Dahon.Steve

+10000000000000

A house is a money pit big time. i like but don't love being a home owner anymore. However, I'm living the American dream but it's a huge price to pay.
i enjoy watching YouTube and seeing all the gypsy's living in vans, motor homes and campers. i have to admit that I'm green eyed envious of this lifestyle and this is from someone who is carfree for life! Maybe some day. ;-(

Mobile 155

Sometimes the simpler life is or seems like the easier life. But you need to be willing to accept the limits of that life.

Sometimes we only see the benefits and disadvantages to things because of the condition we have worked ourselves into. Walter used his property to make money. So they are hardly a big money pit in his case. What also works is to buy a entry level house, live in it till you can afford a second home. Rent out the first home and charge enough to make the payments and a bit more. Stay in the second home and wait for the price of homes to increase. That was touchy between 2008 and 2016. Anyway sell the second home when you can make a profit. Example buy at 60k sell at 120k. Put all of the 60K you made on the second home into the third. If you deal well you can get a bigger home in a better area for the same 120k if the seller is motivated. Stay in that home for a few years till you can retire Or if the market is to your benefit ell and invest the profit. As soon as the very first home you rented out is close to being paid off sell the last home, pay off all of your debts. Fix up your first place and retire. You will have a pretty good monthly check coming in and then you can take the next step.

If you decide you want to get a Class RV as long as it is financed and has a kitchen and bathroom you can claim the interest as a second home. It will reduce your cost if you decide to travel this beautiful country. Yes it took a lot of planning and self control but it works. By the way the same thing works if you are thinking of Sailing or living on a boat. All it takes is a galley and a head and you can claim it as a second home.

If anyone is thinking about taking a RV and traveling I can assure you I have never hear anyone tell me they are sorry they traveled so much or sailed for a few years before coming back to their paid for home. It is just that you have to make these decisions just about as soon as you enter the workforce, at least I did. My son and daughter are doing the RV thing now and they are years ahead of where I was at their age.

jon c. 

I own a small house and it has saved me a huge amount over paying rent all those years. Sure, there are occasional maintenance expenses, but over time those costs are far less than rent. Even when I had a mortgage, there was a never a year in which the payments plus any expenses were not less than I would have spent on renting anything comparable. Not that I could likely find anything really comparable as I live on couple of heavily wooded acres and that's hard to find in the rental market. Buying a house was the best financial decision I ever made.

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indyfabz

Same here. I have a relatively small, two story, worker bee rowhouse in Philly. Before I bought it I was paying $800/month for a one bedroom "box car" apartment on the first floor of a duplex owned by a couple who lived on the upper two floors, and that was on the low side. At the time, an apartment in the same area comparable to the house I bought (which is near where I was renting) would have been at least twice that rent. It's even worse now. I think my mortgage was around $1,150/month. Another advantage was that I got away from the crazy wife who would come home drunk sometimes and hit on me.

Not to mention the fact that you now have equity. You can sell the place and recoup at least some of the money you laid out. Not so with an apartment. And to those who say "But when you own a house, you have to pay property tax and maintenance" here is a little secret. Unless the person who owns your apartment is an numbskull or you are in a very special arrangement (e.g., living in a duplex owned by an old couple simply looking for a little extra income), the owner has factored those amounts into the rent. So you are paying the owner's property taxes and routine upkeep costs. Moreover, the owner can offset taxable income with any maintenance expenses.

CliffordK

Interesting question. I have been living car free out of a house, and can easily do supply runs for 10 to 20 miles each way. Or, I could imagine parking, and heading out for a mini tour by bike.

I'm not sure a single person would benefit from the largest Class A motorhomes. Perhaps the mid sized Class C.

Fifth wheels have both costs and benefits. You can always unhitch and do a quick run somewhere.

There are some combination Toy Hauler vehicles that you could build a small workshop in back. That might well appeal to me. Have good indoor storage for the bike, bike trailer, bike tools, etc.

Another option is to pull a utility trailer behind your motorhome. Pretty much any size can pull a trailer. Mom has a small camper van which she pulls a horse trailer with.

You could haul auxiliary tanks for water or sewage in the trailer too. Although I'd be tempted to haul say 50 extra gallons of fresh water, but hunt for ways to minimize sewage use and disposal. For example, using other facilities as much as possible.

Do any of these campers also have grey water systems? So, you can say re-use washing water as flushing water? Of course, the best will be very water stingy anyway.

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JoeyBike

And now you are a landlord with income property to manage and maintain. This is still work. But I agree that owning something as a BUSINESS that is generating income is almost always good. I would own a car if I felt like renting it out or driving people around all day. I would own a house or two if the plan was to hire a management company to deal with all the work and the tenants. But I absolutely HATE owning a living space that is permanently attached to the ground. It's just not how humans were designed to live, nor how the Earth was designed to maintain us.

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350htrr

Humans were "designed" to live as nomads, hunter gatherers, living in small groups... The earth easily accommodated that... We are now more like the locusts... Guess what, every now and then, the earth swats down the locusts and everything goes on like normal for millions of years for the locusts... We, on the other hand started to live like locusts and we will be swatted down too... Even tho we think we are the most "successful", the "smartest", and the earth is "giving" us everything we want to take, but, the reckoning is coming, even tho most people do not seem to believe that theory…

I-Like-To-Bike

Is this your idea of Living Car Free Philosophy or just another off-the-wall P&R product of untethered critical thinking?

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350htrr

Just my "critical" thinking... Theory.

350htrr

Nomadic, yes, but, tenting would be so much more sustainable for the human race to live, for lets say the next 1,000,000 years, to become as/comparable to be close to becoming as "successful" as locusts ... No,? How long has the human race been around...? Maybe 100,00 years, ? or maybe 6,000 thousand for some...

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350htrr

RVs are great, but they do cost more than the earth can spare, same with cars, same with feeding 10billion people, same with everyone on earth trying to live like the average person in the first world... Yea, it sucks but there it is, a fact in my book but a non starter in many other peoples thinking...

Mobile 155

You may have a point. But the fact is we are where we are and we will not be able to stop or reverse what happened in the past. If the Caldera in Yellowstone goes off it goes off. If a Comet hits Africa we cannot stop it. So you might as well enjoy life as you find it. Getting a RV will not hurt or help the big picture and living in a tent will not change a thing. So it comes down to humans were designed to do just as humans have always done, try to change the world to the way they want it.


So none of that has anything to do with getting and using a Class A RV and seeing what they can of the world while it is still here to see.


Hunter gatherers couldn't help starving children in another country or give assistance after a Hurricane, Earthquake or flood. Maybe we were designed for more than just existence?

Walter S

Actually I'm at the bottom of the big money pit. It keeps getting bigger all the time. Every month my tenants throw more in

Quite true. This is not a get rich quick scheme. Instead it is a scheme that has a reasonable chance at success.

LIFE is work. Virtually anybody will have a disappointing life without accepting that. In my case the amount of work on my part personally has gone way down over the years as I've built a positive cashflow and can hire more of it out. At this point I could hire a management company too and be less involved but I would rather continue to make the pie bigger by working. But the real reward comes when you SELL. Then it becomes apparent that your tenants have been working for years to buy you a nice retirement with plenty of money and now in your aging years, an easier life.

You can do the work while you're young and strong or you can suffer when you're old and weak. The burden of work is there regardless. By doing it while young I build wealth that is leveraged against the entire remainder of my life. By avoiding work till you're old, you skirt by from one crisis to another for decades, you lack the wealth to help out your family or community, and then die young or old the hard way when that final crisis arrives.

Of course rental real estate is not the only way to invest and build a good retirement. I find some things uniquely good about it that fit me personally better. Real estate is "real", which makes your investment more real. Everybody wants houses and that remains true when the economy and stock market go belly up. And the investment is more personal. I've provided my tenants with good houses and kept them well maintained over the years and had a personal relationship with their families etc. and seen my positive impact there. That is "real" and gives me a positive feeling about my value to my community. My houses were run down when I bought them. Now they show off a much better neighborhood than when I started this some 25 years ago. Because of my work.

Work can be a big burden. The outcome of work can be a much bigger reward. Of course it might not go like that. Work can also be a bigger burden than any reward if any. You have to pick the right things to work on and there's also no assurance that because it has worked well for other people, that it will for you too. Does that mean you should do as little work as possible and hope for the best? I think not. The failure to meet life's challenges head on leaves you with an increasingly dim chance of success. Nothing in life comes without risk.

But it's not for everybody! The last thing I want to do is succeed at convincing my tenants that renting is a bad idea

tandempower

Humans have lived on Earth for many millennia, only a few of which we recognize as 'history.' We don't know how many of those people living in small, makeshift structures were happy and how many were miserable, but we know their individual/household choices constituted the building blocks of their net collective effects on the environments they lived in and the future of their species and others.

To say that individual choices don't hurt or help the big picture ignores the fact that ultimately, despite all our networking capabilities, we humans are individuals making choices at the individual level. Those choices may appear to add up to collective patterns, and individuals may base their choices on the patterns they see, but there is no level of authority that truly controls the collective patterns that doesn't operate by getting individuals to cooperate in the choices they make for the sake of achieving the desired collective effects.

As long as you deny that individual choices make a difference, you're denying the fundamental cause of collective patterns and effects. It's like saying that a single tree growing or dying for whatever reason doesn't make or break a forest, but how can any tree in a forest grow or die except as an individual tree surrounded by other individuals?

Walter S

That assumes a designer and a purpose - neither of which may be real except in your mind.

JoeyBike

Big difference. When I was renting an efficiency apartment everything I owned would fit into a minivan. So I was "virtually" not attached to the ground. If I got a job across town, I moved over there. I went to school in another town, I moved over there. If my neighborhood was burning to the ground, I don't really care so long as I get out of there. I have nothing to lose and no reason to go back and clean up a mess and start over. I am FREE of that attachment to that ONE SPOT completely.

All of these things you mention are transient things. I don't have to worry, maintain, insure, protect any of that stuff.

Walter S

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JoeyBike

My parents gave birth to me when they were very young. Mom was 18, dad 20. All my father ever talked about was all of the things he would do when he retired. They saved and saved and saved. Dad died at 48 years of age. Still, no doubt, thinking of all the things he planned on doing when he retired. Then my mom had 3 kids to raise (I was out of the nest just barely). She was broke in 5 years.

Everything is a gamble. But I know this much: I got all the fun stuff done when I was young and fit. I could die today without regrets, in fact, if I died today I totally beat the system! Worst case scenario, it only takes two weeks to starve to death. I traded 30 awesome years doing whatever I wanted for those two weeks. I'll report back after Week 1 of the starving if it goes that way. I got mine. Good luck all!

Walter S

buAbsolutely. No guarantees. But just like you might die young regardless, you might instead live a long life with the opportunity to enjoy it well if you manage it right. You can have "a lot" of fun while you're young and still build a good retirement and with some luck live it out. I enjoyed growing up and visiting my grandfather on his farm where he retired and died pretty quietly at 96 after a long happy life in relative comfort. He didn't work much after 50. That left room for almost a 2nd life for him.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
Here’s how to cut your life costs in half. Start by getting rid of your Debt Emergency if you have one. Live close to work. Move to another city if you enjoy adventure. Don’t borrow money for cars, and don’t buy stupid ones. Ride a bikewherever you can. Cancel your TV service. Stop wasting money on groceries. Give your kids the opportunity to achieve greatness without being pampered. Lose the overpriced cell phones. Learn to appreciate the life-boosting joy of using your own body to get things done. Learn to mock convenience. Practice optimism.