Check out this $2000 Solar Homestead

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I came across this little cabin somewhere on the web a few weeks ago and really liked it. I would love to have a little cabin in the country and live in it. When I share my plans most people don’t grasp how small a cabin I’m talking about. When they do grasp how small a cabin I want they often compare my prospective cabin to the Unabomber cabin. Not the best comparison but I think his cabin would have been plenty big enough.

The cabin I have linked to is 400 square feet. I’ve lived in studio apartments that big so it shouldn’t be a problem to live in a cabin that size. Especially since it has a porch where I could spend a lot of time outside. I also like how the house is not dependent on any utility company for power or water. I’d just have to find a way to get Internet and I’d have everything I need. There isn’t a whole lot of information on the site since he is selling an e-book. It looks like the e-book contains a lot of other useful information. If I were closer to doing this I’d buy the book and I might just buy it anyway. Living in a cabin like this for part of the year would work great for my future semi-retirement plans. It would be a very frugal way to live.

Would anyone else like to live in a cabin like this or am I just crazy?

Where Is It All Going?

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The third chapter of Your Money or Your Life builds on the topics of life energy and tracking your money that were introduced in the second chapter and asks you to do three things.  It asks you to create a table of all your income and expenses organized by categories.  The categories you have are dependent on how you spend your money.  You also need to balance your monthly income and outgo totals. Also you should compute how many of hours of life energy you are spending on different categories.

I do the first step and sometimes do the second step but I think the last step is the most beneficial to those who are just starting to take control of their finances. This last step might cause you to discover that you are spending lots of life energy on categories you don’t really care about and not much life energy on categories you do care about.  This information is very useful in helping you change your spending patterns.

That is a very brief summary of this part of the book.  You really should check the book out from your local library or buy it to get the full benefit of this book.

January Investment Income- $53.58

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My investment income for January rose to $53.58 from $42.85 the month before. Although my investments went down I added enough new money to my portfolio to cause a nice increase in my investment income. Since I started tracking my investment income last April it has risen from $27.50 a month to the current figure of $53.58 a month. If I could continue to grow my income at that rate I wouldn’t have any trouble retiring in 10 years and living on my investment income. It isn’t likely that I’ll be able to continue that rate of increase but I will try to keep it increasing as much as I can. I’ll be adding more money to my investments this month but after that I probably won’t be able to add more money until the end of the year. Maybe my income will increase without my contributing more money.

Disclaimer:This is not my actual investment income. To get this figure I first add up my retirement accounts, emergency fund, and any other money I consider permanent savings. What the total of my savings would earn at 6% interest for a month is my monthly investment income.

Blogging by Phone?

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As many of you already know I plan to spend five months later this year doing a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.  This means that I will only have internet access about once a week when I get into a town.  In order to keep this blog reasonably updated and stay on top of my other internet ventures I’ll be spending a lot of my town time on the internet.  I suppose I could just let my sites slide while I’m hiking but that option doesn’t appeal to me.  I’ve spent a lot of time building them up and I don’t want to start that process over.  Also my sites are generating a decent amount of income that might be enough to cover the cost of my hike.

One solution I’m considering is carrying a phone that I can use to blog.  I won’t always have service available but I should have sufficient coverage that I could update my blog most days I’m hiking and then wouldn’t have an overwhelming amount of stuff to do when I got to town.  I know there are phones that are capable of being used to blog but I don’t have personal experience with any of them.  If any of you have used a phone to blog I would like to hear about your experience and what phone you would recommend. Thanks.

Amazon and Book Giveaway Winners

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The winners of the giveways have been determined by using Random.org. The winner of the $5 Amazon e-gift card is Paid Twice.  The winner of the book Nine Steps to Financial Freedom is Start Up.  By coincidence they are both bloggers. That isn’t too big of a coincidence since a large percentage of my readers are also bloggers. I’ll be sending you emails shortly.

I haven’t heard back from the winner of Your Money or Your Life yet.  Sandra B. are you out there?  If I don’t hear from her in the next week I’ll give the book to someone else.

I’m going out of town this weekend and might not be able to get on the Internet.  If you don’t hear from me over the weekend I’m not ignoring you and I’ll get back to you on Monday.