No comment on the first question. As far as a shower I just sprayed myself with a garden hose in the front yard for the first couple years. It was fairly miserable in the winter and involved a lot of hyperventilating and gritting teeth. Last year I found that walmart online had a propane inline water heater so now I have an outdoor shower that is quite pleasant.

Lucky for me I am pretty much free from assets :)

Yea... it is 19ft diameter with a trampoline suspended from the ceiling as a sleeping platform. So fairly small. I have some recent pictures of the outside, but the inside is not as presentable as I would like due to it being both a house and a tool shed. Half of it is tools which means it is pretty much constantly cluttered inside. Hopefully will add a tool shed this year and get all that stuff out. Can send you the outside pics if you want, but it was just another small snowstorm like the last ones. It is comfortable for a single guy without aspirations of being seen by, never mind keeping up with the Jonses. It would suck if there was more than one person living in here that.

I am outside city limits and did all the work myself. Basically you can do this sort of thing out in the country and get away with it. I don't think it would be possible inside a zoned area. At least not without a lot of money and effort.

With the rising temperatures in Arkansas I think we may be Arizona in a few years anyway. Property in Canada may soon be fairly temperate.

I know... I am saving a little... but I doubt any amount would be "enough" at the rate things seem to be going. I have basic medical insurance but when the time comes I am sure I will be screwed like everybody else. Probably good that I don't have a family. My main concern is the quality of fertilizer I will make wherever I end up.

Thanks... will let you know when my contract runs out in about 4 months. I need to find someone with sprint to see if it will work at my house first.

FYI... I thought I would post the webstats from the above comment. Usually my pitiful little blog gets about 30 hits a day. In 30 min I have 557 (359 unique). From just this comment thread... crazy.

Thanks for the tip... sprint partially covers this area so it may work.

Well.. I am grandfathered into the verizon unlimited data. Don't really use it though so when the contract is up will go prepaid and save $50/mo. Problem is that carriers are a little limited in this part of the country.

Part of the electric is a installation charge they spread out over a number of years. I think I only use about $18/mo, but I don't complain since they had to run about a half mile of cable to get here. I hope to convert to solar eventually... buying bits and pieces if I find them inexpensively.

Arkansas... but it is only 1.3 acres. Outside of city limits, but only 10 miles from a town of 30k. Luckily I am friends with a couple of my neighbors so am basically free to use about 20 acres. I probably should have put that community is also pretty important when living cheap. Not necessary, but it sure makes it more fun.

true... thankful for that.

Including internet and phone ... so $50/mo for electric (not enough insulation), $50/mo for water (have a big garden), $60/mo for dsl, and $100/mo for smartphone... guess that leaves $40 for the usual crap that always seems to happen.

I have been doing this for about three years now in the United States. Basically, bought property ($6000), built small dome to live in ($3000), went half time at work (4 hours a day doing low stress programming). I make about $17,000 a year and live pretty comfortably on that. The key is having no debts, eliminating as many recurring payments as possible (I pay about $300/mo for all utilities and phone), drive as little as possible and don't eat out much.

I even wrote a blog about it. http://www.minimalintentions.com/search/label/Geodesic%20Dome

My plan was that when I had all this free time I could work on my own projects (of which I have many). Unfortunately turns out that I am pretty lazy so instead I sit in a hammock and read books more... ah well... I still plan to get motivated at some point... eventually.

(repost since I was logged out the first time)

Jamie Mantzel is building a giant robot and all the associated fortress / workshop / laboratory etc. He is doing all this on the top of a mountain out in the woods in Vermont while wearing chains and chainmail. He even has a giant geodesic dome made out of pipes with a trampoline on top, with lots of videos to demonstrate how it is all done.

http://jamius.com/Robot/Robot.html
http://jamius.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/JMEMantzel#p/a