Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Right now good land/homes in Oregon & Washington are expensive, though last I checked there were a few properties suitable for homesteading in Long Beach, WA area in the <$200k price range if you don't mind living in a tsunami zone & can cope with grey wet windy conditions for 6 months.

Spartan_Warrior wrote: ↑

Sat Apr 08, 2017 8:26 am

I'm soon to be married, and it seems like a good time to consider switching my lifestyle up and finding greener pastures. We've been looking for a place we can own some amount of land at a decent price and focus on homesteading. We've already been looking at places to move in the US for months, primarily CO and WV with occasional glances toward OR and WA. Like I said, the political changes in this country over the last few months have prompted me to broaden the search to outside the borders.

If recent events have taught us anything it has taught us that the world is changing incredibly fast. And the pace of change continues to accelerate.

If you struggle with pinpointing a country where you want to homestead, let alone a state, city, or town.... why would you want to affix yourself and your wealth to any one place at this point in the journey? If you are anticipating a great deal of flux in the near future, wouldn't it make sense to have flexibility?

What can you accomplish by buying a homestead that you cannot accomplish by other means? Is it worth the loss of flexibility? Whenever I read about homesteaders, they always seem to buy a place, learn some hard lessons, then search for a different property that fixes their early mistakes. Is there some way to learn their lessons without having to pay the price for the mistakes?

For instance, https://www.workaway.info/

@Ego
Have you ever done workaway?
I am intrigued and have thought about campground hosting in the summer in the us and working at an organic farm, yoga retreat, or hostel in Costa Rica in the winter.

My brief experiment with county life was that it requires more capital (financial,social,emotional) than I ever would have thought. Urban chickens are easier fewer predators.

@Laura Ingalls, On our last trip Mrs. Ego signed up for workaway. She taught yoga at a few but I don't remember if she got the yoga gigs from workaway. (Edit: Just logged in and found that we did not). We stayed at a number of places that used workaway volunteers in exchange for lodging and food. This hostel in Istanbul for instance....
http://www.hushhostelistanbul.com/default.aspx

Just a few of the hundreds of "permaculture" listings.

Help building an earthship in BC.
https://www.workaway.info/869619958998-en.html

or a permaculture homestead in TN.
https://www.workaway.info/779398881469-en.html

With meals and lodging provided, the lessons are free in exchange for work. You can move from one post to another, learning skills at each.

@Ego:

Good points and awesome resource, thanks!

I think Malaysia meets a lot of these conditions except 8.
I haven't spent a lot of time there but it's on my list of places to investigate. It's certainly not progressive, but apparently Penang, which has (I think) mostly Straits Chinese population, relative to the Malays, is a little more lax on the religious restrictions around alcohol, etc.

it sounds like Spartan_Warrior is really looking for a cheap version of progressive US metro areas with low gun control measures. there is no such place. progressive metro areas are pricey for reasons. and they have strict gun control and high crime for reasons.

fwiw, all non-US English-speaking countries that brute knows of are extremely strict on gun control, and most non-English speaking ones as well.

price and high-tech are more a function of development level within the country, same as the US. the US midwest can be cheaper than Penang, if one accepts slower internet. and even third world countries can be expensive if Spartan_Warrior requires 50mbit and french cheeses. they will have them, but they'll cost as much in the US.

what's really cheap isn't cheap places, but living cheaply. humans in third world countries simply have much lower requirements. with similarly low requirements, life in the US can be similarly cheap.

interestingly, crime/safety seems completely unrelated to CoL, level of development, or city vs. rural. those might be small factors within a culture, but don't at all compare between cultures.

Switzerland really does fit your criterions. Liberal neutral you can own guns safe, not as expensive as people imagine not strict on punctuation.

I think Switzerland has trouble with 1, 3, and 6. As far as cost if you're comparing cities with cities, and small towns with small towns, it would be more expensive than the US. Health care is very expensive, it's one of the few countries that can compare with the US in that aspect.

I'm certainly not an expert but I don't think it has easy immigration policies. But then again, I don't think many countries do, really, so I guess it does depend on where you set the bar for 'easy'. Switzerland's probably not worse than most.

I'm soon to be married

Congratulations at @SW.

You may also want to consider how an expat is taxed. The US has treaties with some countries, in others you could run into double taxation:

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/internat ... ies-a-to-z

I pay 70 a month for health care wiht 2500 deductible. This is because my income is low.
Also, Geneva is really expensive, even for switzerland.
Soylent is right, BUT, you can live in the countryside, and you'll never be far from a city, an international airport, or the alps.

US expats, how bad is the double taxation?

And @Campitor, what do you mean by "not an immigrant paradise," "3rd world medical infrastructure" and "risk of guerilla warfare?"

DW and I have been talking about NZ for a while. But I'm concerned about the bad combination of lower wages, higher expenses, and paying taxes in BOTH countries. Probably have to talk to a tax lawyer before making any commitments.

If your wife can obtain Irish citizenship then that opens up the whole of the EU.

China has all of those, except easy immigration.

The Germanic countries are worth considering; several of them may meet most of your criteria.

The Philippines offers a lot of that. Plus if you're a single man, there will be no shortage of loving, attractive, young women who want to be with you.

$1K/month would afford a comfortable life in PI.