So back when I was in americore and I just gotten out of college, I had a little bit different mindset, and I really wanted to figure out how to live for free or how to live for the least amount of money possible. So I started looking into some of these eco friendly homes and one that was really cool and still is cool to me is called an earth ship.
Basically, you’re building sort of like a cave out of recycled materials. So usually the tire places will pay to shred tires because they’re not great for the environment. So you can go get tires, you’d use those tires to make the back wall. And you put nails through the tires and pack them with earth and just build them back and back and back, dig out a bunch of dirt and you kind of be in the side of a hill almost. So you build your house inside of a hill and then it had all of these systems like solar panels and water run off different ways to like have a garden in the front of the house, a lot of really cool designs. They’d even use like bottles and Adobe in order to create walls. So recycled materials, lots of cool, interesting features with these houses.
However, the problem that I discovered is that you can’t use debt in order to buy these houses. A lot of times, maybe in New Mexico, some of the areas where it’s consistently dry, you could, but they don’t fit the standards of International Residential Code. And because these houses are built in a non conventional way, they’re not proven. It’s not something that banks wanna lend money on. So you’d almost have to come up with probably the main way that you would do it, you’d come up with all of the money yourself, you’d build the property yourself. Maybe you would look to refinance if there was some sort of Earth Ship financing available, but likely, it wouldn’t end up working out. And so that was in a time when a lot more Liberal influences.
And then I think more recently, as I become more of a capitalist, I just discovered that the easiest way is just to buy properties that already exist, improve them a bit, maybe add some things that help reduce the residual costs like replacing the roof or putting in different windows, thermostats, light bulbs, maybe even solar panels and then going and buying the next property and just leveraging debt, recycling debt. So I used to think that the way out was to reduce my expenses, to live modestly for as long as possible. But then I played that out into the future, and it just kind of led to a life of scarcity. A life of abundance suggests that the sky is the limit and that you can leverage that and have everything that you want and figure it out. It’s just a lot of responsibility, a lot of moving parts.
So maybe not, maybe earth ships are not the way really cool design, something cool for you guys to check out, look into. And another reason why earth ships are not prevalent, especially in the Midwest where it gets cold or other climates where it gets really wet, is that the entire back wall is concrete. And so concrete in general and cold climates is gonna snap and crack and break. It’s gonna mess with the foundation and that sort of thing. And so New Mexico area is the best area for earth ships in the USA. I know that they still build some in Africa. They go to other countries and recycle things and build these houses. But check out earth ships. Let me know if you guys would want to own one.