Live on Year-One Pay and Finish the Apprenticeship

Quick answer: Build your budget on the first-year wage, not the journeyman scale you're working toward. Keep housing plus commute under about a third of take-home. The cheapest rent isn't the cheapest life if it comes with a 45-minute drive each way.

The wage is a ramp

Most registered apprenticeships pay a percentage of the journeyman rate and step it up on a schedule, often every six months or every thousand hours or so. Starting percentages, step sizes and the journeyman rate itself vary by trade, by state, and by whether the program is union or not. Your program should hand you the wage schedule in writing. Ask for it before you sign anything, including a lease.

Now take a made-up number. Say you start at $18 an hour. That's about $37,000 a year before taxes, and call it $2,400 a month in your pocket. Your state could move that figure a few hundred dollars either way.

That's the money you're living on for the first year. The raise in month seven is real, but it doesn't pay month three's rent.

Most guys who wash out of an apprenticeship don't quit because the work is too hard. They quit because the math stopped working: a truck payment, a lease signed on optimism, and a paycheck that's always short by the last week. The work is hard, but men have been learning it for centuries. The budget is what breaks people.

Option one: stay home, and do it right

If your parents have room and are willing, this is the strongest play in the book. A few years of near-zero rent is how some apprentices walk out of the program with a down payment and no debt.

Do it like a man, not like a boarder.

• Pay rent. Even if your folks say they don't want it. Two or three hundred a month is enough to make it a real arrangement, and they can quietly bank it for you if they like.
• Do the work around the house without being asked. Fix the porch step. Change the furnace filter. You're learning a trade, so use it.
• Tell them your schedule. If you leave at 5:15 a.m., they should know, and they shouldn't be woken by it.

And set a date. "Until I finish the second year" is a plan. "Until things settle" is a drift.

If home isn't an option, or it's a three-hour drive from the work, move on.

Option two: a room, not an apartment

A rented room in a house, or a shared place with one or two other guys, usually beats a one-bedroom on your own. You split the utilities, the internet, and the bad winter heating bill.

Choosing roommates is a bigger decision than choosing the place. A few rules:

• Pick someone who gets up for work too. A guy on a night schedule will cost you sleep, and a tired apprentice is a hazard on a jobsite.
• Put the lease, or at least the rent split, in writing. Friends who "work it out" end up not speaking.
• Think twice about living with a coworker on your crew. It can work. But when the boss has a bad week, you'll carry it home, and so will he.
• Never co-sign for a roommate. If his name is the only one on the lease, he's the one on the hook.

Leave the place better than you found it. Clean the bathroom without a chore chart. Replace what you use up. Pay your share before the first of the month, not on it. The guys who live this way get invited to stay, get decent references, and get a landlord who fixes the water heater the same week.

Option three: follow the work, with a plan

Some trades pull you around the map. Lineman crews, pipeline welders, and industrial contractors often work away from home, sometimes with per diem or lodging covered. Done right, that can mean very low living costs because you're sleeping in a company-arranged room or an RV and spending almost nothing. Read The Lineman Paycheck Is Real and So Is the Price before you chase it. The money is real, and so is the time away from home.

A few cautions if you travel:

• Keep your permanent address and your tax picture straight. How per diem and lodging are treated is a question for a tax professional, not a guy at the job.
• Don't pay rent on an empty apartment back home for months on end. Either sublet it or don't sign it.
• If you're married or have kids, talk it through before you take the job, not after. Money earned at the cost of a family is a bad trade.

The commute is the hidden rent

Rural rent looks cheap until you add the drive.

Take 40 miles each way. That's 80 miles a day. In a truck that gets 15 miles to the gallon with gas at four dollars, it's about $21 a day, which is north of $400 a month in fuel alone. Add tires, oil changes, and the slow wear on a vehicle you can't afford to replace. (Use your own mileage and your own gas price. The point is the shape of the math.)

A $900 apartment ten minutes from the shop can easily beat a $600 place an hour away.

And there's a safety cost. You'll put in ten hours on your feet, then drive home on a tank of fumes. Drowsy driving after a long shift is one of the real dangers of this life, and nobody puts it on the safety poster. If you're nodding off at red lights, the apartment is too far.

Some union programs have a training center or hall that sets where you report. Others dispatch you to jobs across a wide area. That's part of choosing union or non-union, and it affects where you can sensibly live. Ask where recent apprentices have actually been sent.

What else eats the budget

Housing gets the attention, but a few other items sink apprentices:

• A truck you can't afford. A reliable, paid-off older vehicle beats a new payment every time. If you need to buy one, check out our advice on buying tools first, because you'll need those too.
• Boots and gear. Buy them once and buy them right. A $200 pair that lasts two years beats a $90 pair that wrecks your feet.
• Lunch. Five days a week at the gas station is easily a couple hundred dollars a month. Pack it the night before.

Do the monthly budget on paper before you sign any lease. Rent, utilities, fuel, insurance, phone, food, tools, and something left over. If the something is zero, find a cheaper place.

Know when to move up

When you step up a wage tier, resist the urge to upgrade your life that same month. Run the new number for six months. Bank the difference. By the time you top out as a journeyman, you want to have a cushion, not a lifestyle that already ate the raise.

You're not trying to live cheap forever. You're trying to live cheap for about four years so the next forty are yours. If you want to still be standing for them, read Work Forty Years in the Trades Without Wrecking Your Body.

Keep your rent boring and your paycheck bigger than your bills, and you'll finish. Plenty of guys with more talent won't.