This is a big reason why me and my partner dramatically downsized our apartment and went from spending ~40% of my monthly income on rent in a downtown townhouse to literally the cheapest place we could find, which is a 2br with about a third of the square footage and is unofficially dorms for the college four minutes down the road. Most people ask what we’re studying when we give them our address even though we both graduated years ago. Rent is now less than 10% of my income. It took months of literally spamming the leasing office to get this place and in the end the only thing that worked was finding out one of my partner’s friends had another friend who lived here and was moving back home so we were able to take over the lease at the 11th month and renew it in our name.

Not saying this as advice to anyone, I understand we were pretty fortunate. I’m just saying this to tell you that living paycheck to paycheck fucking sucks. It sucks big ass fucking balls and at this point we’re just squirreling away as much money as we can and waiting for better days. We’re not giving any more money to any parasitic landlords than we have to.