My latest escape plan: Tiny home. Something that can be purchased ready to go with cash for $35K + Land. Or built myself (do not want) for $20k. Leaves me money in the bank, very low living costs, and the ability to survive on just about any income. Similar to the shipping container home.
There is an interesting cost/benefit to cheap homes/cheap land.
If you live someplace really really really cheap, you likely have very few options in terms of employment. Although if you have a decent amount of land, at the very least you could survive on canning your own produce, keep small livestock for income, maybe sell some forest products.
Unfortunately, that won't send kids to college or supply income for race cars.
PHeller wrote: There is an interesting cost/benefit to cheap homes/cheap land. If you live someplace really really really cheap, you likely have very few options in terms of employment. Although if you have a decent amount of land, at the very least you could survive on canning your own produce, keep small livestock for income, maybe sell some forest products. Unfortunately, that won't send kids to college or supply income for race cars.
The plan is to do contract work from home to supplement income, at least enough to pay for medical expenses and feed the investment accounts. Still it would be nice to have something to fall back onto for work local if you had to.
Locally our land prices are crazy high, But the weather is mild, the work is semi plentiful and we could transition into the home after it was built. ~4 Acres about 40 minutes drive to work each way puts me at around 250K, but I could still work here. The house about 65-95K at what we want to build. Cash is a option but it would kill my non retirement investment accounts. Another option recently is to rent out our current home, it would go for ~4K a month, which would leave about 1500$ after maintenance which could be funneled into paying off the land note if we built the house in cash.
I'd say if you want to go real cheap you should look into Canada. The socialized medicine sure does keep the self-employed in better standing.
Don't suggest New Zealand to my lady...she'll jump.
Some of those places outside the US require a pretty sizeable chunk of cash on hand/assets in order to move there. I was looking into Scotland, as I love the highlands (my ancestors are from there) but I'd have to have $80k on hand to get citizenship AND a job in an area they find needed. Not sure how Aus and NZ are for that stuff, if they'll just let you move there and live there easily as US citizens (or gain dual citizenship).
I also looked into the US VI as home prices can be pretty cheap there and they're still US territory. Job market kind of sucks but if I were retiring there that would be less problematic.
I actually qualify for a lot of out of country stuff. I have the resources and was approved for Singapore and I think Australia 10 years back or so when I was looking for a job with head hunters.
That's cool to know. 
Figured I should give on more little update.
Getting on with things.
So we are 100% individual debt free, nothing is now left outstanding. Its the first time we have ever had this done. All the cars are paid for, the CC have been cleaned out , and we have maxed all of our tax exempt income for the year. I also sold off the last of the classic cars and parts that I had in storage which cleared up a bunch of cash to refill our coffers.
We do still have the mortgage and we have started the refinance to 30 years fixed and 3.785 or so percent. We are ~2K a month cash positive on it if we ever decided to rent it out.
Most of our math shows that if we can buy in the cash the next place all we would need is ~5K a month for everything pre-tax. So only have to come up with 3K a month income generation.
So far I have looked at ~5 lots all within driving distance of where we work now. ~200K total if we plop down a smaller home on them. Also looked at a few homes on much larger lots a little further out in the 300K range. With cash on hand + renting our house + 1/2 years work income we could be free of the house note on these.
Still a little more work to do but at least we can see some of the horizon.
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