Federal Debt

Mortgage Free!, Second Edition: Innovative Strategies for Debt-Free Home Ownership

Description

As a wave of foreclosures sweeps the country, many people are giving up hope for owning a home of their own. They have good reason to turn their backs on the banks, but not on their dreams. In this revised edition of Mortgage Free!, Rob Roy offers a series of escape routes from enslavement to financial institutions, underscored by true stories of intrepid homeowners who have put their principles into action.

From back-to-the-land homesteads to country homes, here is a complete guide to strategies that allow you to own your land and home, free and clear, without the bank. Included is detailed advice about:

• Clarifying and simplifying your notions of what’s necessary;
• Finding land that you love and can afford;
• Taking control of the house-building process, for the sake of sanity and pleasure;
  and
• Learning to take a long-term perspective on your family’s crucial economic decisions, avoiding debt and modern-day serfdom.

Reviews

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-06-22
Summary: "Awesome Material!! Highly Recommended subject"

This book is Wonderful in Many many respects and I Highly recommend it because to me the subject matter is indispensable. He's complete, thorough, etc. The one thing he is Not is concise. Great, great material and very well covered - but be prepared for a read that is occasionally tedious. I read through it anyway :) Also, be prepared for the discussion of a few other odd topics. He talks about salary free living, college, etc. Most of it's logical; such as going to college only if you have a career picked and must have the degree for it. College is Wonderful - but if you don't know what to do, wait. This is the sort of thing that he spends long paragraphs on. Again - good read; totally worthwhile. Just be prepared. His information is solid and useful. He covers the whole process and what to expect as you go. He discusses adaptations for individuals. He even helps you decide if it's right for you at all, and openly admits that in some situations it's not. In most situations it is the best way to go about home ownership - but if you're 2years from retirement and finishing your mortgage at the same time... or if you have a spouse that will leave if you live in a temporary shelter for a couple years while you build, etc. He gives reasonable ways to decide if this fits you and your family, and if so how to make the adaptations needed to fit it to your life. Good luck :)

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-23
Summary: "Should be required in high school as part of curriculum"

Unfortunately we do not educate our children to be conservationists. Most of them grow up to be consumers, indebted to the banks all their lives through mortgages, car loans, credit cards etc. This book is a must read for everyone and it should be required in high school as part of the curriculum,

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-04-05
Summary: "Interesting advice"

This book contains some very interesting information on becoming an owner-builder. The advice herein acknowledges that this book cannot provide detailed construction information and refers the reader to other in-depth books. While the advice is primarily about the problems associated with building a house, the author also goes off on tangents that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. This can become annoying and seems to take up multiple pages in which the author could instead have elaborated more on some aspect of land-buying or home-building. All in all, this is an interesting read, even though I'm not sure that some of the projects built in the 1970's could be built today, considering modern zoning.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-02-04
Summary: "A ray of hope"

This is such an inspiring book!

Me and my partner have both jobs with very irregular and usually fairly low income, and right now it looks pretty much impossible for us to buy a house the "usual" way - paying mortage, I mean.
However, this book has reinforced my point of view that it IS somehow possible to eventually build our dream house, we are not doomed to like in a tiny flat just because we chose to do the job we love most!
We can change that, and this book offers a good amount of tips and tools that will hopefuly help us with it. It offers a "plan" to those who really don't know where to start (you can change that plan to your likings, of course, but it's a great starting point).

The prices and maths done in this book were not very helpful to us, for one thing because they're (as the author states himself) prices from quite a few years ago, and for another thing, well, we live in Spain, so the cost of real estate in the US are not of much help to us here. But this is not the book's fault.

Anyway, I really loved it and I hope to put some of the tips into practice someday!

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2009-03-07
Summary: "DIY: for real."

Well, I just finished Mortgage Free! and I'm pumped more than ever to build that timber frame in the mountains. I couldn't be a more accurate target audience for author Rob Roy. I'm a late twenties art teacher and woodworker (and ex-carpenter/blacksmith) that perpetually annoys my friends and family with H.D. Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Neil Postman, and E.F. Schumacher passages. I'm married, have a decent "grubstake" (savings for land and house) no children, and limitless energy.

This book is probably the first real estate/building/economic philosophy book that I've read in my short years that truly aligns with my own thinking. It has nothing to do with the TV nonsense of flipping homes, buying and selling foreclosures or short sales to get rich, or how to be a landlord in the city. Its greatest merit is the argument that we can live this life unchained to the typical work-a-day existence of mortgages, corporate ladder climbing and consumer/energy gluttony. This very merit, although a proven path even ten years ago, is untested in our current lousy and price-bloated economy. Roy's main thrust is that we should avoid the death pledge of the mortgage at pretty much any cost-and here I agree. What this book really needs though, (indeed lacks) for me, are tangible case studies and numbers that come even close to the typical prices of anywhere else except the Upstate NY area where the author is familiar. I live in California, but I've also lived in Chicago and Denver. Prices in the West are often ten times the updated prices you find in Mortgage Free! The advantages that couples in the late 60s and early 70s had with open space, low prices, and inheritances, are unknown to me. For the first five years of my working life I made nearly the same wage as my father twenty five years before at the same age... except that everything costs ten, twenty times the prices of his day and the joke of unlimited growth of property values is coming to a rude end.

Despite these drawbacks, Mortgage Free! is well worth the money for its honest and sensible approach, clarity and style of the writing, and truthful, enlightened position on energy and economy. My determination to make it to those green mountain pastures in the Sierra Nevada has much deeper roots than this book alone...(and so should yours). So, you should buy Mortgage Free!, read it, and put its good message to work. Thanks Rob.