So wait, there are places where there are houses being given away (e.g. US, Japan and Italy as far as I know) and I'm a person that has the ability to work remotely.
Am I missing something? Is this my ticket to cheap housing and a more stress free life? At what point am I going to be scammed and/or disappointed?
Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying?
When you work from home, you wanna leave home often, where do you go if you're in the middle of nowhere?
I work from home in the middle of a dense city, pay a premium for it! You leave home and there are about 100 places (cafes, theatres, museums, parks etc.) I can go to that are walking distance. Is that possible in say rural Michigan, where housing is apparently practically free?
I work remotely from "rural" Japan. I am surrounded by rice fields and mountains, but also only a 10 minute drive or 20 minute bike/bus ride to the city center where there is shopping and night life. From there it's a couple hours to Tokyo by bullet train, which I visit a handful of times a year.
There are old or abandoned houses nearby that can be had for very little money.
I love being in the mountains. I get outdoors for cycling, hiking, running, or skiing almost every day.
The language barrier is a bit scary, but fortunately I knew enough to get by on day-to-day tasks. Google translate is also a godsend.
Not sure if this is what OP used, but the Google Translate app is nearing sci-fi levels of accuracy and speed. The conversation function is good enough that you can talk with someone while both using different languages and actually understand each other with minimal delay.
Yes but I was under the impression that Japanese long term work visa was only granted to those that had achieved N3 in Japanese language, seems I might be under a mistaken impression...
I have no idea why anything other than N2 and N1 exist. N3 is basically useless, I got it in under 6 months of studying and I’m a slow learner (my Korean and Chinese peers were going for N2 at that time). I still couldn’t function well with it. I was so disappointed by it I skipped 2 and went straight to N1.
Sure... my spouse is a Japanese citizen, so that made getting a visa trivial in my case.
The company I work for has offices in the U.S. and Japan. They were able to transfer me to Japan and let me work remote with my team in the U.S. They probably would have been able to get me a work visa, too, though it wasn't necessary in my case since the spousal visa was much simpler to obtain. Since my company has a presence in Japan, all of typical payroll, benefits, insurance stuff is handled through the Japan HR dept.
For anyone looking to spend time living abroad, I think this approach of working for a large multinational and asking to be transferred is a viable option. Of course it requires that you have a tremendous level of trust with your manager, and you need to be senior enough that it is worth the hassle for them. Also - if there is no business justification for the transfer, don't expect them to help out with relocation costs, and if you are moving to an area with a lower cost of living they may give you a negative cost of living adjustment, too.
I should make it clear that this move wasn't easy to make by any means. It took years of planning and even a job change to find a team I was confident enough I could make it worth with. While getting the visa was simple enough in my case, actually moving to Japan and buying a house, opening up bank accounts, getting a drivers license, etc were all enormously time consuming and at times very frustrating.
So it can be done, and I feel it is worth it, but it does require a fairly large amount of effort.
Hi, do you have an email or something I could contact to discuss your living situation and the process undertook a little better?
I would like to do something similar but would like some more information on it.
No, you're right, for a person like you or me it could be terrifying. But huge swaths of the population enjoy this lifestyle - in the USA they mostly depend on cars, ATVs, or horses to get around (speaking from my Texas experience).
It's not city life, but it's life. It's just a little bit "slower" sometimes. It can be relaxing in its own way.
I mean, I live in the core of SF, but how often do I go to the theater or museum anyway? No more than I did when I lived in the suburbs.
Personally, I am looking to buy a place in Llano or Blanco (between Austin and Fredericksburg, basically) in summer of 2019 and then spend a lot of time camping and visiting people and travelling.
Just because you're remotely based in the sticks and use property there as a place to park equity and a place to keep your big stuff (I have a lot of tools and music equipment) doesn't mean you have to stay there if you're remote.
Years ago, I lived with a friend in Blanco for a few months - a little house built by the owner on the top of a hill, with a big garden, horses, goats, chickens, dogs, as well as occasional rattle snake or scorpion.
It was fairly isolated (in a comforting way), so having access to an automobile was a necessity. If I recall, about ~1 hour to Austin, with a lively music scene.
I learned how the Texas hill country can be quite charming - wildflowers, forests, rivers.. Fond memories. Good luck with finding a homestead there!
Do you find there are a lot of places to camp around there? I'm in San Antonio, and I find it very sparse compared to places that feel made for camping and hiking (looking at you, PNW).
I've been to a lot of the state parks (there are some good ones). The dinosaur tracks in government canyon are cool, lost maples is nice. I've spent a whole lot of time at Enchanted Rock.
None of the places is very big, but if there should be enough to keep someone busy for most weekends if they are motivated.
As you get farther, Mustang Island state park is nice, and I'm very much looking forward to build some lead rock climbing skills-- El Portrero Chico is only 6 hours south.
As other folks have mentioned, Big Bend, Terrlingua, MArfa, Alpine, etc. are all quite good. If you haven't been to Big Bend NP, I'd recommend a trip out that way.
If you can go 9hrs, Ruidoso NM will get you into the mountains.
Appreciate the list! I've enjoyed Government Canyon, and I'm headed to Lost Maples next weekend. I'll have to check out some of those adventures further away.
Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying?
It's (probably) not just you, but at the same time working from home for me, a full-time worker who has a boss that takes the "as long as you get your work done" approach to remote work, which results in me in the office one day, but the very next deciding "yeah I'm not dealing with the blue line's crap today"...rarely comes with the urge to get up and go anywhere and usually don't unless it's to walk the dog or take a smoke break on my porch.
And I live and work in the middle of Chicago, where there's no shortage of places favorable to remote workers or walkable spots for lunch very close by.
But at the same time I've also found myself in Hawaii getting paged for an all hands "oh shit" emergency and been just as productive despite the time difference, so I think it's very much a YMMV type of thing.
>Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying?
That situation is literally my dream. I live in a suburb now and literally go 3-4 days without needing to leave home. I most often leave to go get firewood or meat to BBQ out back.
In my dream I'd be on a full acre(instead of the little 0.2 acre lot we're on) with enough room for a normal family home, and a "mancave/study" so I "go to work".
What's your house budget? For a place with a man cave you'd probably need 250k here in southern Japan. While not really remote, it's far from the busy likes of Tokyo. All of my work is with companies around the globe in all sorts of time zones. I'd say it's boring for a single person out here, you'd definitely only put up with it if you had a family. Securing a visa would be another challenge unless you married a Japanese citizen, which you wouldn't want to do after coming here as divorce rates are high for mixed couples. Culture can be very frustrating too after a while.
I work remotely from a town of 200 full time residents in the North Cascades Mountains in North Central Washington State. The closest grocery store is about 25 miles away and the closest stoplight is about 80 miles. You have to plan a bit around shopping and logistics but it is a wonderful place to live. We are in the middle of the largest maintained network of nordic ski trails in North America, I can literally backcountry ski from my front door and we have hundreds of climbing routes within a 10 minute drive. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
Ha snap, I live in Northland and do the same. My day breaks are running around a track through the bush, body surfing when the surf is up and checking my traps. Small world.
> Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying?
My wife dragged me kicking and screaming to a rural area that's a popular vacation area.
(I must admit that I wanted to end up in a different rural area that's also a popular vacation area.)
My neighborhood is excellent, and there's plenty to walk to. Rural areas still have dense spots with plenty of things to do. There's just a lot of open forests around the dense areas!
What's terrifying is that I still telecommute for the job I got when I lived in Silicon Valley. I have no idea what's going to happen when I need to change jobs.
(Edit) I still miss living right on University Ave in Palo Also, CA. But, that's not sustainable given how much it costs to live there, and our (me and wife's) overall lifestyle desires.
I did that jump, but in Canada. I moved from a medium-sized city (pop. ~180K) to a literal village (pop. ~900), then I lost my remote job a few months ago. I just jumped back into freelancing, and for now I actually have too much work. There's a lot of demand for North-American developers on the freelance market. Also if your cost of living is low (as it tends to be in rural areas), you can afford to charge a little less but still make a lot of money (I suspect my rate is pretty cheap for my clients, but it's double the amount I used to make).
I work from home from a house in the countryside. There are no businesses here, no traffic, nothing disturbing me in my work. The closest neighbor lives a kilometre away. As a bonus, I don't even have a driver's license and the nearest bus stop is a 20-minute bike ride away from here.
Personally, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, but I guess it does take a certain kind of person to pull it off.
If you're working remotely and want cheap housing and a slower life, and you're interested in moving to some random place abroad, why wait on an opportunity like this?
Have you considered just moving somewhere much cheaper? I work from a beach in Mexico, pay almost nothing, and have a nice and slow life. And... it's a beach!
Obviously, there are plenty of places in the world to do this from if Mexico isn't your thing. I have a buddy in Triste, Italy, and another one down the coast in Croatia.
Anyways, I only write this because it seemed like something you want to do but are just looking for some "today's the day" chutzpah. I hope you end up where you want to be one day!
Where in Mexico? I've often thought about moving there, but I hesitate mostly because of crime. I also have a neighbor who lived there for almost a decade, until they were shaken-down by the Federales (with actual gunfights and shallow graves in his story! So they moved back to the US.)
Petty crime is always there, but you probably already have habits that thwart it like locking your door and taking your laptop to the restroom at the cafe. If a cop catches you smoking a joint on the beach and he happens to care, he'll ask for your cash, but I prefer that to getting caught in the States. ;)
More serious crime is unlikely to target you. Stay out of the north. And you can always live where the wealthier mexicans live in a city if you're nervous.
Quiet towns like a lazy beach town are pretty safe.
I'm currently based in Pto Escondido, a beach town in Oaxaca.
A good way to get your feet wet is to book an airbnb at one of the beach cities you can fly into, take a taxi down a highway that runs parallel to the shore, and get off at any of the smaller beaches/towns for a day trip. You could do a different one every day and get some work done at a cafe/bar on the beach there.
That way, worst case scenario, you're still at the beach with your touristy creature comforts (e.g. easier to find good network if you need to `npm install` -- half-joking!). But if you end up feeling more adventurous, you can take a taxi and find yourself alone on a tiny beach, which as far as I'm concerned, is one of the remaining wonders of the world.
Of course, the hardest part of travel is taking the first step at all. If it wasn't for finding a job in Guadalajara at a small incubator run by an American in /r/IWantOut, I would probably still be miserably working from a Starbucks table in Austin wondering when I'll have the balls to do something new.
This is akin to buying a totaled car. You're signing yourself up for a lot of work and the Government isn't going to really give you any help. In this case you're going to be in a very rural area, to the point of likely not having any real kind of internet.
The houses from what I saw looking through translated listings seem to have no insulation, ancient (ie nonexistent) plumbing, and "traditional" toilets (hole in the ground) with no heating/cooling. You're buying a badly insulated cabin in the woods more or less.
I think one of the main pain points in renovating the houses is going to be actually getting materials to the house. Some of these are rural to the point of not having real roads and being hours away from civilization. If you need to truck in a new water heater, you might be building your own gravel road first.
If you're looking to be really remote and more or less build a house, this might be an awesome opportunity - just realize this is more akin to buying a plot of land than "a house" per say.
Owning property or land in Japan does not give you right to reside within the country and you will still need to get some sort of visa in place in order to move in.
Also the location often means that you need to travel (an hour or more each way) for basic amenities and fuel, in some locations you might get snowed in at winter.
Totally true. Actually even more modern buildings are made to be (somewhat) cool in summer and no care at all is done about winter. So each room/apartment is warmed individually using air-conditioner instead of having a central heating per building.
Houses are generally not being given away but there are tons of places in the US where housing is dirt cheap compared to prime coastal urban real estate.
Look at a map of US MSAs [1]: nearly anywhere outside of an MSA will be cheaper than within the MSA. Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap.
Of course, the catch is that standing up your own slice of civilization infrastructure will get either expensive and/or time-consuming, depending upon your non-negotiables. The more requirements you will not do without, the more inputs you will want to haul into or build upon the property.
> Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap.
This is so very very wrong. MSAs are purely based on population density. I grew up in one of these white counties on the map you linked. It's small towns, scattered among farmland and coal mines, and the local MSAs are nothing but a larger (but still quite small) town with an interstate.
As a heuristic, after looking myself for a couple decades for a residence that didn't participate in the global real estate mania we're still in the grips of, the MSA boundary works "good enough" as a starting point for median households setting up a search for a place to live that still follows a conventional 30% DTI ratio (or a safer 15-20% DTI to account for the greater income precarity for median US households today).
We're mostly in a cognitive elite echo chamber here on HN due entirely to a historical anomaly that prices most of our labor high relative to more conventional labor pools (though IMHO not commensurate with yielded productivity benefits), and our sense of what is fiscally "reasonable" is highly distorted and privileged. The MSA boundary is not a hard and fast binary switch, where inside the boundary land is crazy expensive relative to prevailing local incomes, but outside the boundary it suddenly is crazy cheap. But it serves as a useful starting point to look for the pricing gradients in your local area for a median household.
A heck of a lot of Millenials got debt-trapped by the higher education scam, and I applaud those who are "once burned twice shy" about taking on another unsustainable debt load in real estate. For those in the US looking for a chunk of land to inexpensively park their possessions (and if you are the kind of Maker-type that enjoys HN, tools alone can take up a lot of space), without becoming an investor in the real estate business itself, then the choices for the past few decades of cheap credit that I've experienced have been get extraordinarily lucky finding a good deal, wait for a bust, or locate outside of where there is lots of land banking activity.
Land does get much cheaper on the outer rings of an MSA, but IMHO still not nearly cheap enough for median households. They're still stretching, and compromising their quality of life a hell of a lot at the same time. We're pushing tons of stress onto them as an unseen externality, and calling it all good and patting ourselves on our backs that we have so many "homeowners", when we should be holding a frank discussion on why our real estate land markets are so dysfunctional.
I'm seeing a lot of words here, but not the three that matter: "I was wrong."
If you wanted to say "real estate is cheaper in the rural area, but you'd have to drive everywhere", then you'd be right. But that's not what you said. What you said was, "Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service", and that is demonstrably false, and doesn't even pass even a cursory logical test, because for this to be true, then all the arable land and extractive natural resources would have be in cities, and if that was true, then where would the buildings be?
If you fail to understand what is going on in your basic assumptions, why should the rest of your argument even be considered?
I did notice, your phrase, "the higher education scam". That's interesting, since educational attainment has been shown time, and time, and time again, to be the biggest predictor of economic success. The long term viability and effects of shifting the cost of education in the past 25 years from state budgets to individuals, is certainly a concern and worthy of debate, but to refer to education as a "scam", makes me wonder about how well thought out your ideas on the educational debt crisis is as well.
I think you're bitter, and not nearly as smart as you think you are.
In addition to the sibling comment, you can also find relatively cheap housing in some of the Sunbelt although I understand that the real housing crash in Las Vegas has largely recovered.
If you're serious about it, you really need to think about your non-negotiables, your strong preferences, and how high you're willing to go for "cheap" housing. For some people the answer might be a condo in a smaller city that isn't in demand. For others, it might be a house that's out in the sticks someplace. There's also a huge difference between cheap as in $100K and cheap as in $300K.
Contra another post, you probably don't want land that isn't already engineered. Of course, also consider Internet. I know tech people who manage with satellite but there are a lot of compromises.
I'm a big fan of western/piedmont of NC for remote workers. It's not the absolute cheapest compared to the midwest, but the weather is better if you don't love snow, and it's still extremely cheap if you're in some non-hip parts (Greensboro, High Point, Winston Salem are very affordable small cities that have universities, and other less-connected mountain towns like Morganton/Wilkesboro/Marion/Hickory are even cheaper, but less vibrant), and there are plenty of roads connecting you to airports and bigger cities with more robust economies (Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte). Asheville is probably the nicest remote work city in NC, and would definitely beat Dayton culturally, but it's nowhere near as cheap.
Hmm... in my country it'd only be affordable not cheap (The Netherlands). We're pretty populated over here and the government has every square meter planned out. We have a name for it in Dutch "bestemmingsplan" (literally: destination plan or purpose plan).
Now, compared to cheap places in the US, the house price is still somewhat high. But cheap areas in the US, you often have to live in a detached house, as apartments are often very uncommon, or even non-existent, whereas in the Netherlands multi-family housing is much more common(1). And in the US, cheap places you almost always need to own a car, which is inherently expensive, whereas in the Netherlands you can get by with just walking and biking. Plus, the safety net means that even if you're poor as shit, you're taken care of for things like healthcare, to a greater extent than the US.
If you can keep a high salary and work wherever you want, and you want a quiet life, then just throw a dart on a map of the USA or the world. Basically everywhere except a few metropolitan areas is very cheap to live. If this is something you want, yes you are missing something, you should look around a bit.
Depends on if you know Japanese language and culture. Prepare to always be considered a foreigner by institutions and the general public. Plenty of English signs help me get by when I visit but that's in touristy areas (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, etc).
I've seen multiple programs similar to the Detroit one, though you need to know where to look. Generally they follow the same idea as the above: You get a house for cheap, but it needs major repairs/renovations. Essentially you get a house for below market rate, but the city gets tax revenue and their dangerous buildings fixed.
Rural Italy is beautiful and the food (in the grocery stores and markets) is both great and ridiculously cheap. But there are a few downsides. 100-plus-year-old houses often require significant refurbishment including earthquake mitigation (depending on the area) and they can be expensive to heat unless you spend $$$ on new windows and good seals and insulation. But the biggest problem for a foreigner moving to Italy might be the bureaucracy: Huge stacks of paper forms to be filled out and handed in to a guy who just happens not to be in his office today. Repeatedly. If you have a lot of patience for this sort of thing, Italy is lovely.
Also, if you do a job that is defined in law (doctor, architect, journalist, etc), the bureaucracy might actually stop you from working until you’ve jumped several hoops - exams, payments, years of practice, and so on.
Hmm... I was too lazy to do the Google search, sorry about that. I figured the average HN type would prefer to do a DYOR Google search anyway. I happened to have seen it on a Dutch program (a Dutch couple moved to Italy).
I know of a few places with schemes to incentive people to move to dying towns, in the regions bordering with Northern Appennini mountains and in the deep South. The catch is that these towns are dying for a reason: they are far from everything, there are no local jobs (or rather, no jobs most people would do - being a farmer in 2018 is unappealing), and the housing stock is often crumbling and centuries-old. The kids go to school in cities and never go back, so you’re left with a bunch of oldies. Do not expect any help from the State, but do expect hindrance, especially in building matters - Italian laws on paper are the best in the world, but in practice, compliance is hell.
That feels like the wrong way of looking at it. The houses are very rural and dilapidated and cheap because no one wants them. Encouraging just about anyone to get out there and make it a home, highly-paid software engineers included, would be an economic boon for that area.
Houses don't get left abandoned in places with jobs. Knowledge workers are the only ones that can do remote work and thus are the ideal people to take those houses.
That's how you end up with an unhealthy neighborhood. All modern "let's give houses to poor people" program learned this lesson the hard way, and the current, better method is to ensure the recipients of these welfare programs are distributed among the rest of the neighborhood.
If the empty houses described in the article are clumped up, it would be best if the economic status of the recipients is disregarded.
Am I missing something? Is this my ticket to cheap housing and a more stress free life? At what point am I going to be scammed and/or disappointed?