Don’t Want A Picket Fence? Real Estate Alternatives

on May 23, 2017 at 12:24 am

The idea of having a house in the suburbs with a the partner of your dreams and two and half perfect children is seemingly quite ubiquitous. However, this dream does not appeal to a lot of people. Where a person wants to live and where they feel comfortable are both informed by a lot of the circumstances of a person’s life. If someone grew up in a boring town in the middle of nowhere where they knew everyone and everyone knew them, they may want to escape to the anonymous embrace of a metropolis. There is a liberating and paradoxical sort of privacy in living amongst millions of other people. Since everyone has their own life to lead and so many things that take up their attention, spending time gossiping about other people, especially your neighbours can seem like a waste of time. However, lots of people have the opposite experience. Growing up in a city can easily give you the impression that life always needs to be lived at a fast pace. Besides, there is so much noise, crime, and pollution in cities, that retiring to a quiet hamlet can seem appealing. Whatever dream you have for the rest of your life, the possibilities are certainly not as dichotomous as you may think. If it is what you want and you have the drive and ambition to make it happen, it can become a reality. Here are a few possibilities that you may not have considered:

Owning your own ranch may not be something that you ever thought you’d do, but it is entirely possible. Companies like Venturewestranches.com can make it happen for you. There is a certain romance to living on a ranch. One imagines that it is a life of unfettered freedom that is unencumbered by a lot of the often petty, annoying distractions of modern life. If you raise animals and use the ranch to support yourself financially, it can be difficult, but it is a life of self-reliance and independence that few other lifestyles offer.

Why confine yourself to land at all though? Living on a boat appeals to a lot of people exactly because you can travel and always be at home. Whether you get a canal boat and slowly travel down picturesque canals or you invest in a yacht and sail all around the world, the options are always yours. There are expenses that are unique to this sort of life, like mooring charges and maintenance on the boat itself, but it can be cheaper than buying a house. Not only that, one of the disadvantages of a house on land is that when you get up every morning to go to work, there is always the same thing in front of you. With a boat, you can choose what that is because all it takes is sailing somewhere new to change it.

Lastly, a trend that has captured a lot of people’s imaginations recently is #vanlife. It is exactly what it sounds like: living in a van and travelling wherever you like, whether to a nature reserve where you can sleep under the stars or a beach paradise where you can surf. It can be rather ascetic but it is also stress-free and a great way to see the world.