# I Moved Off Grid ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Nate O'Brien - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFreZ59kjH8 ## Содержание ### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFreZ59kjH8) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) So, I am moving off-rid and in this video I'm going to share my reasoning for doing this uh as well as some other details and life updates that I think are going to be fairly interesting. So, I haven't posted on this channel in almost 2 years. And you know, when I made that video two years ago, I talked about how I was taking a step back from YouTube and slowing down in life. Um, but I've made the decision now, the conscious decision to uh buy some land uh that is deep in the forest uh where I'm going to be living. So, um let's just go ahead and unpack this and uh I know there's going to be some questions from people. Um but I'm going to talk about some reasons for it as well as uh some of the finances behind it as well, which I think could be interesting to some people. So, um, I've gotten a lot of questions from people, especially friends, who've asked, why would you choose to live off-rid in 2025 going into 2026? Um, and you know, I thought about this for quite some time, and the reason is actually pretty simple. uh if you think about the speed at which things are moving whether this is with uh you know AI or with deep fakes or all these different things that are happening in the world trying to keep up not lose your job get replaced by AI robots whatever especially when you read the news a lot there's a lot of things that can look pretty scary to a lot of people and so I'm essentially just choosing to not participate uh that's as simple as I can put it um and so over the past two years I've used my phone less and less I've used my computer uh much less than I used to. Um and as I decrease my usage of technology, I find myself just much happier and and more at peace. Um and I think it's easy for us to get caught up in this cycle of just using our phones and using tech all the time. And while they can be really great and beneficial, I think humans are not really meant for all of that. especially with, you know, you look at um the average kid who's having a screen time on their phone of upwards of eight or 10 hours a day. Um and I just don't think it's really healthy. And so, as I found myself kind of not using tech as much, um combined with uh driving through bumper-to-bumper traffic uh in the city, uh dealing with people, listening to your neighbors, barking dog, it kind of just really got annoying. Uh and that's the truth of it. And so I decided, you know what? Let me find a place uh that I can come to that uh there's nobody around. And so for here, I mean, there's nobody for miles. And all I can hear every day is just the wind in the trees um and maybe some coyotes or something that are howling at the in the night. But other than that, uh you know, there's no people. There's there there's nothing around. And I find that very rejuvenating in so many ways. And I think a lot of people can relate to this as well. Now, we are going into 2026, and so there are a lot of things that do make off-grid living a lot easier than it used to be. For example, at some point, I might get Starlink. I don't have it now, but maybe if I want an internet connection, I can do that. Solar panels are much more affordable these days. Um, I can drill a well. There's things that I still need to do on this property. Um, but it is a lot easier to live off-rid today than it used to be. Um, so I'm really enjoying this, but I wanted to share actually some of the specifics behind the finances of it because, well, I have talked about finance a lot on this channel and it's just the way that my brain thinks. So, let me share this with you. So, I think for most people, you know, realistically, you can buy 20 acres of land for 20, 30, $40,000, uh, and then you can build a cabin or you can even build a house yourself, uh, for much less than the price of a typical house that you'd buy on the market. And considering that the average house right now costs upwards of $500,000, sometimes over a million dollars on average in places like California, uh I think this is a much more affordable way to live. And especially when I was looking at things like the average rent, for example, right now I think that the average rent in 2025 is somewhere around $1,300 $1,400 per month. I'll put up a chart here that I saw one time. Um and if you go back 50 years, the average rent was about $100 a month. So you can see that it's increased about 13 or 14fold over the past 50 years. Um, and that got me thinking, you know, what are rent prices or housing prices going to be when I'm in my 70s, 50 years from now? Um, and if you extrapolate this this chart, uh, the realistically the average rent is probably going to be at least 10 or $15,000 per month uh, when we are old, right? And so looking at that, I realized I don't want to be in this rat race of trying to constantly keep up and having to make more money so you can pay your bills. Um, and so I've just actively chosen to not ### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFreZ59kjH8&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 09:00) participate in that system. Um, and so with this property, uh, what I really like about it is that it actually should make me money long term. Instead of having a mortgage, um, instead of having, uh, rent, uh, this actually will make me money. And that's because of this beautiful thing called timber. So, as you can probably see around me, and maybe I'll give you a little bit more of a tour, um, there are thousands of trees around me that I own, uh, mostly maple and oak trees that are hardwoods, uh, that have a lot of value in their lumber. And so what I'm going to be doing when I need money at any point in my life is just contracting someone to come in and log maybe five or 10 percent of the trees at a time every five or 10 years whenever I need some cash. Um, and I think that'll be a great source of income. So, uh, people don't talk about this enough and I could probably rant on it for a couple of hours, but timber investing is really interesting. Uh, the average returns on it are somewhere around 12% annually. Um, and it's because you have three factors working in your favor when you own timberland. The first one is biological growth. So, every year these trees grow bigger and as they grow bigger, there's just more potential boards that you can make out of them. So, you know, they say money doesn't grow on trees, but in this case, it kind of does. Uh, they just grow bigger every year and that increases your total volume of lumber or timber that you have on your property. Um on top of that you have the price of lumber that goes up generally over a long period of time as well. Uh and then you have the price of land that has been only going up uh for you know o over 100 years. The price of land has been going up. They're not making any more of it. Right? So you have three factors that are working in your favor when you own a property that has trees on it. Um and there's a lot of things I'm going to be doing with this land. Um, you know, I'm going to be doing some maple syrup operations. Uh, it's December right now, so come February into March, I'm going to be uh producing maple syrup. I've done this on a small scale uh at my parents house growing up, so I know how to do it. Um, but I have thousands of sugar maple trees. This is a great region for uh maple syrup production, and so that's going to be a great source of income. It's way to stay healthy, move around. Um, and I also just really love it. I've always liked doing that. Um, so finding ways to essentially support myself through uh the resources on this land. I think it's going to be something that I really enjoy very much. So overall, I feel much more peace being here. I think a lot of people if they came here, they would feel something similar uh to notice how your stress levels uh decrease significantly as soon as you are kind of back to nature. And I think this is how most humans are meant to be. We're not meant to be um on our phone screens 12 hours a day and in a big city uh all the time. I think there's a lot of really great benefits to being out here. Now, of course, people are probably going to bring this up in the comments of the downsides of being out in this place that's so remote. Um you know, one of them being that if I need supplies, if I need something, it's definitely uh pretty far away. I mean, the nearest Walmart is about an hour and a half drive from here. So, um hopefully I won't need too many things. Uh but you can just do those in batches sort of. Um and of course, you know, there's the things like maybe you don't have electrical utilities, but with solar and with Starlink and all these other things, it's definitely a lot easier to do this today. So, I think a lot of those downsides are kind of um overdone or people worry about them too much. Um on the safety side, you know, I feel a lot safer here versus in a city um just because this is my land. there's nobody around. Um, not worried about animals too much. Uh, but yeah, so there are some downsides, I suppose. But I think overall, uh, it has been a net benefit of being here. So, uh, th those are the things I just want to share with you briefly in this video. I'm not sure if I'm going to make another video. Maybe in a year or so. Perhaps I might make one on the maple syrup production uh that I'm going to be doing in February. But, I just wanted to hop on here, share some updates. If you have any uh thoughts or ideas, feel free to um you know, leave them down in the comments or so. Um and I'll see everybody sometime in the future. --- *Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/41303*