ERE community

[il-besa]

Hi all,

I was reading the post "how about living under a bridge" (http://earlyretirementextreme.com/forum ... r-a-bridge) and noticing how important is to live with people that we've things in common with, and also how important is to stay in a group (or society).
Well, the hippies have since long time their communities, how about a ERErs community?

Can you imagine how great would be to live in a community where everyone's is or had goal to be ERE, ready to share resources and enjoy frugality.....
Ciao

D

[jacob]

I think it would be pretty sweet too. There are some disagreements as to the exact form. There's also a lot of inertia. We already had some suggestions though.

There's the ERE REIT, a community associated with a business.

The Nullhof

People can buy a boat

You can become my neighbor


Another idea which doesn't have its own topic, but exists in the topic above is simply taking over a city, that is, moving to close proximity of each other without moving into the same house.

[Maus]

The "take over a city" reminds me of that community in Oregon that was subsumed by the followers of the Rajneesh in the '80s. If you get a critical mass of likeminded people, you can control the city council and therefore the police. With enough people, you can control the school board and the county sheriff. Then you have the ability to actively mold the citizenry in an ERE compatible way through education and ordinances. For example, you could forbid parking cars on the street, thus restricting the number of vehicles available and encouraging walking. Your building code and code enforcement could dictate smaller houses and require vegetable gardens instead of lawns. And then... (mad with power, I collapse into paroxisms of moo-hah-hah laughter).
But all that strikes me as perhaps too interventionsist for this crowd. Many of us seem to be of a libertarian, if not anarchist, streak.

[jacob]

Only because I hide my world domination aspirations well ... muhahahaha

[akratic]

I think choosing a city and then inviting people to move there is the only thing that might actually work.
I would consider moving in a few years, after I reach some degree of FI. While I suspect most people are pretty locked in right now, if this ERE stuff does actually work, five years from now or less there should be a sizable contingent of fellow cult-members with few strings holding us down (no job, no mortgage, etc)
I would personally prefer it be somewhere cheap in Colorado, Oregon, California (cheaper part), New Hampshire, or Vancouver.

[S]

I'll hopefully be settling somewhere in a yearish so I'm interested to see where this goes. We're kicking around the idea of moving somewhere really cheap like Detroit and then having a beach house that's rented out during the summer to live in during the winter near my family... unless I'm too fond of the nomad life by then and want an RV instead.

[NYC ERE]

I'll bet there's a place where there are people living a similar-to-ERE lifestyle already, though perhaps without the nest egg. Whether it's a cultural match or not remains to be seen--I'm thinking of artsy slacker types in Austin, New Orleans, Portland OR, Oakland, Philly, Providence, etc. A cousin of the artsy slacker is the freegan post-punk type.
I personally identify somewhat--50%?--with slackers, but i also am pretty ambitious and probably a bit more conservative than them.
Furthermore, I think we should discuss ways of being friends with non-EREs. Just because you don't go out to movies a lot (or ever) and don't go to restaurants doesn't mean you have to limit yourself socially to thrifty folks. For example, I plan to host dinners at my little Manhattan apartment serving luxurious meals of venison I hunted myself--the cost will be a few bullets, a few train/car rides per year, and amortized hunting license and gun costs; perhaps a few dollars per person per meal.
Sure, all of us EREs and ERE wannabes have things in common, but you can only talk about asset allocation and budget tweaks for so long, yes? I'm sure we all have a diverse range of passions we hope to pursue with our newfound freedom.

[Steve Austin]

akratic, is that Vancouver, BC or Vancouver, WA
all, attempting to synthesize in some fashion a lot of these ideas, how about a regionally distributed network of semi-nomadic ERE zero-energy outposts, amenable to shuffling among them with RVs and shaggin' vans? I think this covers home exchange (conceptually), Nullhof, the semi-nomidic Detroit-to-the-beach (S's suggestion), ERE REIT, and even five-flagging if the region is well-placed (Eastern Europe, Mississippi Watershed - Upper Midwest Great Lakes in the US).
Admin note: wondering if there should be a separate forum for Proposed ERE Community Ideas, to "house" ERE REIT, Nullhof, ERE Community, Five-Flag, Semi-Nomadic, Distributed Network of ERE Outposts, etc. It seems that in some cases, proposals are made by posters here, before they got caught up with some of the other related threads.

[Q]

Never thought of outposts, but, theoretically it would be covered in my mind with ERE REIT.
The sky is the limit with permutations.

[S]

Kind of like http://www.homeexchange.com/ crossed with couch surfing? Each member owns one of the outposts. Other members who want to travel there can live in the house if no one else is there or stay on a couch or something if it's already occupied. There are some issues here like what happens if something breaks in the home you're staying in? Does the current occupant fix it? Does the owner? Who gets to decide what to plant in the garden if someone different will live there during planting and harvest?

[Q]

I think that an outpost would be handled with a "caretaker" of sorts. It could be ran as a mini-timeshare so to speak, but ERE people in general should be semi-ok with sharing residence and resources.
I can see it being an amped up couch surfing of sorts.

[AlexOliver]

@Steve Austin: I'm going to guess BC because there's nothing going for Vancouver WA except it's proximity to Portland and non-existant income tax.

[Steve Austin]

AlexOliver, akratic did refer to it as cheap; I didn't know that Vancouver, BC was cheap.