Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 3:32 pm
K, here's the situation:
My wife cannot work, for various reasons that I shall not go into in a first post.
For those same reasons, I have to be home more often than not. We have a four-year old daughter that needs an active parent. I make my living playing guitar in bars on weekends and doing occasional odd jobs. As you can imagine, it's not a lot of money. But it allows me to be at home most of the time which is fine... I don't like working much anyway!
The reason this works is that our expenses are exquisitely low. We have no debt except for student loans which are forever buried in Income Based Repayment (we make so little money that our payments are $0 a month), I grow most of our food, and we own our mobile home free and clear. Our only significant expense is trailer park lot rent, which is highway robbery at $250 a month. There are less expensive parks in town, but oddly they're all quite a bit more upscale and won't let a 1974 trailer near the place.
I'd like to get out from under the lot rent. Part of it is that true freedom is owning your home and the land it sits on (we've got the first but not the second), and the other part is that my wife hates bitterly living in what is indisputably the crummiest neighborhood in our small city of 12,000 ppl. Unfortunately my wife's condition also precludes us going very far, and the cheapest house in town is 40,000. I could buy a vacant lot with cash on hand, but the nazis on the town council have decreed that mobile homes must be confined to mobile home parks (some horseshit about propping up property values), so I'd have a lot with no house. I could probably build a house, but with building codes being what they are I'd stand an excellent chance of running out of dough before the project was completed.
Bottom line: I don't have a lot of money, and am not likely to get a bunch of it in the immediate future. We are trying rather desperately to get out of the trailer park we are in, but are not willing to increase our living expenses in order to do so; in fact we want to reduce our living expenses by owning a place free and clear! I have some money saved up, but it will not buy a pre-existing home in this city and I can't put my trailer on a vacant lot. We've considered a lot in one of the small towns in the immediate surrounding area (where I could put the trailer), but that brings up the nasty subject of car dependency.
Any badass ideas? I've been trying to think outside the box and come up with something completely wild to do, but all I can think of is the mundane. If it wasn't for my wife I'd pack up and move out to one of the rust belt cities where houses are being sold for like a dollar, but that simply isn't an option at this point.
My wife cannot work, for various reasons that I shall not go into in a first post.
For those same reasons, I have to be home more often than not. We have a four-year old daughter that needs an active parent. I make my living playing guitar in bars on weekends and doing occasional odd jobs. As you can imagine, it's not a lot of money. But it allows me to be at home most of the time which is fine... I don't like working much anyway!
The reason this works is that our expenses are exquisitely low. We have no debt except for student loans which are forever buried in Income Based Repayment (we make so little money that our payments are $0 a month), I grow most of our food, and we own our mobile home free and clear. Our only significant expense is trailer park lot rent, which is highway robbery at $250 a month. There are less expensive parks in town, but oddly they're all quite a bit more upscale and won't let a 1974 trailer near the place.
I'd like to get out from under the lot rent. Part of it is that true freedom is owning your home and the land it sits on (we've got the first but not the second), and the other part is that my wife hates bitterly living in what is indisputably the crummiest neighborhood in our small city of 12,000 ppl. Unfortunately my wife's condition also precludes us going very far, and the cheapest house in town is 40,000. I could buy a vacant lot with cash on hand, but the nazis on the town council have decreed that mobile homes must be confined to mobile home parks (some horseshit about propping up property values), so I'd have a lot with no house. I could probably build a house, but with building codes being what they are I'd stand an excellent chance of running out of dough before the project was completed.
Bottom line: I don't have a lot of money, and am not likely to get a bunch of it in the immediate future. We are trying rather desperately to get out of the trailer park we are in, but are not willing to increase our living expenses in order to do so; in fact we want to reduce our living expenses by owning a place free and clear! I have some money saved up, but it will not buy a pre-existing home in this city and I can't put my trailer on a vacant lot. We've considered a lot in one of the small towns in the immediate surrounding area (where I could put the trailer), but that brings up the nasty subject of car dependency.
Any badass ideas? I've been trying to think outside the box and come up with something completely wild to do, but all I can think of is the mundane. If it wasn't for my wife I'd pack up and move out to one of the rust belt cities where houses are being sold for like a dollar, but that simply isn't an option at this point.