[K0balt]

That’s grim.

There is a better way, but you can’t drink any of the kool aid. I wish I could tell other people how to do what I have done, but I have come to understand that it only works for me because i tend not to think things are important that other people value, and I value things that other people sacrifice to obtain those unimportant things.

It’s worked very well for me. If I have a piece of advice I think people might be able to use, it would be to own a place. It should be cheap and have little or no property taxes. A bit of land. Maybe an acre or two. In the country but not too far off a road. It’s not an investment, it’s not your home, it’s a place. Build a house there. Build it yourself. A very modest house with your own hands.

Learn how. Build a home that you can walk away from and come back in ten years and not be bothered by the inevitable decay. The absolute minimum. This is not your home. This is your refuge. Put it in a legal situation so that it can’t be taken from you (obviously this also means you don’t really own it, and can never sell it) The worst that can ever happen is that you have to go and live there while you start from zero.

Now, you will never be without a place.

For most people, this will be enough to give them courage to take some necessary risks. That is enough.

If you want to take it farther (you probably don’t) this is what I have done, and I’m not at all alone in this experience:

Once you have a place, Become unemployable. Any job is a means to a very near end. If you have to work, take a job that pays well but you hate. invest your time and resources in anything where your efforts will be rewarded disproportionally to the risks. 10:1 bets on 1000:1 odds. There are so many things that people will simply ignore because the chance of failure is 90% if done well… but there are a lot of those losing propositions that will compensate way above their risk.

The hack is you can never go bust. Only your health can stop you. you have your place. You have to always be willing to put it all on the line. You can go to zero but it doesn’t matter. Just do it again. And again. And again. You get better, you get smarter, you get wiser. Eventually you win. Is it enough? If it’s not, set half aside in durable assets, and keep going.

Most people are so risk averse that you will have these opportunities basically to yourself.

99.99 percent will find a reason that this won’t work for them, and they’ll be right.

But sometimes you’ll run into someone else in a different stage of the same game. If they’re much farther along than you, they’ll recognise you and you might have a drink, and make a mentor. This is the most valuable relationship you will ever have. Your spouse can be replaced. Your mentor probably can’t .

That’s it. Bring on the hate.

[antisthenes]

Unfortunately what you described has been made illegal by incompetent "small town governments" by adopting Karen-esque zoning and building codes that would fine you to oblivion if you tried to build something affordable.

"Cheap", from what I'm currently seeing, starts at around $300,000 for a place like you describe. If you just buy raw land and try to build your own home, the county will either not let you, or it will end up more expensive than $300,000.

> You can go to zero but it doesn’t matter. Just do it again. And again. And again.

If it doesn't matter, you might as well not do it at all. Doing it again takes time in a game with a very limited amount of it. You can only do it again maybe 2-3 times in a lifetime. Maybe 4-5 if you have exceptionally lucky genetics.

Now $300k isn't that much, but it is going to be a barrier for a lot of average Americans.

[K0balt]

I think you’ve got my timeline wrong. If you don’t have a foreseeable exit (which means only that you have built significant value) within 4 years, ffs it’s a fail. Most of my failures were foreseeable within months, not years. Fail fast. That doesn’t mean that you don’t do century projects, it just means the value has to be obvious within a reasonable amount of time or you put your stuff in boxes and go home. By that time you should have 2 or 3 other things you’re low-key working on anyway.

I’ve launched or participated in at least 50 projects and pivots in my lifetime so far, almost exclusively failures. In the last decade and a half, my results are much, much better. For me, the issue was usually inadequate moat +poor funding or being a decade ahead of the market.

As for the cost of housing etc, stop thinking about houses. Start thinking about buildings. For the sake of all that is holy never build in a residential zoned area unless there is nonexistent enforcement or properly incentivisable inspectors. Housing is a racket of its own, with its own proper criminals and everything.

You can get a lot in New Mexico with nil property taxes and minimal controls for about a thousand dollars. G1 land in Alaska can be had for 4- 5 k and has no zoning controls at all.. It doesn’t need to be near a nice town. An hour to a reasonable town (100k population plus) is fine. Remember, it’s not your home. It’s a place.

I’m not talking about a place you want to live, I’m talking about a place you can live. As long as you can get water, some tumbleweed sandlot in the desert is fine, just cover it in cheap panels and buy the biggest AC unit you can. I prefer a woody place above 2000’MSL and not on any historical flood plain though. Also hurricanes and tornadoes are a big turn-off.

It doesn’t have to be in the USA either. In some ways even better if you have skills that allow remote work or platform work (oil rigs, mining, mercenary, contract Pilot, work camps).

You can build a structure that is liveable for about 50 a square foot. Shoot for around 600 square feet, like a ww2 era home. Bare plywood floors, Sheetrock, etc. If in other countries, use whatever the poor people use to build with. That will also offer some cultural protection.

If you can’t do it, in today’s market, for under 75k you aren’t trying. Just start with a small piece of land.

Maybe Tow and Park an (old) motorhome on it until your house is built. Get the motorhome running and sell it for twice what you paid if it’s not a total lost cause. Don’t ask me about split-rim tires though. I had to pay in (goods) to get one changed at an extremely sketchy tire place. I mean, really sketchy. I’ve spent some time in the 42 in Santo Domingo, and I’m telling you, this place, in North Pole, Alaska, of all the godforsaken places, was sketchy as hell. Just don’t bother.

If you get to North Pole though, see if Dirty-Neck Pete is still alive (no, really) because he has a junkyard with some astounding shit in it including the some of the infamous overland train, Soviet era relics, and a lot of other stuff that will probably eventually become a superfund site. He’s probably dead by now though.

[K0balt]

Not possible. It was about (64.8096, -147.5720) if you get some 1980s aerial survey photos you can probably see the overland train, some APCs , maybe some old long range SAMs, presumably without motors or warheads.

[mattbee]

I'd be interested to hear your story - what was this place you built? How did it help you over the years?

[K0balt]

First place I built, and still my fall back of fallbacks is a 450 square foot cabin in Alaska. No running water. Built that when I was 16-21, started as 128 square feet grew over time. I didn’t know the gift I was giving myself at the time, I just wanted a place to smoke dope and shag. The time I spent pounding nails in those boards has paid dividends of many thousands per hour.

I grew up poor, subsistence fishing, hunting, gardening. Later I understood that was a choice of my father’s. He made good money when he worked, he just preferred to be at home and work with his kids. Reflecting on it, when he needed to buy a new truck, he went to work for a month, bought a 1977 dodge crew cab new off the lot, went back to hunting lol.

I Always had a natural aversion to employment (not to hard work, just working under supervision) , probably a personality disorder I guess. I value the control of my time to an extremely high degree. I’ve been self employed / founder / investor 90 percent or more of my working life.

Ended up raising my first kid at the cabin for a few years. Eventually, in my early 30s, I started to have something you might call a bit of success.

As for how it helped? I’ve never paid rent or a mortgage in my life.(except short term/vacation rentals, hotels, etc, of course) I launched and crashed several businesses from there. Never felt like the end of the world, just the end of the day.