Author: jennynazak

Someone in the Socially Conscious FIRE group just asked if anyone had had any success with non-traditional investments (i.e., not stock market/brokerage, and not real estate).

Awhile back I wrote a post in this blog, sharing suggestions for alternative investment. (Actually a series of posts. See Further Reading section below.) At the time, I had not yet done any of these investments myself. (However, I know personally or have read about people who have successfully done each one of them.)

Now, about a year after making that series of posts, I can say I’ve actually done one of the alternative investments I often suggest to people: invest in a farm or other regenerative enterprise.

Specifically, I have become a co-investor in a permaculture farm & learning center in my home state. Not local, but it’s only about 150 miles away from where I live. I know and trust the people. I don’t expect monetary returns anytime soon, but even if I never see any, I strongly support what they are doing, and feel that I have increased my security and wealth just by being part of something like this. Also, my investment allows me the option to become a resident on the farm. Something I might do if I ever had to leave the house I own and live in (because of sea-level rise or other unforeseen circumstances).

And come to think of it, my dwelling itself, which I own free and clear, also offers potential future monetary gain, but only if its value goes up AND if I sell the house (which I do not plan to do, barring unforeseen circumstances). I don’t buy into the conventional “homeownership as investment” school of thought. My house is my beloved place to live. That said, it offers me a stable, low-overhead platform, allowing me to focus most of my waking hours on engaging in creative pursuits and improving the wellbeing of my community and the planet, and in that sense I consider my house a very sound investment indeed.

Further Reading:

• Laura Oldanie has a new blog post, How To Invest Locally: Suggestions from Michael Shuman. “Everyone wants to live in a thriving, vibrant community, yet we usually spend and invest our money in ways that direct that money elsewhere. While we’re often encouraged to embrace our role as consumers to buy local, much less emphasis is placed on our potential as investors in our local economy. That’s why I was so excited when local investing champion Michael Shuman published his latest book …” Also, this is interesting; corroborates my experience and concurs with one of my top recommendations re overhead reduction: “As part of this approach, Shuman advocates for the financial benefits of buying a home, paying off the mortgage, and investing in repairs and retrofits that will make the home more energy efficient and reduce household bills. Says Shuman, ‘Investing in your own home effectively means running your own hedge fund.'”

• Here’s my series of posts on Becoming a Local Investor – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4. (Note, some of my tips do involve real estate, but even some of the real-estate tips are “alternative” in the sense that they are not ideas I’ve seen widely talked about.) I’ve been so happy and relieved to hear people talking about non-Wall Street investments. I really think divesting from Wall Street and expanding our investment menu is crucial, not only to our personal wellbeing, but also to the wellbeing of our communities, not to mention the future survival of human beings on this planet.

Lately I’ve been posting a lot on the theme of “retirement” and financial resilience. (If you want to tune in to a lot of thoughtful discussion on this topic, from people with many different viewpoints and experiences check out Socially Conscious FIRE (on Facebook). It’s become one of my favorite online forums relevant to creating a sustainable lifestyle.)

Another thing I’ve been doing lately is take time to really get to the root of my fears.

In USAmerican society, it seems like a lot of our fears are focused on material things. Not making enough money to be comfortable; not saving enough money for retirement. Some of that fear is understandable. Our society has reached a point where certain costs of living (most notably rent, healthcare, and student debt) have rendered life precarious for many people.

But, that very realistic anxiety aside (and also universal human “lizard brain” instincts such as fear of starvation aside), I think one of the sources of low-grade gnawing fear in this affluent modern consumerist culture is that we’ve forgotten about a great, old-fashioned foundation of comfort and security. I’m talking about faith. Not necessarily a specific religion (though that certainly works for many people!), but rather, a broader sense of faith. A general belief that “things will work out somehow; we’ll get through this.” A working familiarity with the concept of surrender. And a willingness to practice surrender. Take sensible action but then accept you only have so much control over the outcome. Turn it over to the universe; give it to God; however you think of it. I’m good at it when I remember to do it, but I do find myself having to remind myself to do it.

Another thing, besides surrender, that I find helpful in dealing with my material fears is taking time to get to the real heart of those fears.

Some years back, when I was going through a very rough patch financially and emotionally, it turned out that my biggest fear wasn’t being broke (after all, I was broke already!) or even becoming homeless. Rather, my biggest fear was the shame I’d feel if my family found out how far down I’d fallen. Identifying the core of my fear didn’t fix it, but it did help me prioritize and think more clearly.

Later, after my Mom died, I found myself having a lot of fears around money. (Ironic, because I suddenly had more money than I’d ever before had in my life, having inherited it when Mom passed.) Well, when I really navigated to the heart of my fear, I found that it really had nothing to do with money at all! My fear was all about losing touch with my siblings, since I live far away from them and since I had been (without realizing it) depending on my parents as my channel for keeping a connection with my brother, sister, brother-in-law, and nieces.

Identifying the core of my fear didn’t instantly fix the problem, but it gave me a constructive direction to move in: Work on building stronger connections with my brother, sister, etc. Whereas if I had not identified the real core, I might have become preoccupied with hoarding money, acquiring more money, and so on. Money-hoarding hasn’t generally been a thing I’ve fallen into. But I will say that for awhile, I was pretty preoccupied with things like making a living will, getting a prepaid cremation plan, etc. All of that is sensible stuff to take care of, don’t get me wrong — and it did increase my peace of mind to take care of it. But if I had not also pinpointed my true core fear — fear of losing relationship with siblings; fear that they could very happily live without me — then no amount of attending to practical logistics/material stuff would have addressed my deep-seated unease.

The fact is, I was in some ways distant from my family for years, as I was living in various different places far from them, and also working through my mental/emotional issues (with professional help), which consumed a lot of my bandwidth and seemed easier to do at a distance from my familial origins.

I always kept in pretty good touch with Mom and Dad via letters and phone calls, but took my sibling relationships for granted too much. So yeah, that, coupled with the fact that I live in Florida and they live up north, and our parents are no longer on earth with us, does mean it’s possible my relationships with them could fade. And the future of those relationships is only partially in my control.

There seems to have been a point in my adult life when I suddenly went from being sort of detached from my family, to realizing how very very much they each meant to me. Fortunately this point arrived while both my parents were still alive, and I got to have many happy years of loving connection with them (albeit at a geographic distance from them, and also feeling like I had to be “in the closet” about certain stuff, most notably my financial situation after I dropped out/fell out of the middle class). I’m still dealing with some regrets about how I handled all that. Wishing I had had the courage to share more openly with my family about my life, warts and all. I feared their disapproval and also didn’t want to worry them needlessly. But by not sharing more openly, I created a barrier to closeness. And by not sharing with them my “scarier” trials, I also ended up not sharing with them the great exhilaration and sense of life-mastery that went along with navigating those trials and coming out feeling stronger and more fully alive. Sharing our experiences is one form of generational wealth.

Even recognizing that I might have done things differently, I’m not crying over spilt milk, but rather, using the lessons to be more courageous from here on. And it helps just knowing that my worst fear over these past 2-3 years isn’t anything to do with money, but rather, a fear of someday not having relationships with my siblings and nieces. Now that that fear has been exposed, I can work with it. I can make my best efforts to build deeper connections with them. And, I can practice surrender; let go of the need to control the future; just appreciate what we have now.

How about you — Do you have money anxiety? And have you explored to determine whether some other emotion(s) might be at the real root of that anxiety? And what do you think are some of the main factors that make so many Americans so anxious about money, material things, and “having enough for retirement”?

I hope this post has been helpful to you in some way. And please drop me a line if you’d like to share anything about this topic!

In closing, some thoughts on fear and courage.

• “Fear is the mind-killer.” — Frank Herbert

• Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s facing fear, and moving through it. This is old news, but some of us need to be reminded sometimes.

• “You can’t test courage cautiously.” — a quote from Annie Dillard that I happened to run across today before I made this post.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, the following will be old news to you. But I wanted to give a quick capsule summary for the benefit of the new readers who have stopped by recently (thanks and welcome!).

One, I don’t have a car. By some estimates, taking into account gas and insurance and car payments and repairs and all, car ownership costs an average of $8K a year (USA). Instead of needing a car, I make it a deal-breaker to live near where I work and near essential shops. I mainly get around by foot and bicycle, which doubles as my main exercise. (Pre-Covid, I did take public buses or Uber once in a while. And on occasion I rent cars; I rented one back in 2018 to drive up to Virginia for a time-sensitive family visit.)

Two — and this is the biggest cost item — I minimize my housing overhead. Before I owned my home, I always either found cheap apartments, or shared the cost with a roommate, or both. Back in Austin, I lived in an RV park for 10 years, from 2000 when I got my divorce to 2010 when I moved to Florida. The RV park rent started out at $220 a month, which included electric and water! By the time I left, it had gone up to $375 – still a bargain. (Now, the problem is, cheap housing rental options are becoming thinner on the ground. RV parks are getting bought up by fancy management companies that jack up the rent; apartments are getting expensive and scarce for various reasons. Modern zoning restrictions and NIMBYism make it almost impossible to reintroduce SROs, rooming houses, and other modest-priced housing where students, artists, single folks, and all sorts of people on the margins of society traditionally found refuge. This state of affairs has turned me into a crusader for restoring low-end housing options.)

I own my own home now because I inherited money when my Mom passed, and used it to buy my simple, sturdy beachside bungalow outright for 124K. My monthly overhead house costs, including insurance, taxes, and water/sewer/trash collection, are $350 a month, and I am often sharing these with housemates, though I go through periods of occupying my house alone. Really I prefer housemates even if it were not for the cost savings.

My electricity bill is $11 to $13 when I’m living by myself; $18 or $20 with housemates. I give tips about minimizing electricity use elsewhere in this blog.

I don’t have a TV, therefore don’t have cable service, etc.

My total phone and internet bill, including unlimited data plan on my phone, is $50. This includes 5 gigs of data for getting online with my laptop using my phone as a hotspot, but I usually don’t need it; my phone is my main work tool these days.

What else? I’m self-employed and work at home, but even if I didn’t, I just don’t like new clothes all that much. I buy almost eveything thrift, vintage, or hand-me-down.

I don’t buy many household cleaning products; mainly just sweep with a broom, and mop with water + a drop of essential oil or detergent. Not having carpet helps a lot.

These are the main ways I minimize my overhead. I can live fine on 12k a year before taxes; live very comfortably at 15k; and live lavishly at 18k.

Within this, I am able to donate money to community organizations, environmental preservation nonprofits, and other worthy causes.

I should mention that I have my indulgences. Books, restaurant meals (outdoors only these days), online classes. So I’m not at all deprived. There’s just a whole lot of stuff I don’t need to buy, and it keeps my cost of living low.

Why do I do it? In a nutshell, so I don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy chasing money. This gives me occupational freedom and creative space, including ample mindspace to be able to think about how to solve planetary problems. My belief is that Mother Earth needs for us to marshal as many of our neurons as possible front-and-center right now, and it brings me great satisfaction to be able to do this.

Regarding my experience of living on a low income and being housing-insecure a few years back, I posted the following comment in the “Socially Conscious FIRE” Facebook group:

I actually live in a place where rents are too high for workers’ incomes, but some houses in some neighborhoods are low-priced to buy (if a person can pay cash). I was able to buy my house in cash (124k) because I inherited money when my Mom passed. Before that, I was housing-insecure in one of the very few remaining cheap apartments. I turned a 1br into a 2br by making a “room” out of tall bookcases, so I could let an apartment-mate live in the actual bedroom. Our rent was $500, or $250 each. The creativity part was fun; the very small supply of affordable apts was not, and that’s why I continue to be a strong activist for expanding our menu of lower-priced housing options for renters, such as RV parks, SROs etc. Things that used to be a far more prominent part of the housing supply than they are today.

Further Reading:

Being housing-insecure in the past, and watching others continue to struggle, has made me passionate about addressing the structural ills on the U.S. housing landscape. This article on tiny-house villages is inspiring, and offers possibly the most astute summary of our housing crisis that I’ve ever read. Mentions SROs too. A long piece, packed with compassionate practical wisdom.

” … a tiny house village model is not just a solution to homelessness. It’s basically just a scale of housing, rather than any particular type of person. Lots of different types of people are attracted to this scale of development, where you have a modest, private individual space and then shared indoor and outdoor spaces. It’s something that’s attractive to a broad range of folks, and it’s an option that’s just not available in our city. You have the apartment building, or the single family house. There’s not a lot of shared housing options in most cities. So I see it as a way to both provide solutions to issues of homelessness and low income housing, and an additional option of how we house ourselves.”

As birth rates fall in Europe and Asia, animals are prowling abandoned “ghost villages,” reports The Guardian.

Wow!! (I had actually heard about depopulation in Italy and some other places before, but didn’t realize it had become this much of a thing.)

“Some Japanese towns have taken extreme measures to attract new residents – offering to subsidise renovation expenses, or even giving houses away to young families. With the country’s population expected to fall from 127 million to 100 million or even lower by 2049, these akiya [empty houses] are set to grow ever more common – and are predicted to account for a third of all Japanese housing stock by 2033.”

It’s happening in Spain, Italy, and other places too, according to the article.

Interestingly, this dovetails with a train of thought I started having a few months back, when I started pondering reparations and land-return: Where would all the USAmerican-born people go if we were to decide to give the land all back to its original indigenous inhabitants?

And the answer that came to me was, “We’d have to apply to other countries for residency — and they might well not want us!”

We’d have to be flexible, adaptable, humble, and have useful skills to offer. We’d be in a very vulnerable position, similar to what refugees from other countries go through all the time.

If the other countries are depopulated and in need of extra hands and extra brains, they might be more receptive to such reverse-immigrants. (I pictured myself doing a crash-course in Slovak, to make myself a more attractive prospective resident of one of my ancestral European homelands. Then again, I already speak Japanese, and I love Japan and have lived there before, and Japan is one of the countries experiencing depopulation, so maybe I’d end up applying there … )

Don’t mind me, I just like to think ahead. Sometimes I get a little out-there, but what can I say, I like to plan for every possible scenario.

Here’s another quote that grabbed me from the article:

“A vision of the future, perhaps, in a post-peak world: smaller populations crowding ever more tightly into urban centres. And outside, beyond the city limits, the wild animals prowling.”

That vision, I really love, regardless of where I’m living. I like the idea of other species having more space again. Not only do I like the idea; I think it’s probably essential to the survival of human life on earth.

Someone in the Socially Conscious FIRE group made a post asking if anyone had a retirement plan that does not include investing in the stock market. I am one such person, and wrote the following:

I’m planning FIRE in a way that some people might consider backwards. First, I never plan to retire, because I love my work and it feels useful to the world. (Sustainability writer/educator, freelance.)

Second, rather than raise as much money as possible, I strive to minimize the amount of money I need. I shrank my overhead, and have simple wants, so I can live well on 12k-15k a year. My Social Security will be about that much. And I’ll also be continuing to teach, make art, write, do landscaping gigs, probably still clean a house here and there, etc.

I have a blog where I write about my lifestyle. The original motivation was to minimize my eco footprint and help others who wanted to do so. But then it also became a way to achieve occupational freedom, resilience, creative freedom, and peace of mind.

Coming up: Some tips on how I shrank my overhead. And why!

BTW I highly recommend the Socially Conscious FIRE group!

I’ve been involved with permaculture for awhile (took my first Permaculture Design Certificate course back in 2005), and have been involved in the Strong Towns movement for a shorter while (since 2018 I believe).

Ever since I first stumbled on Strong Towns, I’ve felt that ST principles are basically permaculture design principles applied to the urban environment, and to human interactions in the urban environment. And no wonder I love Strong Towns content so much!

Well, it turns out someone has actually written an article about that very thing, the parallels between permaculture design principles and Strong Towns principles! Check out this fantastic article by Gracen Johnson at Strong Towns. This was written back in 2014 but I just found out about it today, via email correspondence with a content manager at Strong Towns. I will now be sharing it widely!

I’ve been writing a lot of rambling, “big tangled ball of yarn” -type posts lately about the less tangible aspects of low-footprint living, so today I thought I’d throw in a tidier, more nuts-and-bolts post.

A DEEP GREEN reader and friend asked her Facebook community to share tips for replacing bottled dish detergent, throwaway sponges, and plastic scrub brushes. (Great question, and thanks Laura for tagging me!)

My response:

I just use regular dish liquid, but I dilute the heck out of the dish liquid. Even a small bottle lasts a year or two. And, this is big: When it’s just me, not cooking for anyone else, I find i can get away with just rinsing with water the one bowl & spoon I use, and the one pot I use. So that little bottle of dish liquid goes a loooooooong way!

A friend who was a frequent house-guest (pre-Covid) is a “water washer” in the same way. Single, eats with mainly just one pot and bowl and spoon, rarely even needs to use detergent on them.

Re the bottles themselves: Ideally the bottles get recycled (they are #1 PET), but I have rarely had to put one in the bin, as I seem to always find reuses for the few plastic squirt-bottles that get used up.

I use just cut-up old towels as the washing “sponge.”

I do have a plastic scrub brush (bought new in its package at a yard sale, 50 cents); it should last years as I don’t need to use it often.

Note: Because of how I stretch it, I’m probably a year or more away from using up the dish liquid in my house (some of which was left by previous residents). However, once I’m ready to buy more, it’s good to know there are plastic-free options out there. One is Etée concentrated dish liquid, which comes in compostable tubes and is made with 100% plant-based ingredients. (Thanks to another friend of Laura’s for suggesting this in response to her post. Social media at its best!)

If you want to read more practical tips like this, from people all over the world, covering every possible aspect of daily life, I highly recommend joining the Zero Waste, Zero Judgment group on Facebook. It’s a treasure trove, which is why I mention it often here.