Video Transcript

Toggle Timestamps

I want to share a collection of ideas with you that we can put under the umbrella of the phrase downsizing the ideal so I'll teach this through an example which is the example of moving something I've spoken a lot about let's suppose you've heard at least some of those things I've said about the importance of moving to better places and you say well I can Envision this because you've laid it out at length but the cost is too high or the benefits too low or there are constraints in my life things I'm not willing to do things my spouse is not willing to do or my kids or I have these other things to worry about and it's just too great a jump for me well maybe there's a version of this that has lower benefit but way lower cost so it tends to be the case that good things have exponentially higher costs than things that are less good so the better something becomes the the cost usually grows geometrically it's not linear it's not that something much better is equally more expensive it's something much better is way more expensive right that's usually the case that's the natural pattern so the ideal can easily carry a cost that's much greater than what you're willing to pay the question becomes can you hack that curve to get less benefit at a much less cost and because of the way that curve looks it's usually true you usually can some things end up being binary and you just have to go all the way or or it's not worth doing at all but with most things you can push quite a bit into that that reward curve at a a much reduced cost so with the example of moving there are many ways you could hack this one that people tend to think about is well I'll get some people together and buy a piece of land and then subsequent to purchasing it we will develop it and subdivide it and whatever that actually carries a much higher cost than you're probably aware of unless you've tried to do it before it turns out that people are very different from each other in ways that are hidden until they suddenly come to the surface and it's usually a change in situation circumstance environment that makes this difference apparent if you're the one who is driving the process it's extremely likely that the people you convince to go with you in on this thing will absolutely disappoint you in what you expect them to do subsequently there are reasons for this but just to get to the bottom line as fast as as we can they are already showing how different they are to you through the fact that you're the one that has to push them to do these things if it's your idea you're the one that first starts talking about it or you're the one actually doing things about it you're showing how different you are than they are that's going to continue and the the differences will magnify over time and Circumstance that's just the way things go so a better way would be for you to purchase the property outright and then lease something to them sublease whatever aspect of that property you want them to have jurisdiction over and that gives you the an Avenue where you can impose your expectations on them as the one who's making it all happen and getting it in writing is very important when we start thinking about these these themes coming at it from where we are we're just thinking well this is a community people will work together people you need to stop assuming all of that people are different and you can't see who someone really is without a whole lot of wisdom you'll find out through experience and it will be sad experience for the most part so you might think that you're cutting the cost by going in with other people people you're not not significantly and the odds are high that you actually don't have the capital to do it yourself and then just lease things to them in ways where you don't need them so you're not relying on their money to make the whole thing work um usually those leases you'll want to have some kind of a an expulsion Clause where you can ask them to leave I'm I'm being overly polite here you can tell them they need to go and they would be willing to do that because there's some clause in there that you'll pay them out whatever the pre previously agreed upon reasonable amount would be and so with that in mind it's very hard to make a a deal where you say well I don't have the capital to buy this acreage but they're going to give me money in exchange for a lease to be able to live there if if you can boot them out any time but you have to pay them out which is the fair and right thing to do you you you can only do that if you don't need their money does that make sense cuz where you going to pull it from if it's all in the land you can't kick them out you just have to deal with it so uh and I realize I'm just blowing through all these things that you've probably never thought about and there's so much more to say about it but I'm just trying to sprinkle this early but the point I wanted to get to was in that case you can't actually do that so here's something that you might not have thought about which you probably should be thinking about which is what what's a smaller entry point maybe you find those same people who are who are kind of sort of interested if you can go them enough and instead of buying this big plot of land which you can't afford and getting into something that's 100 stages ahead of where you are which you're not ready for you don't realize fully just how much you're not ready for it and and that is worth focusing on for just a moment don't assume that the path to all these things is a single step just like the greater picture of repentance it's a process the process is not jumping from where you are to this thing that you don't have any clue what it's going to be like the process is making the small changes that are before you that might feel very large and recognizing that your attempts to jump ahead of that are looking be on the mark That's the scriptural phrase but it's also a psychological weakness where when we're afraid to do the thing we need to do that we know we need to do we invent something much bigger and just pretend that it's going to be perfect and it's chalk full of hidden things that we don't know about and we know that we don't know about them so that's the we're all going to move on to a big we is whatever set of people that you can convince to do this we're all going to move on this plot of land and farm it and be a community good luck with that you know and it's hilarious when people who have never even had chickens are talking about having a farm you have no idea what that entails it's it's so far beyond what you'd probably want and it is so far beyond what you have any clue how to do anyway so a small step would be well these are people who might be interested in doing some sort of communal thing why don't we join ly find a place to move where we're individually purchasing a home and a yard not acreage per se but if you can find that and it works out great but pre-existing property that's relatively close so that we can dabble in things like sharing a a tractor or if you live in a place with lots of snow sharing a snow mob a snowmobile maybe a snow blower uh sharing some sort of farm relationship like hey I'm going to Grow Flint corn and you can grow sweet corn which you actually have to be geographically distant to do or hey I'm going to grow Brown chickens and you can grow I'm going to raise Brown chickens you can raise white chickens and then we'll we'll use that to alternate years and we know cuz chickens lay productively for about 2 years if you didn't know that we we can use that to alternate the breeds each year and know which chickens we need to slaughter you can do things like that or you can do things like hey uh we have some kind of ruminant that needs pasture and we each only have one acre of land but if we alternate we can have this dairy cow or whatever it is sheep whatever it is we can alternate and have them on pasture back and forth between our Lots or if we have milking animals um I I can go on vacation while you take over the milking and you can go on vacation while I take over the milking or you just alternate every day if you have a milk cow you just alternate who comes and milks a cow whatever the case is you take these these first steps into working together on things and that's much closer to what most people are ready for so what are the barriers well obviously you still have to move and the huge problem is work you have to find work but if you live in a metropolitan area right now you could both move to the outskirts of said metropolitan area and commute into the city to work okay so that's a nice barrier reduction what else uh well a big barrier to doing these things is money interest rates are now coming down and that doesn't make the property cheaper it it will most likely actually do the opposite but there's a window right now where you can get a less expensive mortgage than you could for the last three or so years so that's nice um what are some barriers that don't go away well persistent barriers include the fact that you are unlikely to get As Nice a deal as you have right now you're not going to have the same Quality House the same size house the same location of a house I would argue that the location's going to be better depending on how you do this but if you think that your happiness includes having a house that was built in in the less than 5 years ago and all these square feet and everything else then you're probably not going to be very happy with this arrangement the biggest costs in this though are all the ones you'd incur anyway no matter how you take the upswing into this path because things like having to work a lot more to get the same things that's basically what homesteading is all about um having to deal with other people and them disappointing you and them saying one thing and doing another and dealing with you know six layers deep of motives because people aren't honest and all these things and you discover this through doing these sorts of things well again that's part of the process and so think about that think about downsizing the ideal and what steps could you take now to move into that oh that that's one thing I meant to talk about that I forgot one downside that people identify is they'll say well I don't want to move we live it it's kind of a shocker but there are many people today who live in the same house from when they're born to when they move out which is way later than they used to so the idea of living in the same house from birth until 26 that's a historic anomaly on many levels now I I grew up on the other side of the spectrum there I moved 18 times before I turned 18 and that's also not good but we need to let go of this idea that you buy your dream home and you just stay there until you die that's that's not going to be the case for anyone living right now in the United States unless they die relatively soon and that you should let that sink in and you can choose to disbelieve me on that I don't really care it's going to happen and the writing is already on the wall you're going to have increasing reasons to move as time goes on and no one will have the option of staying where they live so you may as well let that go early based on wisdom or else you're just going to suffer more for no reason so there's a time now where we have opportunities that will evaporate with time and they already are and they have been for some time if you're paying attention you've seen that if if you moved to a nicer place 10 years ago when I started telling you it may be more than 10 years at this point then uh you'd be in you'd be in a place that's worth twice as much as you paid for it and uh you'd probably be be living in a place you had zero chance of ever living in if you hadn't bought it then so these are things to think about and I encourage you to think about them there's probably a situation where you can find another family I just aim for one if you can get two that's great but the more you join together the harder it is but find another family that you get along well with and maybe maybe it's a sibling who knows a sibling of the family of a sibling but maybe it's just a friend and you could look for a place to live together where you're living in separate houses separate properties deeded to each individual but you can start working together on things and see how that goes you'll learn an awful lot and it has a way lower cost with a whole lot of benefits than doing it all the way moving to a rural place on land and doing it that way