Stay.
There is
nothing that will set you back more than having no money and a list of mandatory expenditures.
Let me guess -- you don't pay for rent, food, clothing? If you're forced to pay for rent, food, clothing, etc., then your parents aren't providing you anything you can't already provide for yourself. Find friends and a place to live ASAP.
But chances are you aren't paying anything or, if you are, are not paying much. You are a homeless guy who is being given a place to live.
Having verbally abusive parents/friends sucks and can be a huge mental drain. Going to work 9-5 at a ****ty job you hate is also a huge mental drain, but people do it everywhere because they know it is better than the alternative: poverty.
Treat life like an RPG.
If you have trouble in an RPG, what do you do? Do you "try harder"? Do you just gamble and roll the dice? Hell no. You
grind.
What happens if you grind
before you have trouble? Go ahead, pick up
any RPG ever and sit there and level up for a few hours. You're suddenly level 15 when they expect you to be level 5. It was boring doing the grind, it sucked, but now you're powerful and are breezing through the "challenges". You're at that stage.
That is life. Grinding and delaying gratification to increase the odds of a good outcome. When I graduated from college in 2009, I had a whopping 2 job prospects -- I wanted to be a teacher. English and education. 2009 was not the best year for this. I lived at home for a year. Many days were spent just wasting time playing video games, reading books, etc. It was fun, but not productive. I waited until I could find a "good job" because I knew I had the skills, there just weren't the openings. I found a decent job and I drove an hour to work
every day, there and back, and saved as much money as I could. I then found roomates -- two of them, and was able to get an apartment we shared that cost only $300/month + utilities for me due to the rent sharing arrangement. I scrimped and saved, then I got a house and had the roomates move in to help pay the mortgage and save even more money. I have twins on the way in September and I STILL have two roomates in my house!
I gave myself every advantage possible and now I've got tens of thousands saved up, not from making a ton of money but from making sacrifices. I have a huge safety net because I neglected my "wants" in favor of putting myself in a good position.
In your position you have no car and no money. Leaving is the stupidest thing you could
ever do unless you can sit down and do the math and find out that "hey, I'd save money".
That's what I did when I got my apartment. I did the math. "Hey, I'm paying $X a month in gas on average over the past Y months, but an apartment with two roomates would cost less than X".
Same with a house.
It's
math. Advantages. Sacrifices. It's a game. It's binary. Winning, losing. Set a goal, reach a goal, set another. Emotional state has a price, it can be worth it or not worth it.
Would you live with your parents for 5 more years if someone gave you one million dollars? Yeah, of course you would. I'd live with a guy who tried to sucker punch me in the gut every day for a million dollars. Now you know there's a price, you're just haggling on how much it is worth staying with your parents.
The touchy-feely stuff of "I want privacy", "I want to get away from mean people", "I want to be my own man", etc., are all distractions. You can't hold them, touch them, because they aren't
real. They are
perception.
You can change your perception if you need to, but more importantly you can change your position and make your perception irrelevant.
I mean, you're 21. You might think that's old, but
your brain isn't done forming itself until you are 25. You literally lack the networking in your noggin' that helps you with long-term planning.
So I'll do it for you.
Here's what you do:
- Do the math. Do you save money by leaving, or does it cost you money?
If you can leave and save money, go for it. Whatevs. Chances are you don't.
- Compare your income to expenditures. Are you able to save roughly 50% of your income? If not, you aren't making enough or are spending too much.
Find new revenue streams or decrease spending. And don't say you can't decrease spending. I eat one meal a day to save $5-$10 a day, resulting in savings of $1300 a year. I make that sacrifice because $1300 a year ($5 a day, 5 days a week at work) is a whopping $39,000 after 30 years of working. It's a new car on retirement. That **** adds up.
- Evaluate your ability to find a job.
Have you contacted recruiting companies? They get paid to place you somewhere. Get a job, any job, and move foward. Don't take burger-flippin' jobs unless you absolutely have to -- you want jobs that expand your skillset. Just know that it can sometimes be easier to get two minimum wage jobs than one job that pays twice as much. Two jobs for a short time period = car. Car = freedom.
- Evaluate your skillset
You are 21 and unemployed, so I'm guessing your skillset is fairly limited. You need to increase your skillset somehow. If you can't find a job and don't have a car, it may be that you need to volunteer. Ask parents for help if possible. Even if they are verbally abusive, whatever. You could hate your parents and they can still be useful.
- Set a goal
You need a car, right? I'm assuming public transportation is out of the question. Figure out exactly how much you expect to need. You'll get a used car, it'll have $X in repairs per year, $Y in gas per month, eventually need larger expenditures (tires replaced), etc. You'll have to make sure you have all that income available.
You might not even need a car, I dunno. Assuming you can't bike places or use public transportation.
You want to know how to leave your parents with no income? You can't. Not safely. You gotta find a job and be freakin' good at it.
There are tons of **** jobs out there you can get if need be. Look in classifieds of newspapers, they often have jobs for people who aren't super qualified for others -- this is great for people just looking to enter the workforce. Find recruiters, find side-jobs. Find work! Get money.
money is freedom, mobility
If all your problems can be solved by having more money, then trade your time for money. I mean if you are unemployed and sitting at home then chances are you aren't able to use all your time that productively. Get two jobs and make your life suck for a year. Average of $14/hour is $28,000. That's a car. One year = one car.
"But how will I get to a job if I don't have a car?! This is chicken and egg stuff!"
****in... walk. Bicycle. Carpool. Bus. Parents.
Hell, do Amazon mechanical turk. You'll do a bunch of tedious **** and make an average of $4/hour for the first month or two until you get flowing and then maybe you can start doing audio transcription for closer to $10/hour all from home.
Point is, find something and don't ask yourself if it is what you "want" to do or if it is even remotely interesting. Find money. Find income. When you have money, you can get a car. When you get a car, you can get jobs that are farther away after you have a decent safety net.
That "safety net" thing is the most important, and it is why you can't just get a car on a loan and then get an apartment expecting your income to cover it.
You get your apartment and a car and a job all at the same time and you're sittin' pretty, suddenly you get sick. Miss work. Get fired. Now what?
Hit a pothole, require $1200 in repairs on a $1500 ****ty car you bought. What now?
Some ******* breaks into your car and steals your phone you left inside. You have a broken window and phone. Can you afford this?
Safety net! Imagine how safe you would be if you had about a year of expenditures saved up.
You pay $450 a month in rent/utilities and have maybe another $150 a month on average in expenditures (food, gas, etc.), total of $600 a month in mandatory expenditures. Add another $100 on top and make it $700, because there's always oddball expenses.
$700 * 12 = $8400
If the above was your expenditures, you'd need around $8400 to have a full year of safety. This means that if you hit a pothole and need $1200 in repairs, you have options. You can repair, get a new car, whatever, and
you aren't set back anything but time. No loss of mobility. You just save a bit more aggressively until you are back to that $8400.
Oh no, lose your job(s)?
Get a new one, you've got a year.
Oh ****, you found a job but it pays half of what you got before, what do you do?
Well you've got $8400 in the bank and are earning half of what you did before, so you can now stretch your new income and your savings out for two years. That's two years to find additional income or decrease spending.
Compare this to "I hit a pothole and need $1200 in repairs and have $200 in my bank account". Congratulations! You can't fix your car, lose your job, lose your apartment, and are back in with your parents. That's after scrimping and saving to get a car for a whole year, undone by a hole in the ground because you did too much too fast.
Find money. Save money, get a safety net. Then move forward.
You'll live -- people have always had it worse somewhere. As long as you aren't actually in physical danger, you'll be fine.
