Am I missing something? Is this my ticket to cheap housing and a more stress free life? At what point am I going to be scammed and/or disappointed?
When you work from home, you wanna leave home often, where do you go if you're in the middle of nowhere?
I work from home in the middle of a dense city, pay a premium for it! You leave home and there are about 100 places (cafes, theatres, museums, parks etc.) I can go to that are walking distance. Is that possible in say rural Michigan, where housing is apparently practically free?
It's (probably) not just you, but at the same time working from home for me, a full-time worker who has a boss that takes the "as long as you get your work done" approach to remote work, which results in me in the office one day, but the very next deciding "yeah I'm not dealing with the blue line's crap today"...rarely comes with the urge to get up and go anywhere and usually don't unless it's to walk the dog or take a smoke break on my porch.
And I live and work in the middle of Chicago, where there's no shortage of places favorable to remote workers or walkable spots for lunch very close by.
But at the same time I've also found myself in Hawaii getting paged for an all hands "oh shit" emergency and been just as productive despite the time difference, so I think it's very much a YMMV type of thing.
Groceries are can be delivered. The only reason to drive to town is the odd meetup.
Could I ask you a bit more about Northland? My email is in my profile.
For me it is hiking and sometimes kayaking.
It's not city life, but it's life. It's just a little bit "slower" sometimes. It can be relaxing in its own way.
I mean, I live in the core of SF, but how often do I go to the theater or museum anyway? No more than I did when I lived in the suburbs.
Heh not unique to Texas. I've seen horses outside of strip malls just outside of Indy -> http://imgur.com/gallery/i1Rflum
Just because you're remotely based in the sticks and use property there as a place to park equity and a place to keep your big stuff (I have a lot of tools and music equipment) doesn't mean you have to stay there if you're remote.
I've been to a lot of the state parks (there are some good ones). The dinosaur tracks in government canyon are cool, lost maples is nice. I've spent a whole lot of time at Enchanted Rock.
None of the places is very big, but if there should be enough to keep someone busy for most weekends if they are motivated.
As you get farther, Mustang Island state park is nice, and I'm very much looking forward to build some lead rock climbing skills-- El Portrero Chico is only 6 hours south.
As other folks have mentioned, Big Bend, Terrlingua, MArfa, Alpine, etc. are all quite good. If you haven't been to Big Bend NP, I'd recommend a trip out that way.
If you can go 9hrs, Ruidoso NM will get you into the mountains.
It was fairly isolated (in a comforting way), so having access to an automobile was a necessity. If I recall, about ~1 hour to Austin, with a lively music scene.
I learned how the Texas hill country can be quite charming - wildflowers, forests, rivers.. Fond memories. Good luck with finding a homestead there!
I can't imagine trying to live out here without a car or truck though.
That situation is literally my dream. I live in a suburb now and literally go 3-4 days without needing to leave home. I most often leave to go get firewood or meat to BBQ out back.
In my dream I'd be on a full acre(instead of the little 0.2 acre lot we're on) with enough room for a normal family home, and a "mancave/study" so I "go to work".
My wife dragged me kicking and screaming to a rural area that's a popular vacation area.
(I must admit that I wanted to end up in a different rural area that's also a popular vacation area.)
My neighborhood is excellent, and there's plenty to walk to. Rural areas still have dense spots with plenty of things to do. There's just a lot of open forests around the dense areas!
What's terrifying is that I still telecommute for the job I got when I lived in Silicon Valley. I have no idea what's going to happen when I need to change jobs.
(Edit) I still miss living right on University Ave in Palo Also, CA. But, that's not sustainable given how much it costs to live there, and our (me and wife's) overall lifestyle desires.
What would patio11 say?
Charge more.
There are old or abandoned houses nearby that can be had for very little money.
I love being in the mountains. I get outdoors for cycling, hiking, running, or skiing almost every day.
The language barrier is a bit scary, but fortunately I knew enough to get by on day-to-day tasks. Google translate is also a godsend.
I have no idea why anything other than N2 and N1 exist. N3 is basically useless, I got it in under 6 months of studying and I’m a slow learner (my Korean and Chinese peers were going for N2 at that time). I still couldn’t function well with it. I was so disappointed by it I skipped 2 and went straight to N1.
The company I work for has offices in the U.S. and Japan. They were able to transfer me to Japan and let me work remote with my team in the U.S. They probably would have been able to get me a work visa, too, though it wasn't necessary in my case since the spousal visa was much simpler to obtain. Since my company has a presence in Japan, all of typical payroll, benefits, insurance stuff is handled through the Japan HR dept.
For anyone looking to spend time living abroad, I think this approach of working for a large multinational and asking to be transferred is a viable option. Of course it requires that you have a tremendous level of trust with your manager, and you need to be senior enough that it is worth the hassle for them. Also - if there is no business justification for the transfer, don't expect them to help out with relocation costs, and if you are moving to an area with a lower cost of living they may give you a negative cost of living adjustment, too.
I should make it clear that this move wasn't easy to make by any means. It took years of planning and even a job change to find a team I was confident enough I could make it worth with. While getting the visa was simple enough in my case, actually moving to Japan and buying a house, opening up bank accounts, getting a drivers license, etc were all enormously time consuming and at times very frustrating.
So it can be done, and I feel it is worth it, but it does require a fairly large amount of effort.
Personally, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, but I guess it does take a certain kind of person to pull it off.
Have you considered just moving somewhere much cheaper? I work from a beach in Mexico, pay almost nothing, and have a nice and slow life. And... it's a beach!
Obviously, there are plenty of places in the world to do this from if Mexico isn't your thing. I have a buddy in Triste, Italy, and another one down the coast in Croatia.
Anyways, I only write this because it seemed like something you want to do but are just looking for some "today's the day" chutzpah. I hope you end up where you want to be one day!
More serious crime is unlikely to target you. Stay out of the north. And you can always live where the wealthier mexicans live in a city if you're nervous.
Quiet towns like a lazy beach town are pretty safe.
I'm currently based in Pto Escondido, a beach town in Oaxaca.
A good way to get your feet wet is to book an airbnb at one of the beach cities you can fly into, take a taxi down a highway that runs parallel to the shore, and get off at any of the smaller beaches/towns for a day trip. You could do a different one every day and get some work done at a cafe/bar on the beach there.
That way, worst case scenario, you're still at the beach with your touristy creature comforts (e.g. easier to find good network if you need to `npm install` -- half-joking!). But if you end up feeling more adventurous, you can take a taxi and find yourself alone on a tiny beach, which as far as I'm concerned, is one of the remaining wonders of the world.
Of course, the hardest part of travel is taking the first step at all. If it wasn't for finding a job in Guadalajara at a small incubator run by an American in /r/IWantOut, I would probably still be miserably working from a Starbucks table in Austin wondering when I'll have the balls to do something new.
The houses from what I saw looking through translated listings seem to have no insulation, ancient (ie nonexistent) plumbing, and "traditional" toilets (hole in the ground) with no heating/cooling. You're buying a badly insulated cabin in the woods more or less.
I think one of the main pain points in renovating the houses is going to be actually getting materials to the house. Some of these are rural to the point of not having real roads and being hours away from civilization. If you need to truck in a new water heater, you might be building your own gravel road first.
If you're looking to be really remote and more or less build a house, this might be an awesome opportunity - just realize this is more akin to buying a plot of land than "a house" per say.
Have fun in winter!
Of course, the catch is that standing up your own slice of civilization infrastructure will get either expensive and/or time-consuming, depending upon your non-negotiables. The more requirements you will not do without, the more inputs you will want to haul into or build upon the property.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
This is so very very wrong. MSAs are purely based on population density. I grew up in one of these white counties on the map you linked. It's small towns, scattered among farmland and coal mines, and the local MSAs are nothing but a larger (but still quite small) town with an interstate.
We're mostly in a cognitive elite echo chamber here on HN due entirely to a historical anomaly that prices most of our labor high relative to more conventional labor pools (though IMHO not commensurate with yielded productivity benefits), and our sense of what is fiscally "reasonable" is highly distorted and privileged. The MSA boundary is not a hard and fast binary switch, where inside the boundary land is crazy expensive relative to prevailing local incomes, but outside the boundary it suddenly is crazy cheap. But it serves as a useful starting point to look for the pricing gradients in your local area for a median household.
A heck of a lot of Millenials got debt-trapped by the higher education scam, and I applaud those who are "once burned twice shy" about taking on another unsustainable debt load in real estate. For those in the US looking for a chunk of land to inexpensively park their possessions (and if you are the kind of Maker-type that enjoys HN, tools alone can take up a lot of space), without becoming an investor in the real estate business itself, then the choices for the past few decades of cheap credit that I've experienced have been get extraordinarily lucky finding a good deal, wait for a bust, or locate outside of where there is lots of land banking activity.
Land does get much cheaper on the outer rings of an MSA, but IMHO still not nearly cheap enough for median households. They're still stretching, and compromising their quality of life a hell of a lot at the same time. We're pushing tons of stress onto them as an unseen externality, and calling it all good and patting ourselves on our backs that we have so many "homeowners", when we should be holding a frank discussion on why our real estate land markets are so dysfunctional.
YMMV of course.
If you wanted to say "real estate is cheaper in the rural area, but you'd have to drive everywhere", then you'd be right. But that's not what you said. What you said was, "Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service", and that is demonstrably false, and doesn't even pass even a cursory logical test, because for this to be true, then all the arable land and extractive natural resources would have be in cities, and if that was true, then where would the buildings be?
If you fail to understand what is going on in your basic assumptions, why should the rest of your argument even be considered?
I did notice, your phrase, "the higher education scam". That's interesting, since educational attainment has been shown time, and time, and time again, to be the biggest predictor of economic success. The long term viability and effects of shifting the cost of education in the past 25 years from state budgets to individuals, is certainly a concern and worthy of debate, but to refer to education as a "scam", makes me wonder about how well thought out your ideas on the educational debt crisis is as well.
I think you're bitter, and not nearly as smart as you think you are.
If you're serious about it, you really need to think about your non-negotiables, your strong preferences, and how high you're willing to go for "cheap" housing. For some people the answer might be a condo in a smaller city that isn't in demand. For others, it might be a house that's out in the sticks someplace. There's also a huge difference between cheap as in $100K and cheap as in $300K.
Contra another post, you probably don't want land that isn't already engineered. Of course, also consider Internet. I know tech people who manage with satellite but there are a lot of compromises.
The reason you don't is that cheap places in rich countries are usually cheap for a reason.
Looks like there are some cheaper areas here: https://www.koopwoningen.nl/nieuws/487:de-20-duurste-en-goed...
Now, compared to cheap places in the US, the house price is still somewhat high. But cheap areas in the US, you often have to live in a detached house, as apartments are often very uncommon, or even non-existent, whereas in the Netherlands multi-family housing is much more common(1). And in the US, cheap places you almost always need to own a car, which is inherently expensive, whereas in the Netherlands you can get by with just walking and biking. Plus, the safety net means that even if you're poor as shit, you're taken care of for things like healthcare, to a greater extent than the US.
1 - Looking at the example of Delfzijl, you can rent an okay-sized 1br apartment for ~600 EUR/month: https://www.iamexpat.nl/housing/rentals/delfzijl/apartment
Factoring in extremely low transportation costs, that makes for a pretty damn cheap lifestyle.
https://www.businessinsider.com/move-to-vermont-remote-worke...
I imagine that you need to be a Japanese citizen to get a free house.
https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/15285-Manning-St-48205/hom...
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free%20italy%20houses like the first few articles are about free or 1 Euro houses. Seems to be true!
If the empty houses described in the article are clumped up, it would be best if the economic status of the recipients is disregarded.