a luxury and a privilege. There is one hundred percent a premium on it, and that premium is charged in dollars every single month.

What are you actually buying with that premium? Not having to share your space. Not having to make room in the fridge for someone else. Not having to compromise on furniture or home decor. Those are real, pleasant things. They're also things you're paying for.

So the honest version of the sentence isn't "rent is impossible." It's "rent is expensive, and I've decided the extra cost of living alone is worth it to me." That's a completely allowed choice. It just has a price tag attached, and the price tag is thousands of extra dollars every single year.

I break down budgets every week, and there are consistently people telling me the budgets I look at have unrealistically low expenses. That no one actually lives like that.

Nine times out of ten, the people with those low expenses have a roommate. Or multiple roommates. Or they live with a partner in a place that's genuinely below their means.

And I want to be specific about that last part, because it's where people quietly cheat the comparison. They're not splitting a three-bedroom with their partner so they each get an office. They're splitting a studio or a one-bedroom. The low number isn't a trick or a lie. It's a housing decision that most people looking at the budget would not be willing to make.

Once you see that pattern, the budgets stop looking fake. They start looking like the result of a trade someone made on purpose.

I think expecting to live alone is a very American, very individualistic way of thinking. In most other cultures this isn't the norm at all. Nobody just assumes that adulthood means a place with your name alone on the lease.

That framing matters because of how it changes the conversation in your own head. If living alone is a baseline, then any month you can't afford it, the system has failed you and there's nothing to do. If living alone is an upgrade, then it's one line in your budget you have some control over — expensive, maybe worth it, but not fixed.

Neither framing changes your rent. One of them gives you a lever.

Where this gets frustrating for me is when people refuse to get a roommate and then also complain that they can't invest.

Because those aren't two separate problems. You're spending thousands of extra dollars a year specifically so you don't have to share a space, and then wondering where the money you'd put toward investing went. It went into the premium. That's what the premium is.

I don't think it makes anyone a bad person. Housing is emotional, and quiet is worth a lot. But if you're not willing to get a roommate, your expenses are simply going to be higher, and the sacrifices are going to show up somewhere else in your life instead. The money doesn't disappear just because we don't name the trade out loud.

We really don't like hearing that making sacrifices can help you get ahead. That it can help someone retire earlier on a lower income than you'd expect. But I'd rather say it than pretend the math works differently.

Here's the shift I care most about. When you see someone with lower expenses than yours, the instinct is to say this is impossible, nobody actually lives like this. I want you to swap that for a question instead: how do I make this possible for myself?

What could I share? What am I paying extra for, and do I actually want it enough to keep paying? What's one uncomfortable thing I could sit with for a year?

You can be a little uncomfortable in order to get ahead. That's not a punishment, and it doesn't have to be forever. A roommate isn't the only lever, and it isn't the right one for everyone — but the difference between money that goes to rent and money you're not spending on rent is usually the biggest single number in a budget, which is exactly why it's the first place I look.