11 ms·

So wait, there are places where there are houses being given away (e.g. US, Japan and Italy as far as I know) and I'm a person that has the ability to work remo

So wait, there are places where there are houses being given away (e.g. US, Japan and Italy as far as I know) and I'm a person that has the ability to work remotely. Am I missing something? Is this my ticket to cheap housing and a more stress free life? At what point am I going to be scammed and/or disappointed?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
civilian 8y ago
Where are houses being given away in the US? I imagine that you need to be a Japanese citizen to get a free house.
- tick_tock_tick 8y ago
  Detroit. It's not free anymore but it's still dirt cheap.
  - umeshunni 8y ago
    I didn't believe you, but then I looked online and I saw that you were right! Here's a perfectly reasonable house in Detroit for about 4000 USD https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/15285-Manning-St-48205/home/60996922 https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/15285-Manning-St-48205/hom...
    - dakna 8y ago
      Property values are tied to school ratings and crime statistics.
- ggggtez 8y ago
  I've seen multiple programs similar to the Detroit one, though you need to know where to look. Generally they follow the same idea as the above: You get a house for cheap, but it needs major repairs/renovations. Essentially you get a house for below market rate, but the city gets tax revenue and their dangerous buildings fixed.
ghaff 8y ago
Houses are generally not being given away but there are tons of places in the US where housing is dirt cheap compared to prime coastal urban real estate.
- Ibethewalrus 8y ago
  Where?
  - yourapostasy 8y ago
    Look at a map of US MSAs [1]: nearly anywhere outside of an MSA will be cheaper than within the MSA. Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap. Of course, the catch is that standing up your own slice of civilization infrastructure will get either expensive and/or time-consuming, depending upon your non-negotiables. The more requirements you will not do without, the more inputs you will want to haul into or build upon the property. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
    - jonathankoren 8y ago
      > Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap. This is so very very wrong. MSAs are purely based on population density. I grew up in one of these white counties on the map you linked. It's small towns, scattered among farmland and coal mines, and the local MSAs are nothing but a larger (but still quite small) town with an interstate.
      - yourapostasy 8y ago
        As a heuristic, after looking myself for a couple decades for a residence that didn't participate in the global real estate mania we're still in the grips of, the MSA boundary works "good enough" as a starting point for median households setting up a search for a place to live that still follows a conventional 30% DTI ratio (or a safer 15-20% DTI to account for the greater income precarity for median US households today). We're mostly in a cognitive elite echo chamber here on HN due entirely to a historical anomaly that prices most of our labor high relative to more conventional labor pools (though IMHO not commensurate with yielded productivity benefits), and our sense of what is fiscally "reasonable" is highly distorted and privileged. The MSA boundary is not a hard and fast binary switch, where inside the boundary land is crazy expensive relative to prevailing local incomes, but outside the boundary it suddenly is crazy cheap. But it serves as a useful starting point to look for the pricing gradients in your local area for a median household. A heck of a lot of Millenials got debt-trapped by the higher education scam, and I applaud those who are "once burned twice shy" about taking on another unsustainable debt load in real estate. For those in the US looking for a chunk of land to inexpensively park their possessions (and if you are the kind of Maker-type that enjoys HN, tools alone can take up a lot of space), without becoming an investor in the real estate business itself, then the choices for the past few decades of cheap credit that I've experienced have been get extraordinarily lucky finding a good deal, wait for a bust, or locate outside of where there is lots of land banking activity. Land does get much cheaper on the outer rings of an MSA, but IMHO still not nearly cheap enough for median households. They're still stretching, and compromising their quality of life a hell of a lot at the same time. We're pushing tons of stress onto them as an unseen externality, and calling it all good and patting ourselves on our backs that we have so many "homeowners", when we should be holding a frank discussion on why our real estate land markets are so dysfunctional. YMMV of course.
megaman8 8y ago
don't forget about property taxes and HOAs. sometimes the property taxes can be higher than the value of the house. just watch out.
corey_moncure 8y ago
The point where these houses have no insulation in the walls, no air conditioning or heat and a septic system that must be manually pumped. Have fun in winter!
- sparkie 8y ago
  Also the location often means that you need to travel (an hour or more each way) for basic amenities and fuel, in some locations you might get snowed in at winter.
- titanix2 8y ago
  Totally true. Actually even more modern buildings are made to be (somewhat) cool in summer and no care at all is done about winter. So each room/apartment is warmed individually using air-conditioner instead of having a central heating per building.
squish78 8y ago
Fixing a dilapidated house is not a stress free life
- ticviking 8y ago
  This is the biggest reason keeping me and mine from making that leap. It's 2-3 years of hard work for a pretty solid potential payout
becauseiam 8y ago
Owning property or land in Japan does not give you right to reside within the country and you will still need to get some sort of visa in place in order to move in.
- eric_khun 8y ago
  What's the easiest path to get a visa in Japan without being attached to a company?
  - malydok 8y ago
    Wedding. Would like to know that, too.
    - eric_khun 8y ago
      Ah this might work! But this makes you to be legally attached to someone, what isn't great I guess :(
      - malydok 8y ago
        Found a better option actually: setting up business. Should be fairly straightforward to do for a single remote developer.
pj_mukh 8y ago
Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying? When you work from home, you wanna leave home often, where do you go if you're in the middle of nowhere? I work from home in the middle of a dense city, pay a premium for it! You leave home and there are about 100 places (cafes, theatres, museums, parks etc.) I can go to that are walking distance. Is that possible in say rural Michigan, where housing is apparently practically free?
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying? It's (probably) not just you, but at the same time working from home for me, a full-time worker who has a boss that takes the "as long as you get your work done" approach to remote work, which results in me in the office one day, but the very next deciding "yeah I'm not dealing with the blue line's crap today"...rarely comes with the urge to get up and go anywhere and usually don't unless it's to walk the dog or take a smoke break on my porch. And I live and work in the middle of Chicago, where there's no shortage of places favorable to remote workers or walkable spots for lunch very close by. But at the same time I've also found myself in Hawaii getting paged for an all hands "oh shit" emergency and been just as productive despite the time difference, so I think it's very much a YMMV type of thing.
- Max_aaa 8y ago
  Actually it is wonderful. I work from home and live in a small village minutes from the ocean in New Zealand. Groceries are can be delivered. The only reason to drive to town is the odd meetup.
  - abraae 8y ago
    Ha snap, I live in Northland and do the same. My day breaks are running around a track through the bush, body surfing when the surf is up and checking my traps. Small world.
    - pj_mukh 8y ago
sgc 8y ago
Where are houses being given away in Italy? I would love to know of the program.
- inerte 8y ago
  I upvoted you, expecting that OP might deliver with the relevant article, but decided to do a search of my own and found some stuff. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free%20italy%20houses https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free%20italy%20houses like the first few articles are about free or 1 Euro houses. Seems to be true!
  - mettamage 8y ago
    Hmm... I was too lazy to do the Google search, sorry about that. I figured the average HN type would prefer to do a DYOR Google search anyway. I happened to have seen it on a Dutch program (a Dutch couple moved to Italy).
- stevenwoo 8y ago
  This made the news last year (you have to renovate and make a tourist trap or some economic positive): https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/italy-is-giving-away-over-100-castles-for-free--theres-only-one-catch.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/italy-is-giving-away-over-10... That was an update on an older program that was pretty popular: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/world/europe/sicilian-town-tells-outsiders-take-our-homes-please.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/world/europe/sicilian-tow...
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  Rural Italy is beautiful and the food (in the grocery stores and markets) is both great and ridiculously cheap. But there are a few downsides. 100-plus-year-old houses often require significant refurbishment including earthquake mitigation (depending on the area) and they can be expensive to heat unless you spend $$$ on new windows and good seals and insulation. But the biggest problem for a foreigner moving to Italy might be the bureaucracy: Huge stacks of paper forms to be filled out and handed in to a guy who just happens not to be in his office today. Repeatedly. If you have a lot of patience for this sort of thing, Italy is lovely.
todopoderoso 8y ago
If you're working remotely and want cheap housing and a slower life, and you're interested in moving to some random place abroad, why wait on an opportunity like this? Have you considered just moving somewhere much cheaper? I work from a beach in Mexico, pay almost nothing, and have a nice and slow life. And... it's a beach! Obviously, there are plenty of places in the world to do this from if Mexico isn't your thing. I have a buddy in Triste, Italy, and another one down the coast in Croatia. Anyways, I only write this because it seemed like something you want to do but are just looking for some "today's the day" chutzpah. I hope you end up where you want to be one day!
- MrTonyD 8y ago
  Where in Mexico? I've often thought about moving there, but I hesitate mostly because of crime. I also have a neighbor who lived there for almost a decade, until they were shaken-down by the Federales (with actual gunfights and shallow graves in his story! So they moved back to the US.)
  - todopoderoso 8y ago
    Petty crime is always there, but you probably already have habits that thwart it like locking your door and taking your laptop to the restroom at the cafe. If a cop catches you smoking a joint on the beach and he happens to care, he'll ask for your cash, but I prefer that to getting caught in the States. ;) More serious crime is unlikely to target you. Stay out of the north. And you can always live where the wealthier mexicans live in a city if you're nervous. Quiet towns like a lazy beach town are pretty safe. I'm currently based in Pto Escondido, a beach town in Oaxaca. A good way to get your feet wet is to book an airbnb at one of the beach cities you can fly into, take a taxi down a highway that runs parallel to the shore, and get off at any of the smaller beaches/towns for a day trip. You could do a different one every day and get some work done at a cafe/bar on the beach there. That way, worst case scenario, you're still at the beach with your touristy creature comforts (e.g. easier to find good network if you need to `npm install` -- half-joking!). But if you end up feeling more adventurous, you can take a taxi and find yourself alone on a tiny beach, which as far as I'm concerned, is one of the remaining wonders of the world. Of course, the hardest part of travel is taking the first step at all. If it wasn't for finding a job in Guadalajara at a small incubator run by an American in /r/IWantOut, I would probably still be miserably working from a Starbucks table in Austin wondering when I'll have the balls to do something new.
TulliusCicero 8y ago
You could probably move to a cheap part of your own country already with much less hassle and fewer integration issues. The reason you don't is that cheap places in rich countries are usually cheap for a reason.
- mettamage 8y ago
  Hmm... in my country it'd only be affordable not cheap (The Netherlands). We're pretty populated over here and the government has every square meter planned out. We have a name for it in Dutch "bestemmingsplan" (literally: destination plan or purpose plan).
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    I bet I could find some cheap parts of the Netherlands. Although I guess it depends on your definition of cheap. Looks like there are some cheaper areas here: https://www.koopwoningen.nl/nieuws/487:de-20-duurste-en-goedkoopste-gemeenten-van-nederland-om-een-huis-te-kopen/ https://www.koopwoningen.nl/nieuws/487:de-20-duurste-en-goed... Now, compared to cheap places in the US, the house price is still somewhat high. But cheap areas in the US, you often have to live in a detached house, as apartments are often very uncommon, or even non-existent, whereas in the Netherlands multi-family housing is much more common(1). And in the US, cheap places you almost always need to own a car, which is inherently expensive, whereas in the Netherlands you can get by with just walking and biking. Plus, the safety net means that even if you're poor as shit, you're taken care of for things like healthcare, to a greater extent than the US. 1 - Looking at the example of Delfzijl, you can rent an okay-sized 1br apartment for ~600 EUR/month: https://www.iamexpat.nl/housing/rentals/delfzijl/apartment https://www.iamexpat.nl/housing/rentals/delfzijl/apartment Factoring in extremely low transportation costs, that makes for a pretty damn cheap lifestyle.
make3 8y ago
these houses should probably go to extremely low income people, not a software engineer
- TheGRS 8y ago
  That feels like the wrong way of looking at it. The houses are very rural and dilapidated and cheap because no one wants them. Encouraging just about anyone to get out there and make it a home, highly-paid software engineers included, would be an economic boon for that area.
- negativez 8y ago
  Houses don't get left abandoned in places with jobs. Knowledge workers are the only ones that can do remote work and thus are the ideal people to take those houses.
- vvillena 8y ago
  That's how you end up with an unhealthy neighborhood. All modern "let's give houses to poor people" program learned this lesson the hard way, and the current, better method is to ensure the recipients of these welfare programs are distributed among the rest of the neighborhood. If the empty houses described in the article are clumped up, it would be best if the economic status of the recipients is disregarded.
vorpalhex 8y ago
This is akin to buying a totaled car. You're signing yourself up for a lot of work and the Government isn't going to really give you any help. In this case you're going to be in a very rural area, to the point of likely not having any real kind of internet. The houses from what I saw looking through translated listings seem to have no insulation, ancient (ie nonexistent) plumbing, and "traditional" toilets (hole in the ground) with no heating/cooling. You're buying a badly insulated cabin in the woods more or less. I think one of the main pain points in renovating the houses is going to be actually getting materials to the house. Some of these are rural to the point of not having real roads and being hours away from civilization. If you need to truck in a new water heater, you might be building your own gravel road first. If you're looking to be really remote and more or less build a house, this might be an awesome opportunity - just realize this is more akin to buying a plot of land than "a house" per say.
wishinghand 8y ago
Depends on if you know Japanese language and culture. Prepare to always be considered a foreigner by institutions and the general public. Plenty of English signs help me get by when I visit but that's in touristy areas (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, etc).
phyller 8y ago
If you can keep a high salary and work wherever you want, and you want a quiet life, then just throw a dart on a map of the USA or the world. Basically everywhere except a few metropolitan areas is very cheap to live. If this is something you want, yes you are missing something, you should look around a bit.
astura 8y ago
Not a house but if you're a remote employee Vermont will pay you $10,000 cash a year for two years for moving there. https://www.businessinsider.com/move-to-vermont-remote-workers-program-2018-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/move-to-vermont-remote-worke...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

civilian 8y ago

Where are houses being given away in the US? I imagine that you need to be a Japanese citizen to get a free house.

tick_tock_tick 8y ago
Detroit. It's not free anymore but it's still dirt cheap.
- umeshunni 8y ago
  I didn't believe you, but then I looked online and I saw that you were right! Here's a perfectly reasonable house in Detroit for about 4000 USD https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/15285-Manning-St-48205/home/60996922 https://www.redfin.com/MI/Detroit/15285-Manning-St-48205/hom...
  - dakna 8y ago
    Property values are tied to school ratings and crime statistics.
ggggtez 8y ago
I've seen multiple programs similar to the Detroit one, though you need to know where to look. Generally they follow the same idea as the above: You get a house for cheap, but it needs major repairs/renovations. Essentially you get a house for below market rate, but the city gets tax revenue and their dangerous buildings fixed.

ghaff 8y ago

Houses are generally not being given away but there are tons of places in the US where housing is dirt cheap compared to prime coastal urban real estate.

Ibethewalrus 8y ago
Where?
- yourapostasy 8y ago
  Look at a map of US MSAs [1]: nearly anywhere outside of an MSA will be cheaper than within the MSA. Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap. Of course, the catch is that standing up your own slice of civilization infrastructure will get either expensive and/or time-consuming, depending upon your non-negotiables. The more requirements you will not do without, the more inputs you will want to haul into or build upon the property. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
  - jonathankoren 8y ago
    > Anywhere that is outside an MSA, has very poor soil, no exploitable oil and/or mineral (and most mineral and oil rights are separate from the land anyways), not by a body of water, and has no electric/water/sewage service is going to be very cheap, like $100-500 per acre cheap. This is so very very wrong. MSAs are purely based on population density. I grew up in one of these white counties on the map you linked. It's small towns, scattered among farmland and coal mines, and the local MSAs are nothing but a larger (but still quite small) town with an interstate.
    - yourapostasy 8y ago
      As a heuristic, after looking myself for a couple decades for a residence that didn't participate in the global real estate mania we're still in the grips of, the MSA boundary works "good enough" as a starting point for median households setting up a search for a place to live that still follows a conventional 30% DTI ratio (or a safer 15-20% DTI to account for the greater income precarity for median US households today). We're mostly in a cognitive elite echo chamber here on HN due entirely to a historical anomaly that prices most of our labor high relative to more conventional labor pools (though IMHO not commensurate with yielded productivity benefits), and our sense of what is fiscally "reasonable" is highly distorted and privileged. The MSA boundary is not a hard and fast binary switch, where inside the boundary land is crazy expensive relative to prevailing local incomes, but outside the boundary it suddenly is crazy cheap. But it serves as a useful starting point to look for the pricing gradients in your local area for a median household. A heck of a lot of Millenials got debt-trapped by the higher education scam, and I applaud those who are "once burned twice shy" about taking on another unsustainable debt load in real estate. For those in the US looking for a chunk of land to inexpensively park their possessions (and if you are the kind of Maker-type that enjoys HN, tools alone can take up a lot of space), without becoming an investor in the real estate business itself, then the choices for the past few decades of cheap credit that I've experienced have been get extraordinarily lucky finding a good deal, wait for a bust, or locate outside of where there is lots of land banking activity. Land does get much cheaper on the outer rings of an MSA, but IMHO still not nearly cheap enough for median households. They're still stretching, and compromising their quality of life a hell of a lot at the same time. We're pushing tons of stress onto them as an unseen externality, and calling it all good and patting ourselves on our backs that we have so many "homeowners", when we should be holding a frank discussion on why our real estate land markets are so dysfunctional. YMMV of course.

megaman8 8y ago

don't forget about property taxes and HOAs. sometimes the property taxes can be higher than the value of the house. just watch out.

corey_moncure 8y ago

The point where these houses have no insulation in the walls, no air conditioning or heat and a septic system that must be manually pumped. Have fun in winter!

sparkie 8y ago
Also the location often means that you need to travel (an hour or more each way) for basic amenities and fuel, in some locations you might get snowed in at winter.
titanix2 8y ago
Totally true. Actually even more modern buildings are made to be (somewhat) cool in summer and no care at all is done about winter. So each room/apartment is warmed individually using air-conditioner instead of having a central heating per building.

squish78 8y ago

Fixing a dilapidated house is not a stress free life

ticviking 8y ago
This is the biggest reason keeping me and mine from making that leap. It's 2-3 years of hard work for a pretty solid potential payout

becauseiam 8y ago

Owning property or land in Japan does not give you right to reside within the country and you will still need to get some sort of visa in place in order to move in.

eric_khun 8y ago
What's the easiest path to get a visa in Japan without being attached to a company?
- malydok 8y ago
  Wedding. Would like to know that, too.
  - eric_khun 8y ago
    Ah this might work! But this makes you to be legally attached to someone, what isn't great I guess :(
    - malydok 8y ago
      Found a better option actually: setting up business. Should be fairly straightforward to do for a single remote developer.

pj_mukh 8y ago

Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying? When you work from home, you wanna leave home often, where do you go if you're in the middle of nowhere? I work from home in the middle of a dense city, pay a premium for it! You leave home and there are about 100 places (cafes, theatres, museums, parks etc.) I can go to that are walking distance. Is that possible in say rural Michigan, where housing is apparently practically free?

dvtrn 8y ago
Is it just me or is the prospect of working from home in the middle of nowhere terrifying? It's (probably) not just you, but at the same time working from home for me, a full-time worker who has a boss that takes the "as long as you get your work done" approach to remote work, which results in me in the office one day, but the very next deciding "yeah I'm not dealing with the blue line's crap today"...rarely comes with the urge to get up and go anywhere and usually don't unless it's to walk the dog or take a smoke break on my porch. And I live and work in the middle of Chicago, where there's no shortage of places favorable to remote workers or walkable spots for lunch very close by. But at the same time I've also found myself in Hawaii getting paged for an all hands "oh shit" emergency and been just as productive despite the time difference, so I think it's very much a YMMV type of thing.
Max_aaa 8y ago
Actually it is wonderful. I work from home and live in a small village minutes from the ocean in New Zealand. Groceries are can be delivered. The only reason to drive to town is the odd meetup.
- abraae 8y ago
  Ha snap, I live in Northland and do the same. My day breaks are running around a track through the bush, body surfing when the surf is up and checking my traps. Small world.
  - pj_mukh 8y ago

sgc 8y ago

Where are houses being given away in Italy? I would love to know of the program.

inerte 8y ago
I upvoted you, expecting that OP might deliver with the relevant article, but decided to do a search of my own and found some stuff. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free%20italy%20houses https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free%20italy%20houses like the first few articles are about free or 1 Euro houses. Seems to be true!
- mettamage 8y ago
  Hmm... I was too lazy to do the Google search, sorry about that. I figured the average HN type would prefer to do a DYOR Google search anyway. I happened to have seen it on a Dutch program (a Dutch couple moved to Italy).
stevenwoo 8y ago
This made the news last year (you have to renovate and make a tourist trap or some economic positive): https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/italy-is-giving-away-over-100-castles-for-free--theres-only-one-catch.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/18/italy-is-giving-away-over-10... That was an update on an older program that was pretty popular: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/world/europe/sicilian-town-tells-outsiders-take-our-homes-please.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/world/europe/sicilian-tow...
dreamcompiler 8y ago
Rural Italy is beautiful and the food (in the grocery stores and markets) is both great and ridiculously cheap. But there are a few downsides. 100-plus-year-old houses often require significant refurbishment including earthquake mitigation (depending on the area) and they can be expensive to heat unless you spend $$$ on new windows and good seals and insulation. But the biggest problem for a foreigner moving to Italy might be the bureaucracy: Huge stacks of paper forms to be filled out and handed in to a guy who just happens not to be in his office today. Repeatedly. If you have a lot of patience for this sort of thing, Italy is lovely.

todopoderoso 8y ago

If you're working remotely and want cheap housing and a slower life, and you're interested in moving to some random place abroad, why wait on an opportunity like this? Have you considered just moving somewhere much cheaper? I work from a beach in Mexico, pay almost nothing, and have a nice and slow life. And... it's a beach! Obviously, there are plenty of places in the world to do this from if Mexico isn't your thing. I have a buddy in Triste, Italy, and another one down the coast in Croatia. Anyways, I only write this because it seemed like something you want to do but are just looking for some "today's the day" chutzpah. I hope you end up where you want to be one day!

MrTonyD 8y ago
Where in Mexico? I've often thought about moving there, but I hesitate mostly because of crime. I also have a neighbor who lived there for almost a decade, until they were shaken-down by the Federales (with actual gunfights and shallow graves in his story! So they moved back to the US.)
- todopoderoso 8y ago
  Petty crime is always there, but you probably already have habits that thwart it like locking your door and taking your laptop to the restroom at the cafe. If a cop catches you smoking a joint on the beach and he happens to care, he'll ask for your cash, but I prefer that to getting caught in the States. ;) More serious crime is unlikely to target you. Stay out of the north. And you can always live where the wealthier mexicans live in a city if you're nervous. Quiet towns like a lazy beach town are pretty safe. I'm currently based in Pto Escondido, a beach town in Oaxaca. A good way to get your feet wet is to book an airbnb at one of the beach cities you can fly into, take a taxi down a highway that runs parallel to the shore, and get off at any of the smaller beaches/towns for a day trip. You could do a different one every day and get some work done at a cafe/bar on the beach there. That way, worst case scenario, you're still at the beach with your touristy creature comforts (e.g. easier to find good network if you need to `npm install` -- half-joking!). But if you end up feeling more adventurous, you can take a taxi and find yourself alone on a tiny beach, which as far as I'm concerned, is one of the remaining wonders of the world. Of course, the hardest part of travel is taking the first step at all. If it wasn't for finding a job in Guadalajara at a small incubator run by an American in /r/IWantOut, I would probably still be miserably working from a Starbucks table in Austin wondering when I'll have the balls to do something new.

TulliusCicero 8y ago

You could probably move to a cheap part of your own country already with much less hassle and fewer integration issues. The reason you don't is that cheap places in rich countries are usually cheap for a reason.

mettamage 8y ago
Hmm... in my country it'd only be affordable not cheap (The Netherlands). We're pretty populated over here and the government has every square meter planned out. We have a name for it in Dutch "bestemmingsplan" (literally: destination plan or purpose plan).
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  I bet I could find some cheap parts of the Netherlands. Although I guess it depends on your definition of cheap. Looks like there are some cheaper areas here: https://www.koopwoningen.nl/nieuws/487:de-20-duurste-en-goedkoopste-gemeenten-van-nederland-om-een-huis-te-kopen/ https://www.koopwoningen.nl/nieuws/487:de-20-duurste-en-goed... Now, compared to cheap places in the US, the house price is still somewhat high. But cheap areas in the US, you often have to live in a detached house, as apartments are often very uncommon, or even non-existent, whereas in the Netherlands multi-family housing is much more common(1). And in the US, cheap places you almost always need to own a car, which is inherently expensive, whereas in the Netherlands you can get by with just walking and biking. Plus, the safety net means that even if you're poor as shit, you're taken care of for things like healthcare, to a greater extent than the US. 1 - Looking at the example of Delfzijl, you can rent an okay-sized 1br apartment for ~600 EUR/month: https://www.iamexpat.nl/housing/rentals/delfzijl/apartment https://www.iamexpat.nl/housing/rentals/delfzijl/apartment Factoring in extremely low transportation costs, that makes for a pretty damn cheap lifestyle.

make3 8y ago

these houses should probably go to extremely low income people, not a software engineer

TheGRS 8y ago
That feels like the wrong way of looking at it. The houses are very rural and dilapidated and cheap because no one wants them. Encouraging just about anyone to get out there and make it a home, highly-paid software engineers included, would be an economic boon for that area.
negativez 8y ago
Houses don't get left abandoned in places with jobs. Knowledge workers are the only ones that can do remote work and thus are the ideal people to take those houses.
vvillena 8y ago
That's how you end up with an unhealthy neighborhood. All modern "let's give houses to poor people" program learned this lesson the hard way, and the current, better method is to ensure the recipients of these welfare programs are distributed among the rest of the neighborhood. If the empty houses described in the article are clumped up, it would be best if the economic status of the recipients is disregarded.

vorpalhex 8y ago

This is akin to buying a totaled car. You're signing yourself up for a lot of work and the Government isn't going to really give you any help. In this case you're going to be in a very rural area, to the point of likely not having any real kind of internet. The houses from what I saw looking through translated listings seem to have no insulation, ancient (ie nonexistent) plumbing, and "traditional" toilets (hole in the ground) with no heating/cooling. You're buying a badly insulated cabin in the woods more or less. I think one of the main pain points in renovating the houses is going to be actually getting materials to the house. Some of these are rural to the point of not having real roads and being hours away from civilization. If you need to truck in a new water heater, you might be building your own gravel road first. If you're looking to be really remote and more or less build a house, this might be an awesome opportunity - just realize this is more akin to buying a plot of land than "a house" per say.

wishinghand 8y ago

Depends on if you know Japanese language and culture. Prepare to always be considered a foreigner by institutions and the general public. Plenty of English signs help me get by when I visit but that's in touristy areas (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, etc).

phyller 8y ago

If you can keep a high salary and work wherever you want, and you want a quiet life, then just throw a dart on a map of the USA or the world. Basically everywhere except a few metropolitan areas is very cheap to live. If this is something you want, yes you are missing something, you should look around a bit.

astura 8y ago

Not a house but if you're a remote employee Vermont will pay you $10,000 cash a year for two years for moving there. https://www.businessinsider.com/move-to-vermont-remote-workers-program-2018-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/move-to-vermont-remote-worke...