MAKING WISE HOUSING CHOICES

Your housing choice may be having an unexpected impact on your ability to retire!  (Although the recent housing crisis may have brought those costs front and center ...)

In any case, you'll see in the CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS section that the heaviest line item in a budget is affected by where -- and in what kind of housing -- you've chosen to live. 

By intelligently revisiting that decision, either to put into practice immediately (pre-retirement) or later (post-retirement), assets can be redeployed in a way that totally alters the retirement picture.

For many, this will determine whether someone can retire ... or not.

The crux of this website is to encourage you to explore different 'outside-the-box' housing alternatives ... as opposed to staying in the same oversized, over-mortgaged home after the kids are grown and gone.  While the possibilities are endless, this section looks at:

• Intentional communities, where groups of like-minded adults combine resources in housing with some shared areas or services;
• Remarkable container homes, which use the ever-growing supply of discarded steel shipping containers to create cutting-edge, sturdy, amazingly low-cost housing;
• House-like mobile homes, in which standard construction methods can be used to rehab existing units ... in order to create all the comforts of a regular 'stick' house while offering all the economic advantages of a mobile home;
• Living abroad in order to take advantage of cost-of-living differentials without giving up any quality of life; and
• Downsizing or relocating, whether it's reducing square footage from the family Dream House to a new streamlined way of life ... or a move across town or across the country.

Granted, the different options represent different levels of 'adventure'.  But they all offer the possibility of paring down your cost of living now ... to let you stash money away madly in your retirement accounts while you're still working ... or later so your funding requirements are lower once you reach retirement.

We hope you'll look into the different housing options with an open mind.

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