I had the weirdest dream last night (brought to me by some spicy chicken and rice, no doubt). I dreamed (or dreamt, I guess) that I was visiting a fellow survivalists place and he said i could stay in the guest house out back. Problem was, the place was lousy with grizzly bears and I thought ‘No problem, I have this handy PTR-91 in .308. I’ll just do a mag dump into the first one that gets in my way.’ And then I discovered that the magazine was empty. Awkward. After that it was hide-n-seek with three amazingly large grizzly bears.
This is the first dream I’ve ever had involving the usual gun problem (gun not working, bullets not having an effect, etc.) and the threat being an animal, instead of zombies or people.
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There are several problems for those of us who want to live the preparedness/survivalist lifestyle. One of the biggest is the often-at-odds-with-each-other desire to live someplace remote and quiet but still have a job/career to pay for it. Succinctly, the classic survivalist dilema is how do you live far enough out to have the security and privacy you want while still living close enough in to have a job?
Virtually all the survivalists I know who live in the ‘perfect’ locations are all either a) retired, b) made enough money to live off investments, or c) live a life of desperate poverty.
I’m far from being able to retire, my investments don’t provide enough to live on, and I’ve gotten rather used to hot water on demand and not crapping in a compost toilet. As a result, for the time being, I live in an environment that is not 100% conducive to The Lifestyle..the big deficiency being that I live in a fairly large population center. Oh, compared to San Francisco or Chicago it’s darn near a podunk small town, but it’s still too many rats in one cage for my taste.
Telecommuting? Well, thats wonderfully attractive but those sorts of gigs are few and far between. And, its something of a risk since if you lose your job you are now sitting in the middle of nowhere with no job and a greatly reduced prospect of finding another one given your remote location.
Alternatives? Well, I suppose the first thing is to lower your expectations. Don’t think that youre going to live at the end of a five mile gated road in the middle of nowhere and make $50,000 a year doing engineering consulting over the internet. After that, it seems the best compromise is to live in an area where you’re close enough to the smallest population center that will still provide you a living, but still small-townish enough to give you the isolation you’re after.
Let me give you an example of what I mean… in the town I live in, someone doing, say, a welding or diesel repair gig for a large company in this town can knock back around $40k. But…you have to live fairly close by to keep your commute realistic…as a result, you live in a populous place and your cost of living is commensurately higher. SO, you pack up the kids and move to some ‘Northern Exposure‘ type of small town. Your earning potential takes a heavy hit of 35-50%, but your cost of living offsets a bit of that since the expenses are a little cheaper. But an AR15 is still about $750 no matter if you live in the big city or the small town, so you’re going to have to lower your expectations of your purchasing power, or you’re going to have to work twice as hard to earn the same as if you’d remained in Big City.
There is another alternative I’ve seen where you have someone from someplace like California, New York, Chicago, Denver, etc, sell their home(s) and move out here. They usually wind up getting the same size home or bigger for about half the money and then use the other half to either set themselves up in a business, or invest it and live off the dividends. That has usually worked out fairly well in the instances I’ve come across it.
And, finally, I’ve met at least two people who did it the old-fashioned way – they worked like mules in The Big City for as much as possible, sucked it up for a few years, and then hit the EJECT button and relocated here.
I suspect at some point in the future I’ll be in the group of ‘moved to smaller town and earns less but improves quality of life’. In a perfect world I’d stick a million bucks in the bank, live off the dividends and interest, and have my quiet little place out in the sticks. But if you’re going to try for that sort of thing, you need to have started much, much more earlier than I have.
The fundamental dilemma you mention, finding viable work outside a small-town location, can be a tough one. All the telecommuters I know, started big-city careers (lawyers, consultants, etc), then transitioned to small town telecommuting once they were established professionally. Still some ‘big risk’ there as you say, because if the parent corporation ‘tanks’, you’re now in a rural location with no job.
The best answer to this I know of is, going to a trade school. Many of the electricians, plumbers, welders I know, are basically one-man businesses. Wife runs the phones/scheduling/billing, husband goes out to do the jobs. Most of them have more work than they can handle, and therefore work as much (or as little) as they like.
I’m retired (small ‘r’) military, and plan to do this myself in my rural location. Pay is decent, job security is high, and it’ll always be very flexible. I think younger people could do themselves a huge favor by skipping the $100,000 4-year bachelors degree in ‘Artistic Grievances’, and learn a real skill.
There’s a good book “Shop Class as soulcraft”, I give to the kid’s. Basically say’s the same thing you did, vocational skills are good for the soul, much better then slowly dying at a meaningless job.
Added plus, hard to outsource your plumber, electrician or carpenter.
Most millionaires have income from 7 different sources. Try that. Maybe make a bit of money off blogging, a bit selling stuff online, a bit from a rent house, a bit from trading etc. That way if you lose your job you arent in a terrible place.
comandante, perhaps it was rhetorical, but do the math on what a fixed amount of savings can generate in terms of annual income. Take a million bucks in savings, take the current percentage yield, and see what you get…. It takes a huge amount of cash at todays savings rates to generate anything like a ‘living income’. I think the person talking about multiple income streams has the answer.
Already did. With a lower cost of living, paid for house, the requirements for return on investment are reduced but you’re still looking at several hundred grand in the bank with a rate that has to exceed inflation, so you’re looking at…mmm….about half a million or so in investments at 10%. But thats just cocktail napkin math.
Don’t forget to factor in the ~8-10% REAL inflation rate we have. That really screws up things.
I work in the biz. 5% is more likely for a moderate risk portfolio going forward from here. Kind of sucks when you get 3% on bonds. I think the bogle heads methods and financial indepence reddits are good resources on how to target this lifestyle in a reasonable time frame. Work 20 years save like hell and bug out.
I have 4 people the work for me that work remote 100% of the time. They are all over the US and they only need a solid Internet connection. I’m always looking for contractors in our specific discipline who work remote, but might come into the office for a week or two at the outset of the engagement. They all make between $70k and up.
COBOL programmers, in case you wondered. There’s a shortage.
Proofreading is a lost art, it appears.
I had no idea people still used COBOL. Legacy software?
I found a job on a military base a hundred miles from the big city. The tradesman route is probably a better plan, I got lucky.
If you do end up with a remote tele-job, try not to work, or entirely devote all your time, to a business type that is tiny. Have a BiL who was a game designer. Office was a two hour drive, and he also lived in a remote area that sometimes had road closures lasting for months. The game business eventually condensed to just a couple players, and when he got tossed in a big downturn, there was nowhere to go. Property values tumbled due to loss of forests in their area due to wildfires fueled by leftist idiocy, so retirement was a major problem.
Broaden your skills base. Try not to have all your income be from the same basket.
You can do whatever you want to, it just depends upon how bad you want that something.
I did 16 years of commuting to the big city where my job was from the country where I lived (the nearest town 10 miles away Pop 29,000) when we built our home in Y2K. My job wasn’t 9 to 5, I did 12 hour day/night shifts 7 days out of 14 in a 2-week cycle plus I had a 1hr 45min commute each way. Just picture getting up Christmas morning at 03:30hrs., getting ready and then driving to work. That was my life except for a couple of weeks of vacation each year and when I wasn’t working in the city I was working at home with projects and the ever popular honey-do list.
In 2016 after tidying up all the loose ends we retired to the country. Yes it was hard, yes we took a serious pay hit when we retired, but we survived. One thing I will say, we learned that if you have zero debts you can live on a lot less than you think you need.
“In 2016 after tidying up all the loose ends we retired to the country. Yes it was hard, yes we took a serious pay hit when we retired, but we survived. One thing I will say, we learned that if you have zero debts you can live on a lot less than you think you need.
Debt and health insurance are two huge factors why people are not able to retire, or do retire and go back to work to pay off. Downsize your domocile, get rid of toys you no longer use and save the proceeds for your retirement seed. Health is the huge ? factor though. What we start with young often gets complicated when you are north of 50. No way to predict that one.
I’m a satellite tv installer, in most states you can live anywhere you want to and dispatch from home. For example in febuarary/march I was in Hawaii installing for 6 weeks. I just got back from miles city on a 3 week loan. Typically with us the more remote the better as most people want to live in a bigger city but the people that really need our service live rural so we need techs there. We are IBEW union and make just north of $24/hour on the top pay scale, it’s very easy to meet like minded people.
I will say other than Wal-Mart in miles city the prices on guns and ammo looked full retail, sure you can order online but the $750 gun cost way more off the shelf in these little towns.
The value of a good education is very very hard to beat. Education opens options that are not available for many. For some education offers access to high salaries that enable that great escape to the boonies, but one thing is for sure, education is the very best in portable wealth. Learning is hard work hence the shortage of physicists and chemists and the abundance of education majors. Regular investment in learning during the first three decades of life is one of the best gifts that we can provide ourselves. Best, PR
Just looked at a rental property that can throw off 40% cash on cash return for 3-4 years then the ROI goes infinite. Stay away from those sucker paper “investments” with below inflation returns and massive counterparty risks. A diesel mechanic worth his lube making 40k? Where? Must only work 2-3 days a week. Most “education” is worthless and college diplomas are mainly just the secret handshake to get a cubicle sentence”left handed underwater basket weaving” is not areal skill