10 cool ways to live rent free!

hey welcome to urban nomads and today we're going to talk about the top 10 ways to live rent-free what do we mean by that well we're talking about alternative living situations that are not the traditional thing these are some of these situations you may be familiar with and some you may not be someone know unorthodox but hopefully by the end of this video you'll have a whole new light on ways that you can live rent and mortgage free number 10 backpacking backpacking is really awesome there's many people who have done it there was that movie and into the wild there was a lady named the Peace pilgrim who walked across the country eight times we didn't they think of hobos or homeless people backpacking but really backpacking is for travelers you know you're people with a purpose with a goal you know they want to or maybe they just want to explore you know the cool thing about backpacking is that you can like put your whole house on your back there was a movie wild about a woman who walked across the country anyway you've seen these backpacker people around but the thing about backpacking is it's usually best for individuals although whole families have been known to walk across the country maybe they were immigrants maybe they you know wanted to take a trek through some of the many trails that are around but the cool thing about backpacking is you can carry your whole house with you maybe a small tent a little mess kit I'm used to ultimate a minimalist living right it's not for everybody of course but you know you're not tied down anything you're free to go anywhere and do whatever you want number 9 car living car living gets a really bad rap car living can be really awesome unfortunately most people do not choose to live in their cars on purpose it is usually because of or something maybe they lost their job maybe they just can't pay their rent whatever but basically everything devolves until all they have left is their car unfortunately because it happens like this people look down on it it's like oh you're some kind of loser or something cause you're living in your car people feel bad but I tell you it is really a good solution especially if you have an SUV because if you can live in your car in the modern city today there are many ways to to live a proper life you know and you can sleep in your car and the main thing is that you don't have to pay any rent you don't have to pay a mortgage I mean obviously this would only work for a couple or individual there was a movie about a girl in Alaska who lived in her car the name of that movie was windy and Lucy it was about a girl that lived in Alaska with her dog and she lived out of her car same way this is a really cool way to live and the thing is you can save a lot of money this way and it's awesome so if you can get over all the stigma about it it's a way you know to get ahead and like I said if you have an SUV or truck I mean you can put a trailer on your car or your truck you can tow a tent pop-up tent trailer you can do all kinds of stuff there's rooftop tents that go on top of cars or SUVs and you can live you can live pretty comfortably the main thing with with any of these situations all you really need is a horizontal sleeping surface number eight tent living tense may seem like you know a weird way to live in the modern society but it's really not so bad I mean people have been living in tents for hundreds of years and the Mongolians from the Mongol playing in Mongolia have been using a type of tune called a yurt for hundreds of years and yards are like awesome structures that can withstand some of the toughest winters they are warm in the winter cool in the summer relatively easy to set up as Mongol you know these types of Mongolian herders you know take down yurts move them but there's many kinds of tent solutions out there so if you're in a situation where you can rent a small piece of land or ideally owned a small piece of land a tent solution might be just your thing of course there are zoning laws and whatever but you know there's ways to hack the system so think about tents it's a possibility in the case of cars you can there's pop-up tent trailers there's rooftop tents the Australians have you know come up with all kinds of ingenious tent solutions considerate in especially if you have access to some type of land number seven house sharing now this may seem like no the typical thing but basically house sharing is an alternative living situation ideally you want a situation where you don't have to pay any rent at all so people who live with their parents don't feel bad you're actually in a good thing as long as you have supportive parents maybe you have a friend or somebody that's willing to let you live in their garage or their basement or in our attic go for uncomfortable you know find a space that someone's willing to let you stay in rent-free and then do what you can to fix it up so that it's comfortable for you the key is you wanted to pay a little for win as possible not saying should take advantage of people but if someone's like yeah if you want to live there go ahead you know go ahead the key here is that these are good situations that can allow you to save the money to get a better solution so if you explain to somebody that you know you want to try to live this way maybe they'll let you stay in their place you know for six months or so while you get back on your feet or save up the money to buy your boat or whatever you know or buy your land or whatever you're trying to do it's a way to quickly save a lot of money the problem with house sharing of course is personalities cramped spaces if you're but it's a viable alternative like you know most of the marketing out there is saying you have to have your own house your own apartment here's the lifestyle you deserve yeah but they're gonna bill you for that you're gonna pay a lot for that you know lifestyle instead do the opposite go for uncomfortable you know it's uncomfortable sometimes living with other people but if you can do this you can save money and that's the goal here so you know people have lived communally for thousands of years it's only now in modern times that we're kind of indoctrinated with this idea that everyone's supposed to live separately in their own little house you can get to know new people I've made a lot of friends this way consider that a lot of people you know to do some of the solutions we're advocating here is going to require some significant money like you know in the thousands of dollars maybe five thousand ten thousand but think about it you know if you were paying $1,500 a month in rent in ten months that's fifteen thousand dollars if you can find a low-cost or no-cost shared living situation you can save that money you can buy a really good alternative living situation which we're going to discuss here six tiny houses tiny houses are all the rage these days there's TV shows about him and everything why I didn't get the tiny house thing for a long time I was like why would you want to live in some little tiny house I don't care how cute it is when you could live in a bigger house like it didn't make sense to me until I became an urban nomad and then I realized what's the attraction with tiny houses here's what it is with a tiny house you own it you don't have to pay rent and you don't have to pay a mortgage it's all yours it's your piece of property in most modern cities nowadays let's take LA for example it costs on average if you want to live in a decent safe part of the city on average there's gonna cost I think the average housing house the average house price in LA its $500,000 that means if you want to buy a typical little two three-bedroom house forget three bedrooms two bedroom house if you can find such a thing you're gonna end up paying at least half a million dollars think about that for a second half a million dollars you're gonna sign a mortgage document saying that you are obligated to pay the bank or whoever you're borrowing the money from half a million dollars over 20 or 30 years basically this is indentured servitude okay and you know sure maybe the house will go up in value maybe it'll go down in value if it goes down you're going to be screwed the cool thing about the tiny house movement is if you can get access to a small piece of land ideally that you own or can buy you can build or buy or you know get a little tiny house there and it's your house it's tiny but it's yours and there's no mortgage payment or anything hopefully just all kinds of cool tiny house solutions I mean there's a whole universe and it's a movement that's growing by the day there's tiny house villages anyway some of these other solutions I'm gonna talk about are related to tiny house but that's the key the other thing is that you can the other thing is that you can use your creativity to build a house you want and one of the things that the society is kind of taken from us or discouraged is our creativity most people are capable of so much creativity but this society would encourage you to think that you have to buy it from someone else and forget that you have the power to design and create what you want for yourself and that's what people are doing with tiny houses number five shipping containers you ever see those giant shipping containers on container ships that they ship goods from China in all the time well it wasn't it didn't take much of a leap of faith for people to start thinking about living in them they're incredibly sturdy well-made inexpensive structures and you know they're designed to be attached to ships and go on trans Pacific and Atlantic oceanic voyages they're designed to last like you know decades and they're cheap and they're like the perfect size to live in and so there's this whole movement out there to take shipping containers and construct really creative living structures out of them because they are designed like building blocks people have come up with all kinds of creative structures where you you know pile them on top of each other and all kinds of creative ways I mean shipping containers are great I mean they already come with the four walls you need a door all you have to do is finish up the inside you know install some plumbing add a bedroom a desk cut out some windows and you're good to go there's a you know there's people doing all kinds of creative stuff with them self-contained off-grid solutions multi storey solutions you name it they're doing it and you know I heard you can get a you shipping container for like two three thousand dollars you probably can get them cheaper than that so shipping containers are in a way related to the tiny house movement and they're definitely something to be looked at of course it helps if you have access to some land to locate your shipping container home you can buy a small plot of land or rent one but give shipping containers some serious thought number for truck living you know once I started thinking this way I started looking around and I started seeing all kinds of living solutions all around me giant trucks will go by and I think wow maybe someone could live in that I mean think about how big an 18-wheeler is and like shipping containers why not right well obviously I wasn't the first to think this way there's many people out there now taking truck frames truck bodies and building all kinds of alternative living solutions there's a guy in New Zealand that him and his wife took the frame of her truck well they bought a truck and it was I think was like a type of dump truck and he basically broke it down to its frame and they rebuilt it up and they basically built a transforming castle out of it which you can see in the video below it's really awesome and it just goes to show if you're creative and willing to work with your hands a little bit you can make all kinds of cool things out of trucks there was a guy he took a truck and he basically reconfigured it to be his own little custom RV so the cool thing about trucks is you can get them really cheap maybe you know you can find an old used truck for around three or four thousand and if you willing to work with your hands you can build the mobile home of your dreams number three bus living of course just like trucks I started to look at buses - all it takes is a giant city bus driving past you for you to start to think hmm I could live in that and of course no sooner had I had that thought that I discovered all kinds of people already beat me to it there's people living in old city buses old school buses and double-decker buses it's really cool there was a group of Israeli women that took an old city bus gutted out the inside and turned it into the Schick RV there was there's lots of people taking old school buses and gutting them out and turning them into really nice living spaces the cool thing about a bus is that it has a windows and they're sturdy and they're strong and they have good engines I mean think about it buses are designed to run constantly day in and day out they're hearty vehicles and well-made and so you know the fact that they already have windows means that you know you can come into a bus first of all you can get a bus really cheap nowadays because who wants a used bus most people don't so use buses go really cheap and for whatever you can get a decent used bus old bus older model for around three thousand dollars you just have to look around what you do is you take the bus and you cut out all the insides which are basically seats right so you remove all the seats you take off all the bars and all that stuff and what you end up with is a nice clean open space with windows that you can pretty much do anything you want to do with like we said there's people doing stuff with school buses city buses double-decker buses all you have to do is put in some bedding put in some refrigerators put in a kitchen living room everything you need you can put in a bus the other cool thing about some of the like Greyhound style buses is that is that they have a ton of storage on the bottom here's a bus that is like a 65 year old Greyhound style bus that was converted into an RV the other cool thing about buses is that it's a great way to get started part of the problem with this whole alternative living thing is like how do you start right especially if you don't have a ton of money so a bus is a great way to get started with very little money for example you could buy a used bus for around $3,000 and then you could live in it while you fix it up of course it'd be rough living at first but at least you'd have shelter and you're covered and you could just get creative and camp out in the bus and then you start fixing it up and all the money that you will save from not having to pay rent you can use to fix up your bus just the way you want and now for our runner-up number 2 RV living obviously everyone knows about our V's RVs are like the first thing you think about when you think about alternative living situations it's the most obvious choice you see them everywhere many people are already living in RVs and urban settings but when you really look into the world of RVs nowadays RVs are a high-art I mean there's all kinds of configurations from little camper vans pop-up trailers campers that go on the back of trucks to giant mega RVs that are the size of Greyhound buses and and beyond getting extreme there's expedition RVs that are basically designed to go over rough terrain carrying luxury houses on their backs and there's all kind whatever situation you can think of someone's thought of it is doing it the cool thing about our v's is that there's a billion of them out there and you can get an RV for us you can get a decent RV for as little as $1,500 there really is no excuse to live this lifestyle there are people all over the world in RVs and living totally normal lives there was a guy out of Canada that lives out of a camper van and he's been doing it ever since high school he works a regular job and he lives in his camper van and when you see this camper van it has everything that a normal home would have rvs make really good use of space and what we're learning is that your average physical dwelling makes an absolute horrible use of space it's a lot of wasted space a lot of wasted energy inefficient use of lighting plumbing everything out of necessities RVs must use these things in the most efficient way possible and because of that they've taken the technology of living space just to high high levels so check out our V's they're really cool some people buy old RVs there's a god of Alaska he took really old RV and he gutted it out and he completely tore it down to its frame and he rebuilt it out of wood and he basically built a wood RV and it's kind of like a combination tiny house on wheels RV that he made from scratch it's really beautiful woodworking and everything it has everything you need there's all kinds of RVs out there it's just amazing so you know check them out and see what you think RVs are viable solutions for all living situations there are families of 12 living out of RVs there was a story about a surfing California family of nine that lived that raised their kids out of a small tiny RV there's many families as big as six living out of our v's the cool thing about our fees is that you can travel with them and you can move around and nowadays with slide outs and all kinds of other technologies you can pretty much live a decent life in an RV as nice as or nicer than any physical dwelling and number one boat living so I had a really hard time trying to decide which should be number one RV living or boat living when I first recorded this video I was thinking boat living was number one and it's really a toss-up I mean I've learned a lot more about boat living since I made this video originally they both have their pros and cons I mean me personally I'm very attracted to boat living because it just seems cool and adventurous and exciting but there's a certain aspect of boat living that has come about that I've noticed which is that it's very expensive and it takes a ton of work in fact I would say that it takes ten times more work to live on a boat than in an RV but on the other hand I feel like you can have about you know 10 times more fun with a boat than an RV boats are more for travellers so in this situation we're talking about people living in marinas or moored up near the city I feel honestly that I don't know I mean being ward up at a marina is as close as you're gonna get to owning land in the city without having to buy land and although we call this video 10 ways to live rent-free boat living does require renting a slip in marina so it's not quite the same but you know there are situations where you can use a mooring ball which is a boat you know a ball out in the harbor you usually have to pay for that as well but it's like very cheap so cheap has to be meaningless so I don't know I I still think boats are cool I mean you know if you're moored up at a marina you get all the amenities of you know a typical land-based solution you know you get utility hookups and you get you know facilities and running water boats are cool because basically you can get a boat really cheap now I did a video on this here how to buy a boat really really cheap and I got a lot of pushback from some veteran boat people about like that I didn't know what I was talking about blah blah blah but the bottom line is you know they're not coming at it from like how can I live cheaply they're coming at it from a perspective of you know I want to buy a boat and I want to sail it and blah blah blah if you're just looking for a boat just to live on the bottom line is you can buy a boat for $1,500 and you can pay for a slip at a marina a couple hundred dollars a month depending on how big your boat is and that's pretty doable I mean in major cities like San Francisco New York and LA you're probably going to start running up against some pushback from the establishment you know because they don't want everyone doing that right and so the slip fees are getting kind of expensive but if you go on the outskirts of those cities or if you go into any other city you can get a marina slip relatively cheap now for boat living there's a term the term is called liveaboards that's the boat term for living on a boat we're going to talk about liveaboards and so the other issue is that if you're gonna be in a marina a there's three types of slips there's slips regular slips for temporary people you know people cruising around and they come into that marina temporarily and then there are slips for people who were just storing their boat there but they don't live there and that's probably the most common type of slip and it's kind of like RV storage or boat storage you know but your boats they're ready to go hopefully and then the type that we're interested in is called a live aboard slip so as you can imagine these are rare hard-to-get they require you to have good credit blah-blah-blah-blah-blah it's pretty much just like living in an apartment or trying to lease an apartment you gotta have good credit you got to put in a down payment blah blah blah if you don't pay they can confiscate your boats and sell it off at an auction but anyway boats are cool mainly because you get to sell in the ocean and you can get really creative with boats you can you know people are doing all kinds of cool things with boats there's river boats on rivers this is more common in Europe in England in particular there's several canals in England especially near London and people have these long river boats that they've rehabilitation hacked the London rental market there's also canals in France I don't know how often how I don't know how common they are in North America though there's houseboats houseboats on lakes people are you know in some cities whole communities have sprung up around floating houses they call them floating houses but they used to be houseboats and a long time ago people basically built houses on barges to escape the rental market and you can find these in Seattle in particular of course now they cost a ton of money but you can get pretty creative with boats like RVs people are doing all kinds of stuff as far as the type of boat there's motor boats and their sail boats for sale boats are basically two types there's monohulls which is your typical sailboat and then there's catamarans which have two holes I personally think that for living catamarans are better they're more stable safer blah blah blah there's a really cool couple named gaunt with a YouTube channel called gone with the winds that are currently sailing the Pacific they started out RVing for five years and then they bought a catamaran and now they're sailing the Pacific but their travel gives you a good idea of what it's like so the problem with catamarans though is that they're very expensive where to find a cheap boat again look at my video how to get a sailboat really cheap but basically a lot of marinas have auctions where they have to auction off people who have abandoned their boats or didn't pay the bill there are salvage yards where you know a boat was stored or wrecked or some problem and you know now they want to get rid of it really really cheap so you can look on Craigslist boats are awesome I don't know it's again it's a toss up I feel like RV life and boat light both have their pros and cons I'm personally leaning towards boats but I think RVing is a good way to practice living you know independently from the system before you get into boats although you can just jump into both like a lot of people have the problem with both though is expense since it's on the water it needs a lot of maintenance you have to clean the hull you know there's more weather related stuff with the wind and the ocean and saltwater and leaks and all this stuff so just know that if you go the boat route it will be a lot of work and it will be pretty expensive so that's it hope you enjoyed this video please like and subscribe and share and please let me know in the comments what you think any ideas you have if there are any solutions that I haven't touched on and take care [Music] [Music]

Channel: Urban Nomads

Views: 14,443

Keywords: urban camping, campers, rv living, boats, sail boats, livaboaord, shipping containers, alternative living, rent free, freedom, industrial living, warehouse living, trailers, tiny house, boondocking, mortgage free, live rent free, how to live rent free, rent free living, alternative living situations, tent living, shipping container house, truck living, boat living

Id: 8NnNDmqtCnQ

Length: 30min 21sec (1821 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019