Experiment: ERE Share House

[conwy]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to propose an experiment: an ERE Share House.

How this would work is:

1) A number of us, say 4-5 people, whose jobs/businesses are clustered around a similar location and who are in the accumulation phase and maintain the shared goal of retiring early, would exchange contact details, e.g. WhatsApp.

2) Working together, we would scout out house rentals in close proximity to all of us, at the cheapest possible rent.

3) We would also learn about eachothers lifestyles as much as possible and plan and co-ordinate things like work schedules, cooking times, washing machine usage, cleaning, etc.

4) Finally, once settled on a house, all of us would put our money together to lease the house for an agreed period, e.g. 3 months, paid up-front.

Some benefits I foresee from such an arrangement, if it worked out, are:

• Reduced cost of accommodation, due to house sharing
• Support everyone's "web of goals" by everyone being close to work
• Work together and encourage each-other to continue to pursue FI
• Co-ordinate and organise ourselves such that all members maximise earnings and savings. E.g. share/trade in skills, contacts, knowledge, etc.

Interested to hear your thoughts on the above, or other alternate arrangements that might be useful.

[7Wannabe5]

Interesting suggestion, but implementation might prove difficult.

The upside of a forum such as this is the ability to form a reasonably large group of people who think/live differently from the majority by networking over vast distances. The downside is that we can't share snacks very easily.

A similar thought I had was to do something like swarm cash purchase inhabit and rehab decrepit properties in crime ridden neighborhoods in my neck of the woods. Since some of these properties go for as little as $5000, 10 people could chip in just $500 each, live in one property for a couple months (equivalent of $250 rent plus some rehab supplies) then move on to the next property which would be located as close as possible to the first property. So, in about 2 years you could have a little functional neighborhood of 10 houses fully paid for and rehabbed for little cost above what would have otherwise been spent on very minimal rent.

[Gilberto de Piento]

5) Install cameras throughout the ERE house.

6) Produce reality TV show. Be sure to include plot lines like "who ate all the lentils?"

7) Profit.

[jacob]

Yes, if you can find them and keep them. (4) provides some stability, but what do you do when people want to move out? Can you attract new people fast enough? How do you handle vacancies? Practically speaking, there's the issue of leasing for multiple people. Who is on the contract? Other people have solved this.

In a sense this can be run either as a long-term hotel or a collective. I think the hotel is the most common, but I bet---seeing this is ERE---that most people want to be the hotel owner and take some profit and risk by subletting rooms. The collective might run into problems about just how "extreme" things should be.

Anyhow, people do the roomie thing all the time. So the main issue is in getting enough people together for this in the same city or even the same area of the city. You can probably count of people not working in the same place, so some would be able to walk, but others would require a commute. Could be fixed by being central, but central => expensive.

In short, solving a combined web-of-goals is somewhat harder than solving it individually.

[Demosthenes]

This is sort of like the extreme version of the tiny house village movement
https://www.aarp.org/home-family/friend ... ge-fd.html

People with a common interest congregate in a new community. They set up sharing networks so you don't have 30 houses who all need to own the same 30 cordless drills.

I love the idea, but I suppose life gets messy when you actually try to implement it.

[Stahlmann]

I thought more about creating map where everybody can willingly post their location (there are many such solutions), but this kills privacy...

Of course the goal would to be complete parasite during holidays as very cheap accomodation etc.

[theanimal]

The map thing already happened. There was a page a few years ago where people could put a pin on there city. There were a few dozen people who participated. Anybody remember the link to that?

[jennypenny]

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=5254

[conwy]

Yes, if you can find them and keep them. (4) provides some stability, but what do you do when people want to move out? Can you attract new people fast enough? How do you handle vacancies? Practically speaking, there's the issue of leasing for multiple people. Who is on the contract? Other people have solved this.
...
In short, solving a combined web-of-goals is somewhat harder than solving it individually.

Really good questions, which I'm thinking about a lot.

I'm wondering if some of these issues could be addressed using software and/or more flexible or cleverly structured financial contracts.

Imagine if there were a handful of ERE "houses" dotted at various points around the globe, and members paid ahead-of-time for a room in any of the houses, but were free to move around between houses, depending on where work took them. So it would be kind of like a "club" that you join, and you pay an up-front fee and in exchange, get to enjoy the benefits of flexibility with the low-cost of house-sharing (much cheaper than hotels).

There would be logistical issues like too many people wanting a single place, and other places having empty rooms. I'm not sure how to solve for this, but I'm thinking about various ways, especially involving software.

I would basically like something like what AWS does for computing/hosting, but applied to housing. Cheap, flexible, commoditised accomodation.

[conwy]

This is sort of like the extreme version of the tiny house village movement
https://www.aarp.org/home-family/friend ... ge-fd.html

Looks interesting. I'd really like if the messiness could be solved in clean, consistent ways, kind of like how Ikea makes furniture-shopping simpler and easier.

If you could take all the tricky detail-work out of community housing and instead make it, as much as possible, low-cost automatic, consistent, commoditised and repeatable, then people could just pay one blob of money, spend less time thinking about accommodation/housing and focus on whatever they're trying to get done in life. E.g. accumulate wealth.

Even better if it was all done in a long-term, sustainable, environmentally-friendly, disaster-adaptive way. Though that might be a goal to work toward rather than achievable up-front.

[conwy]

6) Produce reality TV show. Be sure to include plot lines like "who ate all the lentils?"

I laughed, but actually seriously, this could make for a nice Netflix mini-series! Especially with the extreme saving aspect of it!

[Chris]

Imagine if there were a handful of ERE "houses" dotted at various points around the globe, and members paid ahead-of-time for a room in any of the houses, but were free to move around between houses ... it would be kind of like a "club" that you join, and you pay an up-front fee and in exchange, get to enjoy the benefits of flexibility with the low-cost of house-sharing (much cheaper than hotels).

Kind of reminds me of something Tynan setup with his "home bases around the world."

[wood]

This is happening in Svartlamon in my city: https://www.dn.no/d2/2017/12/20/1144/Ar ... lesboliger (paywall + article in Norwegian).

People have signed up for a project where they build a bunch of apartments closely knit together. They do most of the design and construction themselves. The idea is to live in a community with shared kitchen and living room between neighbours. This particular part of town has been special for many years, inhabited by financially struggling artists, musicians and families with low income. It is known for having a strong community and a safe haven for the kids growing up there. Everyone knows everyone.

From their home site http://www.eksperimentboliger.no/:

The five self built “experimental houses at Svartlamon”, built in an area designated as a trial site for urban sustainability, challenge the misconception that a sustainable lifestyle is something that you can buy. An experiment in applied urban ecology, it attempts to demonstrate the value of a nøysom (or frugal) use of resources, creative reuse and participation in architectural processes.

This is not the first experimental housing project in this area. One has to go through an application process in order to live there. I once applied but didn't fit the bill. Oh, and they used to have an annual festival called "Eat the rich".

Another article in English (with pics): http://www.fourthdoor.co.uk/unstructure ... tlamon.php

Anyone visiting Trondheim I'll be happy to walk you through this cool neighbourhood.

[TheWanderingScholar]

@wood

As someone who live in Estonia and interest in Urban Planning, I might take you on that offer.

When I have time...and money.