Early Retirement Extreme Forums

sshawnn wrote: I spent time in Carolina Beach and Kure Beach. I enjoyed the mild (at least not harsh) winter conditions, the expansive interesting coast line made up of islands and rivers, and the lack of crowds. My sister reports that June-August is NOT a pleasant time to be there with the many tourists but September-May is very nice.

That wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. It just means you could rent out your place during that time for income and travel someplace else that's nicer in the summer. If you were willing to go to someplace off-season during that time, it wouldn't be cost-prohibitive. Places like Whistler are beautiful in the summer. If you can stand the weather, there are cheap but nice carribean rentals during the summer, or just sail.

jennypenny wrote:

sshawnn wrote: I spent time in Carolina Beach and Kure Beach. I enjoyed the mild (at least not harsh) winter conditions, the expansive interesting coast line made up of islands and rivers, and the lack of crowds. My sister reports that June-August is NOT a pleasant time to be there with the many tourists but September-May is very nice.

That wouldn't be a deal breaker for me. It just means you could rent out your place during that time for income and travel someplace else that's nicer in the summer. If you were willing to go to someplace off-season during that time, it wouldn't be cost-prohibitive. Places like Whistler are beautiful in the summer. If you can stand the weather, there are cheap but nice carribean rentals during the summer, or just sail.

Right on! I talked with my sister about her buying a "vacation" property and possibly paying for it with the proceeds from rentals, June-August. They are not at a place where not working is an option so they could work a second seasonal job, and camp*, homeshare with friends, etc while prospering from their place.

I thought of the options you mentioned, specifically blue water cruising during those brutal summer months.

The winter weather while I was there was high in the 40s-50s but 70s are not uncommon. There is PLENTY of available outdoor offseason activity there!

* http://www.nccoastalreserve.net/Resourc ... d/205.aspx

http://www.trulia.com/property/31598132 ... t-SD-57551

Buy the city

Probably not the right thread since it's meant for an US ERE city, however -->

http://www.ecosia.org/search?q=sicilian ... don=chrome

An interesting ERE opportunity (if it wasn't for the geographical location, immigrants, climate (?) etc.)
On the bright side though, it would be easy to get enough people to occupy the city

jacob wrote:

vivacious wrote: I would posit many small, west coast places as fairly good for ERE. Specifically within an hour or 2 from a city. The prices are MUCH lower at that point. You could go into the main city sometimes also.

I've been looking [obsessively] at Washington (state) lately, particularly in the Puget Sound area. There are many [declining] lumber/fishing towns (Aberdeen, Centralia, Bremerton), where dilapidated houses can be had for $20,000 paying $400/year in RE taxes. A decent house (nonfixer) can be had for $50,000/$600 and a large one for $75,000/$800. In short, housing can be ridiculously cheap. The crime stats are kinda iffy but not as bad as Chicago.

If you don't mind the tsunami bottleneck risk, then Ocean Shores was/is a developed retirement community where 4 season vacation homes can be had for around $110,000/$1200 or so.

Artsy/touristy places like Port Townsend and Anacortes start around $150,000/$1600 or so (lowest I've seen was around $60k but that didn't look too good). That's what I'm looking at, namely for the added entertainment value. I've also looked at Union, WA. Bill Gates has a house there. That's about as far away as you can get from anything in Puget Sound.

There are also rural opportunities. You can get 10a for $175,000 with a small house in the middle of nowhere.

TL;DR - Washington state is currently my favorite state due to: decent RE prices, low RE taxes, no income tax, no excessive winter heating costs, long growth season, fresh water from the sky, lots of nature.

Curious what made you pick Chicago over Aberdeen. I have been looking at houses (on Zillow) recently and find that the houses in the 60-70K range are decent, low taxes, etc. The tsunami risk is what I also found. Also open to other cities with reasonable commutes to Seattle/Redmond.

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/updat ... house.html

Equally importantly, it wasn't a choice made in a vacuum. In 2014 there were reasons for us to stay here. Not so many reasons to restart something in Aberdeen.

Explorer wrote:Probably not the right thread since it's meant for an US ERE city, however -->

http://www.ecosia.org/search?q=sicilian ... don=chrome

An interesting ERE opportunity (if it wasn't for the geographical location, immigrants, climate (?) etc.)
On the bright side though, it would be easy to get enough people to occupy the city

I actually like the idea sitting behind here (and in Jacob's earlier post). Why not use the already set up infrastructure of a mostly empty town with plummeting/ nonexistent housing prices? The houses will definitely need repairs to be done on them, but this invites a beautiful amount of community involvement and sharing in terms of having community tool libraries, sharing labor, and could theoretically grow the community into a tight-knit group. The repairs that need done could also be done in a high-quality and sustainable fashion. And in parallel with the construction efforts could be efforts with restoring the land around them. Community gardens, food forests, etc. could become mature(ish) right when the houses finish being repaired.

Ideally I would also vote for this to be more of a "city" rather than a "commune" where maybe a sizeable chunk of the population is FI/RE instead of a community built solely on the ideas that we have. It would also be nice if there was a small tourist population, as then they could see the way we are living and how much we have repaired the ecosystem and created a very comfortable livelihood for ourselves, and then maybe they would want to join too .


Other considerations:
It seems like this theory/idea would leverage a large amount of initial resource dump followed by long term payoff in terms of return on housing and food supply. It also needs some sort of long term "desirability" for others to keep the resale values of property up (hopefully real cost of ownership <$0 due to all the improvements we have made on both the individual properties and landscape as well as the ecosystem of the towns).

As others have mentioned it needs to be somewhat close to a more major city to facilitate other types of interaction that would need to occur on a smaller scale (obtaining necessary outside resources).

Side Note:
In the end I think this may be too much of a pipe dream. In trying to bound a large group (50 or so at least) to some sort of collective checklist, we would have to impose and compromise far on wants more than many individuals would be comfortable with. Thus there is really no incentive on the individual level to move to this ERE city (unless it is a large improvement over their current situation).

Maybe of some interest here

http://www.openworldvillages.org/

Time to revive this idea in light of Flint, MI water crisis? Zillow indicates we could buy an entire subdivision for $100,000. Build some rainwater catchment systems and we're golden!

Not opposed to this idea.

But, it's Michigan.... Maybe I'd stop by for some summers

For the price, we can all just spend summers there!

http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/02/free- ... s-its-time

The Free State Project has reached its goal of 20000 people. The idea, which started in 2004, was to pledge to move to NH if enough pledges were collected. I guess we'll see what happens now.

Maybe something similar is required to actually get to the point of "ERE City" albeit probably with a much lower number.

If I were not tied by loved ones and pesky immigration laws, I'd be there in a heart beat! Perhaps the libertarian minded folk won't mind harbouring like-minded illegal aliens?

@Vexed. It's not a problem. We can set it up so everyone in the ERE city will be married to each other. So you'll can get a green card!

Wait, in which states is polygamy allowed?

JL13 wrote:@Vexed. It's not a problem. We can set it up so everyone in the ERE city will be married to each other. So you'll can get a green card!

Wait, in which states is polygamy allowed?

Ha. None, yet. But according to the folks who oppose gay marriage, it's inevitable now.

I looked for somewhere else to put this but did not see a place; so I put it here as I have been designating Manchester, NH as my ERE city and it was initially one of the primary ERE cities.

I was looking at commutting to Boston from Manchester just in case my finances in ERE took a header and I needed to get a job again and Boston would have the better job market and it is 55 miles one way; so I was going to look into boston housing until I checked the state tax rates and NH is zero while MA is 6.25%.

So I did the math and it would actually be cheaper to live in NH and commute(if you do not include the commutting time as a cost) than live in Boston with any income over around 25K as if you have a 50MPG prius and commuted 48 weeks a year on $3 per gallon; your year costs would be about $1500 which is what you would pay in takes at 6.25%. and it would be also cheaper to live in NH at 40k and cummte if gas was $5; something it has never reached in the usa.

I just found it interesting.

How about we pool resources a buy a submarine? FREEDOM!!

@leeholsen
6.25% is the MA sales tax, not income tax, which is not very important if your goal is ERE and therefore you are minimizing things you purchase (note: food and clothes are still tax free in MA). For a big purchase though, you could always drive to NH to buy it if you lived in MA, and then "forget" to put it on your MA tax return (you are supposed to report it but I think most people just don't).

If you are talking about income tax, that is 5.1% in MA. If you work in MA and live in NH, you still pay income tax on your MA income. You get hit with the tax either way.

NH real estate taxes are generally higher than MA, depends on the town but generally you'd be paying an extra 1% in NH vs. MA.

In NH, you still pay taxes on dividends and interest income.

So by my math, MA is actually superior than NH for ERE in terms of taxes, mainly due to the higher NH real estate tax. NH just gets the reputation of being superior to MA for taxes, because for most people who work until they're old (assuming they work in NH) and have a high spending rate, that is certainly the case.

Certain parts of CT or RI could potentially result in even lower taxes than MA for ERE folks, despite those states also getting bad tax reputations based on the common way of living.

Lucky C wrote:@leeholsen
So by my math, MA is actually superior than NH for ERE in terms of taxes, mainly due to the higher NH real estate tax.

I think it's highly specific to a person's income plan and living situation. If you're pulling in investment income as capital gains, NH's dividend and interest tax won't bother you. And the first $2400 of div/int income is exempted. So if you're following a total-return approach and selling off shares for income, or maybe you're in muni bonds, or other investments generating cap gains income (mutual funds, timber REITs), NH would work well from a tax perspective.

As far as RE tax, that depends on where you live. The difference in rent/property prices may outweigh the difference in RE tax. Comparing Manchester to Worcester, you could probably find equal or cheaper apartments in Manchester. But out in the sticks, I'd expect prices to be similar.

In my opinion, commuting from NH to Boston is brutal. During rush hour, 55 miles != 1 hour of driving. Not sure what you're specialty is lee, but the job market in NH is pretty good: unemployment rate at 2.6%.