Rural Financial Independence is Different
FI/RE (financial independence) advice is Urban-centric if you ask me. Even if you didn't ask I'll give you my best 4-1-1 on what it would be like if you live in the sticks
Rural financial independence takes some different choices and activities.
I like to think I know a little bit about rural living in the United States of America. I grew up in a gigantic land area town in Upstate, NY (which really is north of Albany) which borders the great state of Vermont. We even had a Vermont postal code for a time growing up, even though we were living in NY state.
I made y'all a map of our "estate" and the surrounding areas. It's the best damned graphic I have ever produced, so go ahead and feast your eyes on this.
Our little town had no village and no traffic lights as far as I can remember. It is 23 square miles and the current population is around 922 for a population density of about 41 people per square mile. For a little perspective on this statistic the entire country of Hong Kong has a population density of 17,000 per square mile. Even a large land area country like India rolls in at over 1,000. The point is we had a lot of room to roam growing up. I'm sure the dairy cow population far outnumbered the human population. You could tell by the smell.
Here is part I in case you missed it: FIRE is a Different Path When you Live Rural Part I – Food and Housing
Rural Financial Independence: Sports
My little high school graduated about 60-70 young people every year in the 1980's when I was growing up. Being such a small school you could almost automatically be involved in most sports as nobody was really "cut" from any teams, especially track & field and cross country. In fact that is how I ended up on a varsity track team in the 8th grade. There was no lower level so everybody was in the pool together - even if you weighed 120 pounds soaking wet. Almost everybody I knew was working class and blue collar including the whole track team. I remember starting out and coaches having us run a 4 mile rural loop from school and having to do it in leather high top sneakers. My folks, having a stable middle class prison guard income, kindly went out and dropped some cash for proper running shoes to remedy this situation. Not all the others had that kind of household income so they were stuck with whatever they could get. We even shared track spikes that were around 5-10 years old. The coaches had a canvas bag with about 10-12 pairs of spikes and you were lucky to be highly enough regarded and hoping they had your size to run a track race. Hell, I can remember running a relay race when somebody would finish the first leg and then had to get their spikes off real fast to give them over to another kid running a later leg in the same relay! In fact, I can't remember anybody on my team who "owned" their own spikes. After I went off to college and did some shabby running I went back to my little high school and donated half a dozen pairs of running/racing shoes and that was very much appreciated.
This is the house where I grew up
Living in farm country, the other small schools were really spread apart. Some of those track meets were over an hour bus ride away. One school in particular sticks in my memory from those early years. It was in Cambridge, NY and we showed up for a meet and there was no track! They had a bunch of orange traffic cones measured out in the grass where a track might be. You know what? It really wasn't a big deal and we went and competed just as if it were in an Olympic stadium. The home cross country course was about the same kind of thing. Before the days of major liability concerns our coach asked the farmer adjacent to the school if we could use one of his farm fields for our course and he agreed. We used to practice and race with the cows still in the fields! The cows didn't seem to mind a bunch of scrawny runners being in their safe space and on a good day you didn't step in too much cow shit.
My little cow town didn't have a school so we rode the school bus an hour each morning picking up kids far and wide of all ages from kindergarten through high school seniors. The school was only about 6 miles from our house but we had to make a gigantic country loop and some of the poorer houses there were literally the classic tar paper shacks. It was a lot like what you picture as Appalachia. Have you ever had friends who had tar paper on the outside of their house? It's different but not too terrible if everyone is in the same boat. It didn't feel poor for that reason. We also weren't too concerned with safe withdrawal rates from a portfolio or travel hacking. In those days I think most of the heads of households were counting on some kind of pension and social security for their golden years. We didn't go hungry but we weren't learning real life money concepts either. It was somewhere in between in that most of those conservative frugal folks were more like "save your money and put it in the bank" types.
A little tar paper and this place will be good as new.
Rural Financial Independence Frugal Entertainment
Cable television was not an option and if you look at my illustration above you might realize why. I remember having an antenna on the roof of the house and we had a fancy motorized "rotor" that would turn the thing in order to tune in the big three network channels. The little village near our school had cable so my friends experienced the launch of MTV and ESPN but I mostly had no idea of those things until college. My great grandmother Stella, however, lived in town and had cable AND HBO and I used to stay with her pretty often to hang out with my friends and if you could stay up late enough watching HBO you could sometimes catch a little brief nudity! That was pretty damned sweet for an adolescent boy. Most of our entertainment was playing outdoors and riding around on bicycles. There weren't a lot of boys around and I remember having to ride my bike two miles to go throw a ball around with my "neighbors." I remember those boys having to live with 4 boys in 2 bunk beds all in the same little room in a little house. It didn't seem unusual. We had a couple of rules when they rode over to play near my house, though. 1. No walking across the train bridge. 2. If you play near the abandoned house don't fall in the well!
Most of our family holiday activities were centered around pulling a camping trailer to camp sites not too far from home. Like I said, we were almost the upper crust of society in that small town with a middle class income. That was a pretty good time but that ended by the time I was about 12. After that most of the entertainment was playing around outdoors or running or shooting a basketball at the garage hoop. I don't think I ever traveled more than 90 minutes from home until I was about 18 years old. "Who cares? So what?" you might ask? I only write this to illustrate that there are a lot of regular people out in the world who are largely forgotten in a national discussion. Even if they could travel to the "big city" many of them don't care to do so and can be content within an hour from home for their whole lives. It was a little isolating to grow up like that but it isn't the worst thing to enter adulthood a little naive to big city life. There is plenty of time for all that later if you decide to leave the sticks. Thankfully, the internet has provided some connectivity and the lacking financial skills of my misspent youth are now available even to country bumpkins. It's not a sexy way to live and maybe that's why these folks don't get much press except maybe the whole world think they're addicted to opioid pills. In all the big FIRE discussions, though, let's not forget they exist and have been living that simple frugal life before it was cool. That's my story of rural financial independence.
Oh, and there were some pretty cool thinkers in that small town: How Did I Get This Way? Mentors, For Better or Worse
Are these edible?