Seattle and its surrounding cities have among the highest minimum wages in the entire world (~$22/hour). You're maybe not renting a studio apartment by yourself but it is far from destitution.
In one of my least favorite games of all time, Final Fantasy II, it was possible to reset the "steps remaining until random battle" number by entering the menu and healing a character without full HP.
The number was actually stored in the save file, so you could just count steps until you entered a random battle, reload the system, and take n-1 before healing to completely avoid encounters. I expect this was purposeful because the battle system was so tedious and the encounter rate was obnoxiously high.