Simple Tiny House Cost of Living Comparison

Tiny house cost of living is one of the biggest draws to doing this crazy tiny house thing.

While Mrs. Epic and I were considering a tiny house at first, my biggest concern was something to the effect of, “What is the break even point of building and living in our tiny house compared to continuing with the status quo?” The status quo at the time meant continuing to pay for rent for a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom duplex with a garage and a yard.

It took us all in all about 10 months to complete our tiny house. 6 months of that included a sort of work exchange plus internet costs for rent while we were building.

I’ve run through many different calculations and projections. However, now I can actually use numbers that are valid.

Our rent and utilities where we lived in Sacramento totaled up to about $1250 per month.

As of March 2016, our rent will be $350 per month.

Our tiny house cost us around $31,000 (without the moving expenses).

Tiny House Cost of Living

You can see on the left of the image, that is the traditional cost of living expenses (big rent, big place, bigger utility bills). The right is our Tiny House Cost of Living including the cost to build.

Based on using a Google Docs Spreadsheet and running basic calculations, it’d take 33 months for the total cost of the tiny house build plus rental expenses incurred to be less than the traditional rent of a larger space.

Now, we know this is just a super simple projection. And we do plan to get into more details about tiny house cost of living breakdown and comparing it to the traditional rental style costs, but for now we’ll just put this out there.

Since we started our build while paying rent, we eventually will do a breakdown including that, best ways to reduce costs if you do not have access to reclaimed items like the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, many good craigslist finds, etc. We spent the majority of our tiny house build without access to a nearby ReStore, with horrible options on craigslist due to where we lived for the majority of our build. We still were able to find ways to reduce our overall cost even though we had to buy nearly new items for everything.