We can’t all do that, living in a cabin are you?
I bought a ~13 acre farm with a new 1,000 sq ft home. It is an entire finger of a plateau aproximately 60 feet over the valley we overlook.
IN the Seattle area I owned my own home for 20 years and lost it in a divorce 12 years ago. I’ve rented ever since and almost bought a few years ago. I thought this runup was nuts and refused to be last in on a pyramid. Also, renting gave me the ability to move at the drop of a hat. I just moved from a 5 bedroom house that was appraised at $525k but I paid $1,600 a month. I now live in a $1,050 condo across the street from my corporate office. That plus the payments on the place in Kentucky is a hair less than my rent payment was in the house, and THAT was cheap.
We leased the farm back to the original owner and we bought two calves, one each, late last winter. We slaughtered them in November and now have about 480 lbs of meat that had a total out of pocket cost of $420. The previous owner canned 75 jars of potatoes last winter that were grown on the land, beyond the other stuff they grew.
The land has a natural well.
If things collapse here, it is waiting for us. It is also where we vacation now. We have the ability to easily fly there whenever we need. Getting the time off is the only challenge. We have what is left of our five bedrooms of stuff (mostly bicycles, music equipment, records and vintage hi-fi stuff and my wife’s collectibles) in storage and plan to drive a U-haul truck there this spring. We’ll fly back and wait for the time we move there permanently, when we’ll drive there in my Scion xB. We plan to move this summer and I plan to telecommute.
But the key was that we did not own a home chaining us to a particular area.
Oh, and the farm is off a road off a road off a road off a highway. The roads around us are what Seattle bike trails aspire to be and we were on the road talking to a neighbor last fall for THREE hours and not a single car drove by. And there are STILL two wall marts and Lowe’s within 13 minutes. It cost us $98k and the US government gave us $8k back. :)