What suits us probably wouldn't suit others. Here is our plan. We are currently in NM. We will be heading back east to buy land. Based on criteria which we have given a lot of thought on. We have to be fairly close to a Sam's Club as Hubby's prescription meds are super cheap there and we like to shop there once a month. We need warm winters. We need more humidity (we are drying out in the NM deserts). We want to be within an "easy day's drive" of the coast (we figure 75 miles is an easy day's drive in the bus). We prefer to be in a smallish rural town. We are looking at the area between Panama City (FL), Tallahassee (FL) and Dothan (AL) if zoning and prices work out. We are looking for a piece of land that already has septic/sewer, electric and water run to it. A burnt house or dilapidated house/trailer would be ideal. We would build/remodel into a very tiny apartment with a large enclosed/screened winter patio area... what ever overall size needed to satisfy minimum house size zoning requirements (if they apply). We are going to combine our savings with my daughter's savings to purchase a larger piece of land than what we could have had individually. Then we split the land up into her section and our section based on percentage of money paid. After a couple of years when we get the FL place set up to how we need it to be, we hope to have enough $$ saved up to do the same in the mountains of TN. That would give us a cool summer place and a warmish winter place in two states with no income taxes.
I grew up like that. My parents had a home in FL. But back in the 60's/70's, the building dropped off in the summer to nothing. So my dad had several months with no income. He solved that problem by moving to a town in western NC where the nearest tile setter was over 60 miles away (they didn't want to to cross the mountain from Asheville) and 100+ miles to the south (Atlanta area). They had a mortgage on the house in FL but paid cash for the land in NC. The land was cleared and paid for by bartering (what we called "trade work"). My dad built a lot of bathrooms for locals who, up til then, only had outhouses or very rustic bathrooms. Dad found an old single wide trailer really cheap that he towed up to NC with his 3/4 ton pickup truck (1950's era mobile homes were towable with a truck). Every one thought we had money because we had a house in FL (winters) and a house in NC (summers). What they didn't realize is we had a small house in FL where Dad worked hard all winter for a tile company and on school holidays longer than 3 day weekends, the last day of school, we were on the road to NC (a 12 hour trip that we made in 10 hours or less) where we would roll into our home there in the wee hours, unload, go to bed for a couple of hours and my Dad got up and went to work for himself while us kids and Mom got the trailer cleaned up from sitting unoccupied and unpacked. We had no "spending money". No "loose cash". We didn't buy expensive clothes, new cars (always paid for with cash too so they were driven til they dropped), no week long "vacations". I think I got my work ethic from my Dad. at one point, my parents were worth over a million on paper. No loose cash. But when we added up their net worth (every thing was paid for) they were worth over a million. I took bookkeeping my first year of college and learned how to figure the net worth of a business and person. Their long term FL bank had turned them down for a small loan for a new work truck as a poor risk. They always paid off their small loans early. So we sat down and figured out their net worth. My Dad took the paper into the bank, the bank looked at it, the loan was immediately approved the loan that my Dad refused. He called the local bank in NC and got the money deposited to his account over the phone. Hard work, pay cash for everything, avoid debt, don't waste money on stuff you really don't need. That was how I was raised. It worked for my parents, it works for us. We just need a portable business. We are working on that.
