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Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
151–160 of 188 posts
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#152Same. If anyone wants to buy mine off me and learn this lesson for themselves, drop me a message.
Thought it was going to be a utopian "intentional community", and build all the things I'd been dreaming of from watching YouTube vids. Turns out that the infrastructure you need to even get started with that is in the way. Wish I'd just gone suburban with a nice garage workshop instead. That way I wouldn't have to worry about paving a road or pumping water up to the ridge.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Homestead may not work if you depend on your own farm for all of your food needs. However, I feel off grid life with solar, storage, EV etc. combined with a remote job and hopefully cheaper Satellite Internet in the future may work for a lot of people. If I lived in a scenic country I would've at least tried this lifestyle, but may be that is because I am inherently introverted.
I think you might be missing a lot of the amenities of modern towns/cities. Let’s ignore energy and internet/cell service. * You’ll want to live close to a grocery store. * You’ll want to live close to doctors —- not only hospitals and ambulances but also any specialist you or someone in your family mind need. * You’ll want access to tradesmen/craftsmen. Plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians. Things brea…
Make a trip once a week or every other week into town (1hr drive) to pick up groceries.
Doctors, etc. - why do you need to be close? 1-2 hr drive for something so infrequent does not seem to be an issue.
You learn to fix your own stuff.
At least during the pandemic, housing outside of city centers have been in high demand as people seek more land/space.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you might be missing a lot of the amenities of modern towns/cities. Let’s ignore energy and internet/cell service. * You’ll want to live close to a grocery store. * You’ll want to live close to doctors —- not only hospitals and ambulances but also any specialist you or someone in your family mind need. * You’ll want access to tradesmen/craftsmen. Plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians. Things brea…
Make a trip once a week or every other week into town (1hr drive) to pick up groceries. Doctors, etc. - why do you need to be close? 1-2 hr drive for something so infrequent does not seem to be an issue. You learn to fix your own stuff. At least during the pandemic, housing outside of city centers have been in high demand as people seek more land/space.
You seem to be healthy with no chronic issues, which is good to hear. If you become sick or injured, and especially if you or a family member develops certain long term issues, you may need to visit a specialist multiple times a month. Sometimes these specialists are only available in major cities.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#155Something I've noticed among the "successful" youtube homesteaders is that they almost all invariably have property "in the city" that they rent out (generally unseen, usually unspoken, and always off camera) for significant passive income and treat homesteading like a virtuous hobby. Many of them also have side hustles like giving paid talks on homesteading, renting out "farm experiences", or offering classes on var…
One of my favorite YouTube channels is an off-grid homesteader in the UK. I once thought the idea was compelling, but watching the incredible amount of work this guy has put in over many years has discouraged me, as has the toll it took on his body. Plus, he is massively more competent than I am at just about everything: he built a hydraulic post holer and a log miller from scratch, built several buildings, planted t…
Kris the embodiment of a grafter. He started on that land in a tent, p*ping outdoors. He's in the UK where's it's cold and wet half the year. Yet he got up, every day for years and made the land a bit better.
No way do I have that in me and I doubt most people do either.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#156I requires multiple people to be successful at sustenance. There's a reason humans in history have large groups of families and many children bunched into a community (tribe!) to work together. The same is true today. Everything takes time or money. So if you require more than 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to upkeep and grow your food supply or craft goods -- you need more people working on it or you pay the difference.
Sarah Taber might offer some more context on this too: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/america-loves-the-id...
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#157I made the jump 8 years and 3 days ago. (In fact, I wrote books about it https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-1-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093... and https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-2-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093... ). My first two years were full of buyer's remorse. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had expected, the work was very hard, I felt incompetent, I missed my friends back in the metropolitan area, and I missed out…
Thought of you when I saw this post :)
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
where are you going to get a farming job that pays the same as tech without also feeding the corporate beast?
perhaps if agriculture and food generation was priced more in line with its value to humanity, rather than along the lines of cheapest product wins, there would be more feasible careers in homesteading, simpler lives and farming. but in a world where NFT based companies are claiming to be worth billions what hope is there of that? :)
The same could probably be said for software.
You can't make any money homesteading software either. Get a half rack 22 u servers, install the os (set up a pxe boot server and golden images plus a bootstrap script). Build out your storage, app server database server, load balancer, write your app, get customers, do support, fix bugs, release features.
You could probably break even with a well targeted market and not hire anyone else (maybe keep it in the immediate family) but you're constantly competing against products whose costs are built on economies of scale. Even if your not up against a giant corp, your up against someone with funding that's probably using giant corp tech.
Even if you do use giant corp tech (which isn't a thing you can do with physical land so I didn't factor that in) bootstrapping a boutique software company has some long odds and long hours. Bits tough work to know and do everything. That's why people specialize and companies hire specialists.
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same can be said of large houses. They look fantastic and wonderful but many people don't think about the scale of maintenance. A smaller/modest house can have it's roof replaced for $4500...that fancy house down the street: $25000 for the low-ball.
Heck most people won't even figure in the extra cost of electricity for a larger home, never mind understanding upkeep is a fairly consistent fixed cost that’s proportional to the size of the home.
Man the cleaning in itself is pretty crazy on big houses..
Re: Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make a trip once a week or every other week into town (1hr drive) to pick up groceries. Doctors, etc. - why do you need to be close? 1-2 hr drive for something so infrequent does not seem to be an issue. You learn to fix your own stuff. At least during the pandemic, housing outside of city centers have been in high demand as people seek more land/space.
You seem to be healthy with no chronic issues, which is good to hear. If you become sick or injured, and especially if you or a family member develops certain long term issues, you may need to visit a specialist multiple times a month. Sometimes these specialists are only available in major cities.
fair enough!