Comment by delbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delbel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've been able to do this after re-arranging my life over the past 5 years. I bought 7 acres of bare land for $35k and built a 200 sqft tiny house for $4,000. I homestead as much as I can and my bills are approximately $40/DSL, $40/Electrical, $35/Car insurance (I drive a 90s Honda), and approximately $30 a month in property taxes. I spend about $40 in propane for heat in the winter and my air conditioning bill is an extra $15/month in the summer. I'm halfway between Portland and San Francisco and do telecommute node.js/angular work. I'm saving up to build a nice house and a this summer backhoe. Some projects I'm working on this summer include a biodigester to supplement my propane for cooking gas, a rocket mass heater to eliminate my propane, a backyard blacksmiths area, drip irrigation and cistern system, and more fencing for livestock. My property search took me several years and I had no experience in construction but learned most of it from youtube and asking friends. I lived in a camper trailer while I built my place. So to answer your question, about $200 a month is the cheapest I can survive on.

$35k for bare land? In Detroit, $35k gets you a lot with a newly renovated, 3 bedroom, 2 bath house. Random example at $37k: http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/487-W-Green...

Edit: I can just keep going and going with nicely livable ~40k houses in Detroit:

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/13111-Grigg...

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/17593-Monic...

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/427-W-Green...

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/18461-Sorre...

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/5510-Three-...

... not sure if this is sad or awesome ...

Except you'd be in Detroit. :-)

I wonder if there is a huge hidden accumulation of unpaid property taxes the buyer would be on the hook for.

There likely isn't and risk to the buyer. These houses were most likely foreclosed or abandoned.

Detroit is auctioning off houses and lots that have not been paid up to the highest bidder by the dozens. These were likely purchased super cheap for flipping, and now being resold.

Detroit has a real problem with the city services right now, and as a result of the lack of services, and large land sales houses are SUPER cheap.

I'm curious as to the social angle on this. Do you get lonely out there, are friends primarily on line, is your partner (if applicable) happy with this situation, etc?

I ask because I've always dreamed of a life of simplicity similar to what you've got setup, but the thing that stops me is the possible isolation.

My friends generally broke down into three groups, those who were to busy to hang out because of their career, their family, or they were into bad situations I didn't want to get involved with (drugs, alcohol, wrong crowd). This wasn't the case in my 20s but now that I'm in my 30s this is just how it went down. Ultimately sitting behind a desk paying a mortgage for 30 years outweighed the social aspect of being lonely right now in my life. But visiting Portland is like going on vacation in my home town and I plan on buying a rental with a garage apartment just for me to have a home base when I'm in town. With all the financial freedom I have I see this in a few years. But yes, my partner wasn't 100% down with the move, regrettably didn't move with me. Also watching friends gather and text message each other in the same room was a funny moment for me.

You're living my dream.

I haven't been able to do what you're doing because remote work is hard to find. Because remote work has been so difficult to find, I've been hesitant to go all out like you have. I scouted all sorts of places and have not been able to get the variables to all work out.

I hang around the outskirts of cities and cobble together a living, and I go into the city for meetups. If I were doing what you were doing, I'd be scared because of the effort it would take to just hit the pavement and go talk to people who could offer me work.

Have you gone through job changes yet?

Remote work can be pretty easy to negotiate with smaller businesses. If you want to be a lead engineer for a fortune 500, good luck. But if you want to be the sole Admin for 1 or 2 small businesses and work remotely and only come in to install routers and such, it suddenly becomes MUCH easier to find.

You may take a pay cut, you work may become a little less interesting, but thats the tradeoff. I did just this and I think it was WELL worth it, life is slower paced, cheaper, I now have the flexibility to work from any location I want, Im headed to Cancun for two weeks next month for work... life is rough.

That's really cool and probably exactly what I was looking for. Sounds about as cheap as you can go.

How expensive was it to get any utilities hooked up to your property, or was that already taken care of when you bought the land?

The utilities a power pole and a well, were already on the property when I bought it. But the original costs were $6,500 to dig the well and approximately $5,000 to install and green tag the power pole. If you can get your total wattage usage down, you could easily go off the grid with the newer 430 watt solar panels and LiFePO4 batteries. Its almost an impulse buy for me and definitely something I want to do this summer. I got lucky but spent 5 years searching for my property. But, you can find properties with burned down mobile homes that have utilities already setup.

Very cool, do you have any suggestions as far as finding and purchasing cheap land?

I was very fortunate that my father was a real estate broker, although he is no longer around I gained some really good tricks for my real estate purchase. First off, scout the areas you want to live. A lot of times real estate isn't listed on the local RMLS site (or if it is, might be incorrect information). Second strategy get a tax plot map. Look for property owners who are out of state and send them a offer letters. Craigslist, Zillow alert and other sites have been pretty helpful for leads as well. Third, pay attention to what other properties are selling. If everyone in the neighborhood is selling, there has to be a reason. Buy where nobody wants to sell. Finally, out of pure luck I bought my property on auction.com and was the final bidder without even looking at the property (there are ways to back out of a deal, my dad told me all the tricks :). The property information just happen to be wrong, it was the wrong zoning, address, acreage, etc. This was probably because it was in the holiday season. The Realtor assigned to the property didn't know anything about it. Because I did a title search before placing my bid, I knew more about it then they did! And because I scouted the area well, I knew approximately what I was expecting. I also knew that buying property during the holiday season (thanksgiving to new years) is the best possible time as far as I can tell. Generally home values go up in the summer and down in the winter. I also played the 2008 recession, but values didn't go down as much as I expected, but it helped. And no I didn't buy a property way out in nowhere, I'm about 20 minutes away from the Redwood Forest, 45 minutes from the coast, and 30 miles away from a Home Depo/Walmart. Regretfully, the nearest Trader Joe's is over an hour and a half away. :)

Just look where there aren't people. This is one click from the first hit for "norcal land sales" (selecting the lowest price bracket):

http://www.landwatch.com/default.aspx?ct=r&type=5,30;268,684...

What about food?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com