I’m always glancing at Zillow and looking at different real estate options … one desire I have is to live near the ocean, but as I look, the prices and quality of housing options are always discouraging. There was recently a home with potential in Neptune City, NJ, which was within walking distance of both the beach and the train to NYC. But it was priced to get as many people looking as possible, and while I tried to get to the open house right before it closed, the realtor said “my client doesn’t want any more walk-throughs,” and I didn’t even get a chance to look inside. And sure enough, within 24 hours, it was listed as a pending sale.
I found it a bit frustrating that a house that needed a lot of “TLC” would go that fast, and I’m sure for well over the asking price. It got me thinking: do I really want to be in this frenzied real estate rat race? Why not consider something unconventional? Perhaps buy some land and put a pre-fabricated house on it? The image at the top of the post is a rough conceptual draft of this scenario … it might be fun to try something really funky like this.
Then, as I was casually glancing through listings of land for sale, I found an unconventional opportunity: a 3 story home out in the southwest, in the middle of 40 acres, as you can see here below. There’s also 4 small cabins on the property, and it could be a retreat, it could be a main home for me and 4 cabins to rent to tenants, it could be just about anything. And the crazy thing is, this home and 4 cabins and 40 acres costs less than the value of my suburban NJ condo!
There’s part of me that says, “this is too drastic a change, could I really ever do something like this?” Then there’s part of me that says “why not?” As I recently had a birthday and am looking to the year ahead of me, I think about the fact that I’ve been doing the same thing – sitting at a computer every day in a suburban neighborhood for the past 23 years. Now that my kids are adults and I have complete freedom, I think: why not go for the unconventional? Why do I have to think that opportunities – like 40 acres in the southwest – are opportunities that other people jump into, and only think about it vicariously? Or, stated another way: why do I think that cool and unusual things that others do are just things that others do? Why not me?
Granted, this is a wildly different scenario than the beach house I was considering at the beginning of this blog post, but I’m trying to use it as motivation to think about the unconventional, and taking the plunge to do something different. It could be a home in the Catskills, a lake house somewhere, a mixed-use property somewhere that I could open an art gallery, moving to the southwest … I’m just trying to push myself out of my suburban comfort zone and think of a new existence.
To be continued …