So at the moment I live in your typical 3 bed semi-detached house in a housing estate, it’s about 7 miles from the center of Belfast, Northern Ireland. I don’t really like it here, to be honest I have never really liked it, don’t get me wrong I don’t hate it, I’m not ‘unhappy’, but there are a few things that I really don’t like. I’ll not go into all of that now, that is a post for a different day, but to get to the point of this post, I have a dream!
While I live in this house I don’t think I will ever be able to realise my dream, but I think about it a lot and I am working towards getting it.
My dream isn’t just about the house I want to live in, although thats a good place to start, it is about the lifestyle that I want to live, and you know I bet at the heart of it that most people would want the same thing, obviously with different details, but the same basic core.
Not a cave!
My dream is to live what I like to call ‘Zero Cost Living’, this is basically where I don’t need to have any further increase in my income to survive, and that my whole income is from a residual source. Further, I want to live in such a way that I have a minimal impact on the environment, and if possible actually improve it rather than destroying it. Now I’m not saying that I want to go live in a cave and eat berries and nuts, naw I do like my comforts and I don’t think that is a necessity to do what I plan, although having an earth sheltered home might be classified as a cave, and growing some of your own food could be described as eating berries and nuts.
So the basic targets are as follows;
- Buy/build a house in the country, with a good sized piece of land
- Increase residual income
- Reduce unecessary expenditure
- Grow a large percentage of my own food
- Generate all of my own energy for electricity, heat, and travel
- Reduce waste, both landfill and sewage
There are really two things about this plan which are difficult, saving enough money to buy/build a house in the country, and the second is to build a residual income that is big enough to pay for it without having to do too much work to maintain it.
If you check back again I will talk about a few of these aspects in more detail.