Your the Director. You make good money, you’ve saved and invested, you could buy a house with cash or get it at a good interest rate if you wanted the tax advantages of letting your money grow in the markets.
Don’t you know it’s foolish to pay rent. You’re just making your landlord rich, paying his mortgage. Renting is a temporary thing you do or what you do when you have no other options because you’re poor. Did I mention it’s foolish? Think of all the money you would be saving, paying the bank and establishing equity in your own home.
You’re in your mid forties but you’re still riding your mountain bike to work most days, except when you take the bus and transfer over to the shuttle. You know like the drunkards and the poor who don’t own cars. You’re spending your weekends in the wilderness, smoking pot, drinking beer and burning shit. Listening to shitty old music. Even when it’s cold and snowy as you hate living in the city.
But I really don’t want a suburban house. I hate lawns, I hate carpeting and vinyl siding. It would be such a waste of money to buy a structure I hate, costs a ton to heat and light and I wouldn’t bother even making the most minimal of repairs because I hate it and it’s all just garbage to me.
I want a small cabin up in the wilderness wherey I can shoot and own whatever hand and long guns I want without special government permission, burn whatever garbage I want and not waste my time washing out plastic bottles and tins cans for fake recycling, have pigs, goats and any other livestock I want, grow cannabis and other feed stuffs. I don’t mind shitting in a bucket, chopping wood or fiddling around with batteries and solar as that’s that I do half the year when I’m not back in my cesspool apartment in the city!
It will happen some day. Not that far in the future. I can see my net worth increasing and my years of experience paying off at work. After all, not everybody becomes a director. The financial experts say I am a fool but they are not me. They don’t understand my love of the wilderness and the small towns, the freedom to live the life I want to live. The houses I see on Zillow are so distasteful as is everything New York State and the liberalism it all involves.
That was the words I uttered under my breath as I looked at this one house that popped up on Zillow outside of Coeymans for $250,000. Just a few meetings with a realtor, a lawyer, inspector, selling some stock and cutting a check. Ten acres, on a back road I used to explore a lot when I was in my younger years, looking at homesteads with their burn barrels and horses and cattle.
But I really don’t want it. I don’t want to have to drive to work, the commute through all those speed traps. Being trapped in a house and homestead, having goats and pigs to feed, leaky roofs and floors to replace, dealing with broken appliances and scheduling septic tank pumps, so they can haul away the shit to the local landfill.
Yet it had the acreage I was interested in and a woodstove. It would be a commute but it would be mangable. Yet it also was New York State. It was rural, so I could have livestock, I could have fires, though I’d have to a bit careful what I tossed into the fires lest neighbors start complaining about the smoke. I could build my dream homestead, add solar, get a quad to ride trail and a tractor to work the land. But it’s also kind of rocky, marginal ground, though if I brought in some organic matter like food scraps and grain and hay to feed livestock, I could build the soil up.
And the thing is buying now would block future plans. It’s true you can sell property, and that property gains value over time, but there is also the cost of commuting, maintaince of property, taxes. As an asset class it’s not very deversified. It’s not clear if I bought land today, if I could easily sell it and move out west eventually where there is more freedom to own guns and burn debris. I’m not sure if even want a grid tied property, O r all that technical equipment modern houses require.
Raising pigs for meat is a great idea for most homesteaders. Every year we raise pigs for our own family and to sell to our local community.
I was watching this video the other day, it has an interesting perspective on the economics of raising hogs on a homestead. Like most things relating to farming and homesteading, pigs aren't cheap but they produce a lot of delicious meat. Neighbors had hogs growing up and Cam Edwards of the NRA makes me hungry every time he talks about the heritage hogs he raises. Pigs aren't cheap but they sure are tasty even though you do want to have a fair bit of land to raise them as I can tell you they sure can smell as they root around in fermented grain.
I would definitely use such hillshade data when considering to buy a piece of land, to get a better idea of what its like then what just an aerial photo or map shows. LiDAR see through trees and bushes, it gives a lot more information then you might get without a very detailed survey of a property.
