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Comment by ryanmercer | Hacker News Reader

I'd be happy to just have 10 acres for my wife and I :(

If you aren't picky about location, you can have that for relatively little money. Less than $100K and sometimes with a salvageable house.

Sure, and where you can get 10 acres and a livable house for 100k or less, you can't find work .

My wife and I just spent 178k on just over a half acre + house in November. We don't get residential mail delivery, closest grocery is about 15 miles away, closest gas station abut 6 miles away. Our town is a little over 300 people, with no police, the fire department is volunteer, and if we had to call 911 for a medical emergency an ambulance is probably 15-20 minutes away. All of those sacrifices just to be able to afford a half acre.

The appraiser refused to agree to the listing price, so we had to scramble and get cash gifts from family after we'd already made an offer. Two offers before us fell through and we were in a 24-hour bid war with another potential buyer.

I make 36k a year and my wife is a public school teacher, we consider ourselves to be doing very good compared to many we know and this is the best we can do.

Here is a little less than 20 acres within a half hour of me, just land, no buildings. It is 6.91x my gross annual income. Just about no one makes land loans so I'd need to have 249,000 USD as cold hard cash just for the land, then need another 50-125k to build a house. Then I'd have to drill a well, then install septic, then get it changed from light-industrial to residential. All in I'd need 350-450k dollars to make it work. https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/7700-N-Cou...

Similarly close is this one https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/959-E-Coun... for 400k USD with 10 acres and, admittedly, an absurdly large house.

No one is going to give a guy making 36k a 400k loan, and there's no realistic way I, at 35, can realistically save 350-450k cash to buy land and build a house before I'm too old to do a lot of the initial work the land would need for my purposes.

I'd love to know why I'm being downvoted too. Is it because I don't earn as much as you so my opinion isn't valid? Is it because I wish I lived in a world where I could afford 0.004132231% of the land that Bill Gates owns?

That is expensive as fuck compared to land around me. I live near a town of 1200, you can easily get cleared land for $1500 or less per acre. Prime land here will be worth more, but mostly because it has a higher value as a prospect for non-farming expansion and housing.

For me at least, it's not just the idea of cheap land. The soil makeup, rainfall, growing zone, etc. all matter. You can go buy scrubland stupid-cheap for example, but it's not really useful for homesteading. Similarly land that was over farmed can sometimes be had dirt cheap because the soil is basically depleted and is little more than dirt.

Yeah, ultimately this is the really sad consequence of non-local land ownership. Homeownership has been put out of reach for pretty much any American.

Hell, I read here yesterday that 44% of Americans apparently make less than $18k/year.

I'd kill for 10 acres. Even 1 acre near any kind of town is currently out of my reach as a lower-paid software engineer.

> Even 1 acre near any kind of town is currently out of my reach as a lower-paid software engineer.

I'm sorry but I don't believe that, unless you have some specific personal circumstances such as very high debt or something.

If you're ready to go near any kind of town, it is absolutely possible to find 1 acre on a lower-paid SE salary.

He needs a job in a town where he can find a job. There are many towns where a lower paid SE can afford an acre of land. And the one company that hires any software people at all has 1 opening every 2 decades. They often don't know how to get word to software people who might be interested so you are unlikely to find out about that opening. Some place in the country it exists though.

> He needs a job in a town where he can find a job.

I'll assume you meant that he needs a house in a town where he can find a job.

First, this was not mentioned as a prerequisite in his post, but fair.

Second, software engineer is the job that can be done from anywhere, if your priority is to find 1+ acre of land then maybe you can put up with working remotely.

And finally, there are still plenty of towns, with jobs where buying 1 acre of land is completely possible.

Yeah, my goal is ultimately to work remotely to fund something like this. I don't even care about being 30 minutes from the nearest store... I am good at stockpiling and cooking my own stuff.

Depends on the town. I found a job in the middle of nowhere where I can afford 1 acre of land, and walk to the bus stop. I'm not a lower paid software engineer, but the lower paid ones should be able to afford the payments if they are careful.

There are not many such places in the world though. If my city was any smaller it wouldn't have bus service at all. Good luck finding one.

> I found a job in the middle of nowhere where I can afford 1 acre of land, and walk to the bus stop.

It isn't the middle of nowhere if there is a bus stop. If there is a bus stop, it's a city. Most of the United States (by inhabited area, not population) doesn't even have public transportation.

Yes it is a city. There are a lot of similar small cities scattered across the US. It isn't the bay area where there are a lot of job choices.

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