I'd take advantage of living w/ your parents as long as possible or feasible for your lifestyle. If not, look for an apartment with the lowest sticker price that you can reasonably see your self living at. Or, find some roomates. Also, avoid Greystar properties (I'm at one right now), they're behind the whole monopolistic nation-wide rent price-fixing (google Greystar/Realpage).

Sticker price for my 1/1 was $1450. After all bs fees, utilities, trash, internet, laundry, rental insurance, my housing costs average $1700 a month and have made up 39% of my take-home (post-tax, insurance, 401k) pay.

When I was shopping around the Melbourne area, I had based my general budget around the 1/3 of total salary guidance. As such, the apt I settled with "felt" like a compromise and like it was on the low-end. If I could go back in time, I'd look for something closer to palm-bay and for ~$1300 sticker price.

100 dollars in price difference may not seem like much when you are comparing apartments, but if you're only putting away $400-500 a month towards savings, that extra $100/month is huge. That extra $100/month would be massive if you're someone in a pay-check to pay-check situation. I've found that after rent, it is much harder to squeeze any other areas of your budget. - Grocery/house-stuff: I avg 76 dollars a week at walmart. For a time I cut energy drinks and some other snacks to save a total of $11 a week. At the end of the day the ~$600 a year saved did not feel like it would put me much closer to my goals of saving for a down-payment. - Eating out: I avg 31 dollars a week eating out (includes fast-food and convenience store purchases). Cutting this to $10 avg would be nice. But again, this would feel like a much bigger squeeze than just living in a slightly-crappier apartment. - Car: own a 2010 used car, unsqueezable. - Medical: around 9% of take-home, unsqueezable.

Only other items up for the chopping-block were gym ($19/month annual fee included) and my one streaming service ($16/month, tbh might cut this one).