You don't need to live out in the middle of nowhere by yourself to live a cheap lifestyle which affords lots of free time (to code, garden, design, etc). If you replace log cabin with Natural Building [1] and expensive air conditioning and heating with smart design [2], you can build a cheap, sustainable home for very cheap. A group of us is working on building a development of this style only a short bike ride away from Bloomington, IN - close enough to easily/cheaply get into town and alleviate boredom - all to the tune of less than $100/mo over 15-30 yrs or $10-20k down. btown cooperative living at gmail if you are interested.
Hello dwiel, I did something sort-of like this about 12 years ago. My wife and I sold our house in San Diego and moved to the mountains in Central Arizona. Definitely lower cost of living. We bought a small, very well insulated house, and except for travel (for fun) and health insurance, our living expenses are very low. We find our fun in hanging with friends, cooking, hiking, etc.
Living away from large cities == great life style. Highly recommended.
I wanted to open some dialog with you about this, but I believe your email address might be incorrect or there was an issue with how I converted it that I can't find. Care to send me a message?
just sent you a message, and the correct email is: btown cooperative village at gmail, with dots between those words. Sorry about the typo above - it looks like I can't edit it any more.
Just letting you know, I don't think the dots in gmail addresses are required. You can place them anywhere in your address and it will still get to you. Handy way to sort your inbox bases on who used which version of your email address.
The land below is the expensive part of housing in a city. Here in Bloomington, land just outside the city limits goes for around $10k/acre. Your traditional 2-3 bedroom family home will easily cost $100k.
As for a bike ride away being in town, that was my point. "You don't need to go to the middle of nowhere to live cheap." If you were referring to when I said a short ride into town, I meant going through the suburbs and into the downtown where people go and have fun here. Sorry for the confusion. Its interesting how different the definition of town/city change from place to place.
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_building
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling