I am living in rural upstate NY close to a college town and bought a 70 acre farm for a fraction of what a small ranch house costs in the Bay Area. My wife teaches people to ride horses, her business is probably the most profitable horse operation I know of because (1) it was bootstrapped up from 2 horses to 8 and (2) we never bought large amounts of heavy equipment; the average horse barn has a big-ass truck and a horse trailer, we can pay somebody to haul a horse somewhere for a fraction of the monthly payment on a big-ass truck. We have two houses on the lot and get usually get rental income from two units in the second house (though we are renovating it now and I'm using it to gentle a feral cat right now)

I've had some terrible years where I ran up $20k of AWS bills and had no income, I did run up a balance on my HELOC which I later paid off. The good years paid for the bad years, I consistently put money into retirement funds except for the absolutely worst years. I always had health insurance except for a summer that I worked at a web dev shop that didn't offer it.