The subprime mortgage crisis in just about over. Those whose loans came with usurious interest rates have, if they got behind or lost their jobs, already been foreclosed upon. Now the issue is negative equity, the fact that real estate is depreciating so fast that homes are no longer worth the price paid, even with prime interest rates. Being “upside down” and expecting a higher rate to kick in on the original price is causing more and more people to simply walk away from their mortgages.

And indeed, walking away from the debt may be the best option for people who purchased during the “bubble” of inflated valuation. Because the underlying problem the bubble was based upon – ever-increasing wages for the working classes – has dismally failed to materialize.

We’re all paying for the bubble and the ridiculous amount of side-bets that got made by financial pyramid schemers who artificially produced and inflated that bubble. When the “average” price of a below “average” home (say, 50 years old, in need of repair, in a bad neighborhood and too small for a family) rises above $120,000 in one of America’s “Officially Depressed Regions” where a majority of citizens are chronically out of work and wages hover right around minimum, you know something’s got to give. That’s how it is in my nearest county with an actual city in it – Buncombe County, NC, home to the city of Asheville (pop. less than 100,000).

See, the cost of living either keeps pace with what the semi-skilled or skilled laborer can expect to earn, or it doesn’t. Around here we’ve got a perpetual situation of “doesn’t.” This doesn’t just mean that the vast majority of the population must pay rent to the landholders who CAN afford the real estate, because the cost of rent is tied to the value of the property being rented. So if you have to pay $1200 to $1500 a month just for a kitchen, two bedrooms and a bath either way, the only difference between ownership and renting is that if you rent, the landlord has to fix the roof and furnace and plumbing. And when the average family with two full-time workers can no longer afford to live indoors and eat regularly, what are they supposed to do?

Economic greed of the sort that led us to this current “financial crisis” – is not just one of those deadly sins, it’s blind, deaf and dumb to its own interests. Stupidity of the inevitably terminal variety that we should NOT have to make good on after the crimes have been committed. A legitimate slave-owner had to provide food, clothing and ostensibly adequate shelter for his slaves. If they were starving they couldn’t work. If they were freezing or sick or naked they couldn’t work. It cost the slave owner money to replace his chattel, and the necessities of life had to come with the bargain. This hasn’t been so in America since slavery was outlawed. Of course there had to be a bad end to it all.

So now that the marginal debtors have been generally ‘liquidated’ in the first wave of cashing in our collective assets, the better debtors are scheduled to fall. As described in the Business section of the New York Times, this stage of the liquidation will cost more, be every bit as damaging, and is not expected to salvage any actual wealth for anyone but the bankers. It involves real properties so quickly falling in value that their prime mortgages are upside down enough that the debtors are simply walking away.

Those who don’t wish to walk away are being charged exorbitant fees for refinancing closer to value, and rising interest rates are also denting the effectiveness. Fannie and Freddie are big into this second wave heist, as apparently are Fed and Treasury. Just another way to clean out the higher end of the so-called “middle class.”

The bad news is that there is a building third wave building as well, as commercial properties either default or turn upside down. Soon there will be vast wastelands of once-nice suburban neighborhoods and shopping centers and malls where the homeless sleep at night sans utilities. They’ll be homeless even as millions of empty homes and apartment complexes sit dark and empty because no one owns them, they’re not worth buying and nobody’s renting.

In a future post we’ll take a look at some innovative options that abandoned property squatters can put to work for themselves toward necessary things like light, heat, cooking ability, water supply, sanitation, etc. – ways that people are either keeping the utilities on in a home they neither own nor rent/lease, or providing for themselves. Sure, these are the “future-slums” many complained they’d become when they were being built, but hundreds of thousands of once-productive Americans every month join the ranks of the “future-slum” dwellers they never thought they’d be.

To all but the top 10% of wealth-holders things are well beyond mere recession at this point, whether any talking heads want to call it that or not.

Another Scam Alert

CNN Reports that fraudulent “discount medical cards” are spreading like wildfire, and offers some hits on how to recognize a scam:

1. You learn about it from a blast fax or internet popup ad.
2. They promise a certain percentage savings.
3. They use the term “guaranteed coverage.”
4. They won’t give you a list of providers until you buy.
5. It sounds too good to be true.

Because these scams are growing and a matter of concern to law enforcement in a number of states, always check out an offer through the BBB, your state’s attorney general’s website, the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud and National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

One of my favorite series bloggers sarahnity has a weekly series at Daily Kos called “Frugal Fridays” that offers different tips and ideas every week, by her and a number of volunteer authors, on how to make your money go farther, how to earn money on the side, and how to hang on to what you’ve got. Last Friday the theme was frauds and scams geared toward those being most harmed by the current economy, entitled Don’t Get Fooled Again.

I’m just going to list the major confidence games going around in recent weeks/months, and the several resources and good advice offered to help people determine if something’s on the up-and-up or just more grifters targeting the weak to make themselves strong. The series is awesome, definitely worth bookmarking by all readers of this blog and checked every Friday afternoon for the latest in resources for the frugal.

The major scams making the rounds these days – particularly via the internet – are sometimes old and sometimes new. There’s the standard Work from Home sting where you have to pay to find out who’s hiring. If someone wants your money before showing you the want ads, it’s likely a scam. Real employers aren’t looking for you to pay them, they’re seeking people to pay for good work.

Then there’s the new-ish trick of Facebook identity theft where a clever grifter assumes an identity from among your networking ‘friends’ (often a relative) to beg for money. Be suspicious if someone on your Facebook page suddenly asks for money. Often the real person knows nothing about it – so check on regular email before sending anything.

There are also property tax scams going around where someone tells you you’re paying too much for property recently devalued. All you have to do is send money and the scammers won’t do anything for you. These can come in the regular mail too, so always do your homework and check with your real property tax officials about what’s what. If you really do pay too much, they’ll let you know for free. In line with this there are also housing and mortgage frauds, where someone offers you a “special rate” to refinance, take your money and disappear. Don’t fall for it.

There are more, of course. Please click on Sarah’s linked diary and check them out, there is good advice on how not to be victimized and who to report suspected scams to in your state and locality.

We’ve seen a lot of desperation as the world (and US) economy tanks in the wake of the mortgage-loss pyramid scheme crash. We’ve heard a lot of hyperbole and rhetoric from the candidates who want to replace Bush-Cheney as President and Vice-President of the United States. This is The Week That Was, votes will be counted tomorrow night, and we should know sometime in the wee hours of Wednesday which of the contestants gets the erstwhile “prize.”

As Wall Street began its precipitous fall, Republican candidate John McCain was busy informing the nation that the ‘fundamentals’ of our economy are strong. No, they aren’t strong, they’re utter failures after years of massive tax cuts to the wealthy, heavy borrowing to support two wars, and the “Unfettered Free Market” [TM] frenzy allowed by blanket de-regulation of the banking and investment sectors.

To get an idea of just how outrageous things had gotten, consider the so-called “Mortgage Meltdown” that took so many once-staid capitalist houses into ruin. We all know that housing prices had ballooned in most urban areas of the country, a ‘bubble’ sustained by the practice of lending to workers whose incomes haven’t seen even a minimal rise in more than 30 years, for houses that cost easily twice as much as they could hope to afford and three times what they were actually worth. Many of these loans were made with specific criminal intent to skim fees off the top, and saddled with adjustable interest rates that worked just like time bombs to force people into bankruptcy.

Knowing that these time bombs would explode X number of years down the line, the banks and futures traders on Wall Street invented a new paper vehicle called “Credit Default Swaps” for the express purpose of betting on strapped families defaulting on their mortgages. [Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny]These are an insurance vehicle, insurance to be paid out to the holders of the policies on bad mortgages. And those policies – as “Credit Default Swaps” were sold and resold hundreds of times. This is what led corporate insurance giant AIG to be one of the first Big-Time Players to fail, our government moved right in to nationalize it.

This situation is a prime example of the philosophy of “Privatizing the Profits, Socializing the Losses.” It’s a bail-out to rich gamblers necessitated by unregulated greed. Pure and simple. Look at how it worked…

The number of risky, possibly criminal, largely ARM mortgages in the US that have or soon will default amounts to approximately 1% of all the mortgages outstanding. The re-insurance scam ended up valuing these mortgages at 5 times the annual Gross Domestic Product of the entire world. They were of course never worth anywhere close to that much, this is just the amount of insurance pay-outs once they DID default. And default they did, that brought Wall Street – and the world markets which participated in the scam – to their knees.

Despite the fact that candidate McCain did not seem to have the slightest grasp on the impending doom (his chief financial advisor Phil Gramm famously called people concerned about the situation “whiners”), his tax promises to the nation if elected is still to maintain George W. Bush’s blanket tax cuts to the top 2% of wealthy citizens and corporate giants. Democratic challenger Barack Obama would reverse this situation by taxing the rich and giving significant tax cuts to the middle classes. Even to the point of eliminating income taxes altogether on seniors who make less than $50,000 a year.

McCain of course calls this tax-the-rich situation “Socialism,” as if that’s as scary a word these days as it was back in the ’50s. It is not. All governments receive taxes and use them to support infrastructure, public education and other social programs, thus all government is essentially socialist at heart. The fine points always apply to who pays the taxes and gets the benefits of governmental largesse.

CNNMoney recently published an article about the different tax plans of the candidates, along with a breakdown of just how much your taxes will go up or down according to your income. McCain, Obama and your tax bill is recommended reading for everyone out there who hasn’t already voted, and is concerned about the recession/depression that we now know will last more than a year.

Then get out there and vote on November 4th, as if your way of life depended on it – because it does!

Links:

McCain, Obama and your tax bill
Greenspan Slept as Off-Books Debt Escaped Scrutiny
Economists see recession through 2009

Watching Treasury’s Paulson on Meet the Press Sunday made me sick. That pitiful, pleading look, the bizarre non-logic, the reversion to fear, fear, fear… the guy’s a cheap crook in an expensive suit and no, the whole world isn’t going to self-detonate if we let the greedheads take their lumps for being so damned greedy. Let ‘em fail.

Meanwhile, I’ve a fine plan to salvage the housing market as well as the business and jobs outlook. Instead of giving up to $3 trillion dollars (the price goes up hourly) to the crooks who got us into this mess, why not give every citizen $3,000 dollars? They’ll catch up on their mortgages, then FHA (the receiver for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) can refinance at lower rates and more realistic selling prices. Voila! the mortgage market is no longer “bad debt.” And if we’ve got an extra couple of trillion laying around to spend on these greedheads, why don’t we spend it on something useful – like universal health care?

That price tag is less than a third of the price tag the Fed, Treasury or Wall Street has come up with to bail themselves out of the hole they dug, and it would completely solve the asset valuation problem for regular Americans who don’t earn $5 million a year. And it lets the Wall Street failures fail. They earned it, they deserve it. Screw ‘em. The rest of us will be fine with our dividend.

But if you really want to try and understand what they’re all so boogedy-scared of right now, here are some links to excellent overviews that will tell you more than anybody wants to know about how we got to where we are today, and why.

Daily Kos front pager ‘Devilstower’ published a spectacular overview of how we got here in his Three Times is Enemy Action. It’s clear and concise, easy to understand, and will make you furious. His piece is so good that it was picked up by The Nation, which also offers an article by William Greider that’s worth reading, Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle.

Trading insider bonddad offers his usual excellent analysis of the bailout plan being pushed by BushCo (with further links) with Paulson to the US – Grab Your Ankles, beginning with the relevant observation…

“There’s a plan afoot to screw the US taxpayer.”

Yeah, well. Seems to me that instead of ‘trust’ in the very people who have screwed things up so thoroughly, we should see if trusting We the People might not work better.

If indeed we must in the wake of the failure of the only valuation we’ve had in recent years (real property) find some other means of valuation, giving the “bailout” money to those of us who DO consider our homes and businesses to be valuable would do more to dig us out of this mess than giving it to crooks.

Links:

Paulson to the US – Grab Your Ankles
Three Times is Enemy Action
Paulson Bailout Plan a Historic Swindle

That’s what Angry Bear says about the government bailout of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, announced on Sunday, September 7. It will cost the American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars we don’t have. Why? Because more than 1.3 trillion dollars’ worth of those mortgage bonds are held by foreign countries, primarily China, Japan, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and Belgium, and they want to know if their holdings are any good.

Now, you might be struck by some of those listed ‘foreigners’. Cayman Islands? Luxembourg? Belgium? Well known for hosting questionably legal accounts for some questionable characters, I suspect we’d find a lot of Americans on those lists. Americans don’t count as “foreigners.” Unfortunately, we’d also find a lot of Russian front companies and Middle Eastern Sheiks as well.

We’ve once again been robbed blind by wanton corporate and individual greed, and we are expected once again to bail out the wealthy speculators whose greed led to the failures.

Predictions for what happens now aren’t pretty. The dollar will plunge, inflation will zoom, regular Americans will have an even more difficult time keeping up. While the richest 1% will have their taxes cut and get their bad investments paid off so they can go speculate on other nifty things like food and water.

So buckle up, fellow shoestring budget enthusiasts! We’re going to get our chance to put all our alternative survival strategies to work. If we do it right, what will arise from the ashes of the late, once-great American economy might be strong enough to last awhile.

Links:

Bonddad: Our Foreign Masters Have Spoken
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: A Broader View
The Fannie/Freddie Bail-Out: The Plan and Why Now?

Mere days after causing a regular knee-slapping laugh riot with his claim that the average middle class American probably brings home something around $2.5 million a year (by way of being “rich” if you make $5 million a year), Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain told Politico that he’s not sure how many houses he owns. “I’ll have my staff get to you,” he said, since some of those houses are condos, and all condos look alike apparently. The correct answer, by the way, is at least seven, maybe ten.

By the way, if you’re feeling a little low because of that foreclosure notice you just got in the mail, here’s a slide show of McCain’s home (the one pictured above) from Architectural Digest, 2005. They may have sold it by now, but I don’t think it’s because they couldn’t afford the payments plus jet fuel for ‘getting around Arizona’ at the same time.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s campaign jumped on the gaffe to highlight just how out of touch with regular Americans his rival is. True to form, the McCain campaign came back with charges of elitism because Obama vacationed in his home state of Hawaii instead of just going to Myrtle Beach like everybody else does.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world where the vast majority of Americans don’t bring home $50 thousand a year and millions are losing their one and only home – and increasingly, their jobs – in a devastated economy, market analysts are beginning to notice that the foreclosure crisis could be hiding even worse conditions in the general housing situation nationwide. Turns out, according to Deutsche Bank analyst Nishu Sood, that half or more of “distressed” (foreclosed) properties aren’t being added to MLS listings.

Shares of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freedie Mac have lost 40% of their value since Monday (August 18) and are now trading at 20-year lows. Having lost a combined $3.1 billion between April and June, losses will only grow – because foreclosures are just getting started. Still, if you’re a fool with some money, you can pick up a share of Fannie Mae for under $5.

It occurs to me that at least one of the men running for President this year has no clue about what it’s like for most Americans just trying to get by day to day in this country. We’re just “whiners,” after all. Luckily, there is one fun recreational activity that most of us can engage in that doesn’t cost a dime. It’s called voting, and if enough people do it we just might keep OUR house – the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in DC – from becoming just another house McCain can add to his others.

For Heaven’s sake! Is it too much to ask that our wannabe leaders actually take a moment out of their jet-set lives to find out what’s real on the ground here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.?

Links:

AD: Slide show of McCain’s home
Foreclosures likely skewing housing indicator
Politico: Interview with John McCain

The US Congress, both House and Senate, finally cleared the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 today, after nearly a year’s worth of hemming and hawing and slipping goodies into the legalese in the middle of the night. A regular miracle of modern political tug of war and a bill that’s changed its name and focus so many times nobody’s quite sure what’s in it other than a trillion or two to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Having weathered a total of seven [7] Senate cloture votes, President Bush is likely to sign it into law.

No one expects a handout from this bill unless they’re 1. a robber baron, or 2. a loan shark, or 3. a speculator and/or house-flipper (buys real estate only to flip it immediately at inflated price), or 4. an fossil fuels dealer. Thus not surprisingly, the stock market opened low this morning [7-28-08], down more than 134 points at noon. Though Fannie and Freddie were on the upswing on that promise of taxpayer trillions.

But there is up to a $300 billion set-aside aimed to offer 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with government backing to “at-risk” homeowners. But only if the mortgage holder goes ahead and shaves a full 10% off the current appraised value. This clause of the Act is scheduled to go into effect on October 1, and sunsets within a few years. These will be Fannie and Freddie loans with out-of-pocket fees.

If you’re barely keeping up with your mortgage or facing a ballooning rate, it’s a good idea to start now trying to understand this labyrinthine legislation and keep up with news reports on how it’s to be implemented. How housing rescue bill can help you is a good beginning from CNNMoney. What is so far known per the language of the bill:

• Qualified borrowers must live in their homes and have loans that were issued between January 2005 and June 2007. Additionally, they must be spending at least 31% of their gross monthly income on mortgage debt to be eligible.

• Home equity or line of credit on the property must be retired, and will not be available to FHA-backed mortgagees for five years.

Your current lender has to agree to all the terms – including the devaluation. Go ahead and scroll down to the What does it cost? header to see how FHA stands to gain from the arrangement. Why, you’d think this government agency was in it for profit or something! If you ever sell the house for more than loan principal, FHA gets a share of the profits (100% the first year). This should help keep the house-flipper privateers out of the program, though.

Here’s hoping the ‘housing rescue bill’ can actually help out some honest, hard-working people out here in the real world. If you think you’ll qualify, go ahead and contact your mortgage lender and start the discussion. You’ve got nothing to lose, right?

Today the New York Times reports that governmental expectations that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will somehow keep the housing market afloat is starting to look like a pipe dream. With defaults and foreclosures rising drastically, administration officials, regulators and lawmakers are starting to get very nervous…

Will the next big taxpayer bailout have to go to these government-guaranteed mortgage giants? Well, since we got to bail out private investment bank Bear-Stearns, I’d guess so. Too bad we can’t bail out the families losing their homes.

Speaking of which, I got to wondering what happens to the people who lose their homes, given that the rental market is in just the same trouble. Is anybody keeping track of the homeless population? And if the person who used to own the home is now homeless because it’s been foreclosed, what’s the new designation for that family if they decide to simply stay where they are?

I did a little searching and found lots of news and opinion about how neighborhoods decimated by the mortgage crisis are now hosting increasing numbers of “squatters”. Here’s a CBS News video on that issue:

Seems cities simply can’t keep up with squatters living in foreclosed home, and once solidly middle and upper middle class neighborhoods are becoming squalid slums. In addition, CBS reports in The Frontlines of the Foreclosure Crisis that some scammers are offering foreclosed homes at places like Craigslist for rent, collecting money from them until the bank actually sends someone out to check the property. What this tells me about the situation is that the utility companies will actually set up accounts for squatters, meaning you can keep the electricity and water and phone going even if you’re just living there with no strings. Hmmm…

With just a little bit more surfing I found an article in the Wall Street Journal’s blog, Why Walk Away? Mortgage ‘Squatters’ Stay in Their Homes. Seems a report from a developer in South Florida maintains that some people in some of the very best neighborhoods ($2 million homes) have simply stopped making mortgage payments now that the value of their homes has decreased to drastically lower than they owe. Yet they’re staying put, essentially squatting in their luxury homes!

Thanks to a large backlog of foreclosure cases in the courts, they may get to stay in those homes for years before the banks can take action. Could middle class people hit by the crisis do the same thing? Virginia’s Rappahannock News blog asks that very question! In the entry entitled Squatting in Your Own Home, the opinion that squatting might just be the best option for those who have defaulted on sub-prime mortgages.

Staying put while still keeping up maintenance and utilities while the courts try to sort things out will not only keep the home from being vandalized and occupied by criminal elements, it also offers up to a year or more of time for the family to figure out what they’ll do next, possibly wait to see if federal bail-outs of the lenders might allow them to enter a new mortgage, or perhaps purchase the property anew once the credit is again available, for much less (and on better terms!) than what they had before.

So if you find yourself caught up in this ever-worsening mortgage disaster, take your time to look around at what’s real in your situation before loading the family into the car and heading for the state park campground. How many homes in your area are repossessed? How overloaded is the local court system? Is your banker a regular guy who might think it’s a fine idea if you stay to protect the property until things settle down? Would he dearly love to re-sell the house to you at a future date?

Carefully weigh your options. If you don’t have to be homeless, don’t make yourself homeless. If you could as easily squat in someone else’s repo home, you can probably squat in your own. The rich will come out of all this smelling like roses, it’s real people – real families – who are being ‘liquidated’ in this economic recession. Play your cards right (and be stubborn), and you might also come out the other end with a better deal than you had before!

Links:

Doubts Raised on Big Backers of Mortgages
Lenders Swamped by Foreclosures Let Squatters Stay
The Frontlines of the Foreclosure Crisis
Why Walk Away? Mortgage ‘Squatters’ Stay in Their Homes
Squatting in Your Own Home

Many of us watched with serious confusion the strange financial market machinations that led to the Fed bailout of investment bank Bear-Stearns, taxpayers taking on bad debt paper held by speculators rather than any actual member of the central banking community. JP Morgan bought B-S for mere pennies on the dollar, ending up buying for just a 5th of what B-S’s Madison Avenue headquarters building is worth – the rich folks have taken their hit. What matters now is how much of a hit the average cash-strapped citizen will have to take.

Government bailouts of junk paper speculators is outrageous, and does not a thing to help homeowners whose mortgages far outstrip the current reduced value of their homes – while the price of every necessity is going through the roof. Yet at the same time Fed chair Ben Bernanke pledged to “do all that is possible” to help struggling homeowners. There actually may be hope on the horizon, though nobody should bank on Fed “pledges.”

What should a homeowner behind in mortgage payments (and unable to catch up) hold out for? With the cost of everything going up quickly, there isn’t much incentive to hang on to an overpriced mortgage or the increasing fees for being hopelessly behind. If the homeowner still has a job, here are the things to insist if the mortgage holder is willing to negotiate…

1. Reduced principal. Tell the holder you don’t want a property that’s worth tens of thousands less than what you bought it for in an inflated market.

2. Reduced interest. Tell the holder you don’t care to pay 13-20% interest over 20-30 years and certainly aren’t looking to be able to afford a balloon payment in this economy. If they won’t re-set to a flat rate of 8% or less, tell ‘em you’ll send a postcard from wherever you end up.

3. Make sure they re-set the whole thing so you start fresh in the new mortgage. Don’t agree to start over already behind, and don’t accept imposition of ‘points’ on the renegotiation.

In some states courts have determined that the debt has been bundled and resold by speculators so many times that no one actually holds the mortgage paper. This means homeowners cannot be foreclosed on if no one can prove they hold the debt. If this is true in your situation, you just might come out ahead! At least, until the markets figure out how to re-do everything, and in your favor if you insist. They can’t re-do anything you won’t go along with.

And while you’re negotiating, remember that even with a low fixed-rate mortgage you’re still paying 3 times the actual price of the property over the life of the loan. That’s the way it works, and this is not going to change. It’s a trade-off for the real property asset – but useful only so long as it’s an actual asset and not a lead weight on your ability to get by in the world. If the feds can bail out the wealthy speculators, they can bail out strapped homeowners. If they won’t do that, there’s nothing wrong with walking away.

Being a “bad credit risk” in an economy where no credit is being extended anyway isn’t much of a problem. By the time the economy climbs out, just about everything will have to be re-set. If you take to heart the many resources available to conduct your life without going into debt (brand new used!), you’ll get by better than many others.

Links:

MSNBC: Mortgage Mess

Bernanke pledges to help troubled homeowners

Banks may lose $325 billion over mortgage mess

This is the second installment of the 20 ways to live on little-to-nothing. Obviously, not all of these alternatives will appeal to everyone. But perhaps some will appeal to some.

6. Personal Housing for the Gypsy Tread-Lightly

If your lifestyle doesn’t require thousands of square footage consider the advantages of an RV or travel trailer. No, not one of those $200,000 new fancy jobs, but one just “big enough” and in desperate need of some handy TLC.

Getting “free” will take more ingenuity that most people have to spend, but getting “cheap” is entirely possible. Unless you’re a serious mechanic, travel trailers are a much better option than RVs or old city buses that probably need totally rebuilt engines. A trailer can be moved as regularly as necessary (many state and national forest sites have 2-week limits) so long as you’ve something to haul them with.

7. Take Advantage of Gypsy Food Sources

If you move around quite a bit, you’ll have more opportunities than most people to take advantage of wild foods along the back roads and byways of your travels. Did you know that your basic cattails are a regular supermarket of goodness? Or that acorn flour makes great bread or breakfast mush that’s extremely healthy? Did you know that violets, tiger lilies and nasturtium flowers make a very tasty salad?

There are apple and pear trees that have escaped old homesteads, often right beside the road. In some producing regions you can glean fruit from orchards after main harvest. Grapefruit, oranges, peaches, apples, sometimes cherries and grapes as well. Truck and grain crops can sometimes be gleaned as well, allowing you to pick vegetables that weren’t ripe for the main harvest and will otherwise be left to rot.

8. A Place Of Your Own

Free land? In the 21st century? Believe it or not, there are towns in the Midwest offering land for free to people willing to build new homes within 2 years. Of course, this means you’ve got to invest in building a new house, and that’s certainly not zero cost! Do not be fooled – the US Government [BLM] stopped offering free land in 1976. You can’t just go claim some.

Yet an industrious and/or well-connected professional caretaker could end up with space enough to put a home in exchange for simply living there to take care of things! That way you don’t have to “stuff-less” or rootless, your home is your own. This takes some diplomatic skills and might take years to work yourself into, but there are people who got their property (including yard and garden!) for free on a corner of someone else’s property.

9. No-Cost Housing for the Handy

People might be surprised at what’s available out there for those willing to do the work or bargain with others for the services. Older houses on acreage that’s being subdivided for development are often given away rather than simply torn down, but you’ll have to move it to where you want it. Those who can build and re-build can often tear them down and keep everything for rebuilding on their own property. Which is often much cheaper than moving a farmhouse…

Careful inspection to decide the best relocation option is required. If that house will fall apart two blocks down the road, you’ll be better off just taking it down and hauling it off in pieces. Building materials, bathroom fixtures, plumbing, wiring and electrical box equipment, kitchen cabinets, cabinets and even sinks are often available for free where a developer is tearing down older dwellings to make way for new too.

10. Powering Your Living Space

Cost of electricity is always going to be with us, it seems. Still, there are alternatives out there that a handy person could make good use of. There are ways to obtain free solar panels that would make a real dent in a traveling home or even a stationary one. If you’ve some land of your own or you end up in a community of like-minded people, think about developing a diversified alternative system.

Posts to This Series:
Part 1: Items 1-5
Part 2: Items 6-10
Part 3: Items 11-15
Part 4: Items 16-20