How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?

More parameters are needed, in my opinion. What you want is possible, but not with only $10k. That, or give up some requirements (internet, unless you want to walk to a public library) and be prepared to squat on someone else's property.

I live close to your desired existence. I own my humble hermit's cabin outright, have no debt at all, and a few grand in savings. I grow some of my own food, hunt some more, but I still need supplies. I could conceivably coast through a few years without any external income, but it would be a very Thoreau-like existence (which isn't a bad thing, just too primitive for me). I own my car and home, but still forced to pay insurance and yearly registration/taxes (cheap, as the car and home are old and of very low value, but they're non-negotiable and will surely rise over the years and are unavoidable). I still pay for power and internet, which could be trimmed (but what's the fun in that?).

If someone mailed me a check for $100k today, I'd never need to work again, and I'm under 40. I'm that set up and frugal. As it stands, I pimp myself out as a remote admin and local PC support dude, with minor hopes that I can realize a small web site that will bring in a few kilobucks a year.

For $10k you can buy an acre on Hawaii ("the big island" -- subdivisions near the lava flows), fly out there, and start gardening year-round while you live in a tent. Water falls from the sky daily and you can raise some meat to supplement the fruit and veggies you can grow. You'd have enough cash to pay for a few years of taxes, too.

Property taxes will get you every time, though, unless you squat. There's some dude who lives in a cave in southern Utah on public land. He eats bugs and scavenges food from nearby towns. Interesting experiment, but he'd be hosed (likely) if the majority of people weren't wasteful and he lacked stuff to scavenge.

Anyway, it's possible, but you'd either need more money up front, to have everything owned outright when you begin, or have enough passive income/savings to cover taxes and minimal supplies. Like I said before, more information on your current situation and your goals/plans are required for a more realistic analysis.

Where you will run into problems is food. B/c you only want to spend 1 hour a day on involuntary tasks, you'll have to buy food. Regardless of how efficiently you buy, your 10k wont last very long that way.

If you are a little skilled and live in the right area, you can get food from hunting/trapping but you're still looking at significantly more than 1 hour a day. Farming is right out.

To live that life you really have to be willing to work a little harder or spend a little more. No Minority Report ending, sorry.

Commit a felony and go to jail. That will meet most of your requirements. You will probably be paroled early, so commit additional felonies as required.

A mentor of mine did this, with $300,000.00 for four years. He bought a plot of land in Wyoming, built and underground cabin, and bought a Backhoe to help himself build it. He lived there for four years before moving on with his life...

A thought - you might want to try this out for a month in a dry run before spending time building it. I spent about two months learning how to track, trap, and otherwise survive in the Southern Utah desert, which was an amazing experience that taught me a lot, but not as romantic as you might imagine. Before investing time, dreams, and resources learning about and trying to build this, why not go rent a remote cabin for a month and see how it suits you?

I did this, years ago:

http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...

I started this phase out wanting to be left alone and live on $40/month, but reality interfered and it turned out to be a way to completely change my life.

I think it can still be done. There is a steep learning curve.

It's an interesting question. but if you are an old hacker in the US or probably anywhere else in the developed world you qualify for a retirement income. At age 70 it would be something on the order of $2500/month. If you had an unmarried old lady, you would have something on the order of $60K per year plus reasonable health benefits in a few years.

The real problem is shelter. It is probably very difficult to build your shack anywhere near civilization, because of building code restrictions. The minimum, cost is probably some kind of used RV. You could theoretically avoid the code restrictions, because you could drive to a waste pumping station, etc. However if you blend in to a rural community sufficiently to be considered an asset rather than a nuisance, say by continually improving you property, you might get along quite nicely.

Respect if you do it because you're harmful to society, childish if its because society is harmful to you.

Great question. I think more passive income is required for food etc. eg. my rule of thumb $1,000 invested will bring in about $1-2 per week; or, some businesses you own can (theoretically) provide passive income, but in practice it's not totally passive (1 hour per day is quite reasonable though.) But both sources will require more work to setup in the first place, to create the "asset". Another option is part-time consulting work; if you charge $100 per hour, that's $500 per week. Of course, you probably can't get that literally one hour per day; it would be bursty: (say) full-time for a few weeks, then don't work for a year. That's a popular hacker route. But again, you'd have some setup cost, in having the technical skills (and keeping them up to date) + (more importantly) having the business skills to keep getting the work, year after year (and the social temperament.) It's sounding more reliable to work for a whole year, and invest that.

Though my personal experience is that I really missed being productive for other people, and have decided to expend effort doing useful things for others (create the value that I want to create, on my own timetable and terms - largely an intersection of benefiting both others and myself.) It took me 2-3 years of not working to come to that decision, and it seems typical of people who retire. But even knowing that, I still had to see for myself. I expect you too. Of course, it's quite possible to just do that in the first place (I didn't.)

People laugh when I tell them that my dream job is to tend a lighthouse (which are all largely automated now), but it's for reasons very similar to what you've outlined here: lots of free time for me to read and study what I'm interested in. So another possible solution is to identify a job that's based predominantly on the criteria of having a human present. A fire lookout comes to mind. The one hour of work/day would probably need relaxed to two to three hours per day, but you'd also be supplied room & board. The Internet access might be possible via cell technology.

Please let us know how this works out for you.

Doug Fine has partially done this. He moved to New Mexico. Installed solar panels for electricity. Shepherd 2 goats for milk. Grow his own vegetables. Converted his car to run on cooking oil.

http://www.dougfine.com/farewell-my-subaru/

What about living in a different country?

One of my friends lived on $100 a month in China. Out there your 10k should get you 8 years and 4 months of living in Beijing. You certainly could last much longer in the countryside.

You can supplement your money by teaching English.

All those who venture in caves: return to the world, or go mad from loneliness. Some may seem interesting, but there is a thin line between insane and interesting.

Pilom is right. Your life would become revolved around food.

You should check out the following three things:

Emergency by Neil Strauss in which Neil detail his experiences in trying to become more self sufficient and gaining the abilities to escape from the system

Island to Oneself by Tom Neale for a first hand account of trying to survive on a deserted island for 16 years.

And Survivalistboards.com, which is full of conspiracy nuts but has lots of information about becoming more self sufficient.

I also have aspirations of independence and have concluded that "getting rich" is not The Answer. Some things that are working for me:

For health reasons, I have given up all furniture. I sleep on the floor with zero bedding. I had to get healthier in order to be able to do that. Being cold was really about being sick. It was a gradual process of using less bedding, getting healthier, and generally changing our lifestyle to need fewer things to meet our basic needs.

I have a netbook and a small folding shelf it sits on to keep it off the floor. The little shelf has folding legs, so I can change its position. I also have a prepaid cell phone as the cheapest phone access and have cancelled my landline. No furniture means less housework. It also means fewer bugs in the house. When we first moved to this apartment, there were a lot of bugs. I thought it was just that without furniture they were visible. Over time, with getting healthier and getting the apartment cleaner and reducing our possessions further, we have fewer bugs.

At the moment, we own one deep frying pan. We cook a lot from scratch, but they are simple one dish meals. The medical condition I and my oldest son have is high maintenance. So rearranging our lives so we have less to do in terms of cooking, cleaning, etc is essential in order for us to be healthy and still have time and energy to get a life (which we are basically working on now, after having spent about a decade working on getting well).

We live without a car. That substantially cut our expenses and has turned out to not be as challenging as I expected. Since we don't own furniture, we don't need to haul that much crap home. We regularly buy food and clothes (because clothes gets thrown out routinely around here....long story) and we bought a netbook earlier this summer. But I just don't need the kind of hauling capacity I needed when I lived more conventionally.

I have internet access via my netbook and could also have it via cellphone if I wanted it. I guess the internet access my cell phone would offer would be more limited. I'm reasonably content with the situation at the moment, though there are three people sharing one netbook and the plan is to buy one or two more netbooks when there is money for that and eventually add some (probably handheld) gaming systems.

Anyway, that's all that comes to mind at the moment. Just start reducing your needs now. Have a yard sale. Start living with less stuff. Step by step, you can move towards this and as you make changes it will make other changes possible that you wouldn't have imagined.

Good luck.

Yes, but the $10000 or whatever amount of money becomes redundant. And, I do not recommend this path, as it is not for everyone because dropping out is instant "boot camp" rewarding in ways only you know, but boot camp. It's difficult work. Let go of one thing that you intuit you no longer need in your life, and watch what happens. Be gentle with yourself.

I learned long ago that effort should be expended on expanding one's ability to produce and create, rather than on trying to reduce one's burn rate down to nothing.

But its a great idea to have a very simple place you can spend some time at when you desire. I want one too.

Consider http://tinyhouseblog.com. It has some great information.

That is possum living there is a book for you http://www.possumliving.net/ There are video about it on youTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvn79E40VSc

> Internet access, say 100 hours lifetime total, accessable at some definite rate, say at least once a month for an hour at a time max (Richard Stallman style is ok)

So, what- you've got less than 10 years left? If you want to restrict yourself to 100 hours of internet, that's more like 2 hours per year for the rest of your life, or 10 minutes a month.

> Upper limit for time spent on daily involuntary tasks (say 1hr/day) with definite certainty on ability to maintain existence. Assuming no outstanding terrestrial occurences, there should never be any stress from fluctuation of shelter or resource availability

You fundamentally misunderstand what being a self-sufficient old man in a shack means, don't you.

Read about Tom Neale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Neale

"spent much of his life in the Cook Islands and 16 years in three sessions living alone on the island of Anchorage in the Suwarrow atoll, which was the basis of his popular autobiography."

Very long but totally worth it to read the whole thing: http://www.janesoceania.com/suvarov_tom_neale/

Makes me want to go to Cook Islands at the least.

Go to India/China/anywhere. A change in culture can be refreshing and living there is really cheap. English is the second official language in India, so there shouldn't be a barrier. I also heard that the people are really really friendly (USA/Europe seem a bit resentful to foreigners).

You can run some easy calculations that show that candles are vastly more inefficient than electric light. Not surprisingly, they are more expensive too.

Bad news for you buddy:

There is no escaping the system. :)

A relative escape may be possible, but definitely not an absolute and complete escape from 'all' systems.

You go live in a jungle, you have to adapt yourself to the 'system' there.

You may be able to escape the laws of a more civilized country by living with some tribes in Papua New Gunea or the Amazon, but you would have to start living by their laws (formal or informal).

I suggest that you think over opting in for a dentistry/vision/emergency plan. Old man in a shack is definitely going to need it. Probably this should constitute the largest part of your suggested spending whatever your motivation is.

Look at it from a start-up perspective, either you bootstrap with $0 invested or you raise money (more than $10k).

The same project can be had with no money or a lot of money. Once you burn through $10k you will only want more money.

Just go live in a shack and don't deal with other people unless you really need to. No need for $10k.

No. http://www.survivalblog.com