So, I ABSOLUTELY know there's massive variation in this. Just want to get ahead of that.
What I'm looking for is...what do finances look like, casually, when you have a 100% paid off small (SMALL!) home. When a mortgage is out of the way, what's left to eat up your paycheck?
I suppose I'm looking for the sort of casual knowledge of expenses for this sort of life that your kids might pick up if they lived in your area with you in your home. En mass, pulled from multiple lemmy folks, so I can get an idea of general trends. I'm partial for info from the USA, but others reading this might appreciate statistics from other areas. :)
(People mistake how valuable this sort of "general idea" info is, I always see people going into the weeds on how every situation is different without bothering even giving a crappy signpost so I can see if I'm looking at a $5 expense or $500 or $5000. Knowing if something is going to be $5 or $5000 is very valuable, even if it's not some exact precise number. But I don't need to know if it's going to be exactly $392.29 if I wiggle my ears and tug my nose to get the right loophole, I just need to know that closer to $500 is correct, or whatever.)
I don't have family, so I missed out on "casual learning" opportunities, and don't have anyone to talk to IRL to get this info, so it's really hard to apply my city-living experience to try to extrapolate what life might be like if I make a goal to buy a small home in Nowheretown, USA to retire in 20 years down the line.
Anyway. So what do expenses look like if you have a small paid off house? What range do utilities run in for you (in your particular climate), what's home insurance like, what sort of unexpected expenses pop up when you own instead of rent?
What's utilities like for sewer and trash, especially? Those have always been rolled into my rent. Is rural internet still limited to DSL or satellite (or Starlink I guess these days), or has better infrastructure been rolled out in places over the past 20 years since I last looked for this info?
Edit: Also...talk to me about well water and well expenses, and septic tanks instead of sewer lines, and oil heating. I promise I'll listen!
Edit 2: Also talk to me about how propane works.
Thanks everyone. :)
I've never owned a home but what people have told me is that you will spend 13 or 14 monthly payments per year, 12 of them on the loan, and the other 1 or 2 on the related expenses. Insurance has gone up a lot around here since then though.
I know you can rent a tiny home plot with water and sewer in the (expensive) SF Bay Area for $800/month including some amenities (deltabay.org) so that is sort of an upper bound. This includes an electric hookup but you have to pay by the KWH for power. You can order a 400 sq foot tiny house (container home) on Amazon for about $20K (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9Q3391S) though that's just for illustration purposes. I don't know enough about them to actually recommend that approach, plus I hate Amazon. So I would try to buy direct if I pursued that.
Mobile internet coverage is pretty good now, unless you're waaay out in the boonies to the point where you have to ask whether there are even roads to get there with. So if you don't use a lot of data, that gets you online fairly inexpensively. The next thing after that is Starlink, which is way less expensive than I thought, $300 for the dish tranceiver plus around $150/month for "unlimited" service.
The deal with well water depends a lot on the location. In the western states there are often legal restrictions. In drier places you have to drill very deep, which is expensive. If there is surface water, it's less bad. In the desert (Joshua tree), a 1000 gallon truck delivery is around $100 (10 cents a gallon) iirc. I looked into this because a friend was interested in building a biodome there. So you are ok for careful usage but typical suburban use with frequent laundry and toilet flushing could get expensive. If you use a well, you might have to process the water to get rid of dissolved metals and solids, some of which can be toxic.
Propane, again, some company delivers a 400 pound tank every few months, which means there has to be a road that can get it there, or you need some other way (ATV) to move it. I guess you can use smaller tanks if that's easier. A friend of mine had this and I think they swapped the tanks around, as opposed to refilling stationary tanks from a truck, but I can ask her. It's possible that I'm confused.
Solar electricity and solar hot water are very doable now. You can buy a pretty good ready-made battery bank from Home Depot or similar, almost as cheaply as you can DIY without serious scrounging. Again I know a guy with around 10KW of solar panels and 10KWH of batteries iirc. He may have spent around $15K on this though he DIY'd. There is a substantial tax credit against solar expenditures here in CA, plus he gets paid when he feeds surplus power back to the utility (net metering), so he is doing pretty well with it. I think that setup is enough to run all normal household stuff most of the time. Maybe you want a backup generator around.
There is a really good old reddit post about solar hot water. I think it is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/diySolar/comments/b5leqm . The person made a huge coil of black PVC tubing exposed to the sun, with the water circulating through a big tank, and this was enough to give him plenty of hot water year-around with a few K$ worth of stuff, plus electricity to run the pumps.
Lately there are developments in ways to extract water directly from atmospheric humidity, even in the desert. I like to say that this is just like the moisture farming I used to do back on Tattooine ;). Web search: "atmospheric water harvesting". Maybe this will become practical soon.
There are a lot of homesteading forums that might be better places to discuss this stuff.
Is there a location you are thinking about? For now, my own interest is sort of academic, but I have been following stuff a little bit.
All told though, I always hear that city and suburban nerds like me often think this lifestyle sounds great, but they get sick of it quickly when they actually attempt it.