Woodland is relatively cheap in the UK. Certainly for what you pay, you can get an unmanageably large amount of land. You can get a few acres for 10-20k, up to hundreds of acres for < 200k. Prices have gone up quite a lot recently. You pay more for things like ancient/hardwoods, features like river frontage/streams (which may have fishing rights) and occasionally some come with outbuildings.

For example: https://www.woods4sale.co.uk/woodlands/scotland/1488.htm

The catch is that you are extremely unlikely to get planning permission (hence cheap) for a building and you can legally only stay there for a certain period of time each year. On the other hand, you can put up a small cabin if it's for "forestry activities" and if appropriate you can make a profit out of the land (e.g. lumber, forest crops, charcoal). There's also a reasonable chance there will be public access routes through your land.

Big benefits though. It's yours, freehold, and it's convenient for tax purposes (no inheritance tax). You can camp on it, or have a caravan, and it's essentially your playground. You are liable for some maintenance like boundary fencing, but aside from that its' really up to you what you do with it.

In Scotland it's a bit different, you can build a hut (technical term) and the only real constraint is that it must be removable without leaving a trace - so you can't put in permanent plumbing, for example. It also can't be your main residence.

See: https://072b35b7-8c60-4122-84b1-63e1d24587e4.filesusr.com/ug...

https://www.thousandhuts.org/

Nope. I spent the last year looking to do this and it’s not as simple as you say. If you buy a plot in the middle of Arizona or something, you might be responsible for road upkeep or charged for other things. And you still have to pay taxes every year as well as follow building codes. And there are hidden problems. You have no privacy, you will be in a wash and get flooded, you will probably get robbed, an industrial farm might move in nearby and spray fecal matter upwind of you. You’ll need an off-road vehicle just to get there and you’re going to have to off-road truck all your building supplies to the site. Oh and you want water? Good luck. And you have to pay tens of thousands at least to get the land. By the end, it’s not even close to being cost effective. Back in the day you could buy land in Texas with no zoning or building codes and get a huge area for almost no money. That just doesn’t exist anymore.

And plus, you are at the mercy of the county. If they want to raise taxes or make your life hell with some kind of development like a highway or something, it’s them vs little old you. And guess who’s gonna win. Oh and if you have a small medical problem you are 100% dead.

If you want to get out of the rat race, you should move to a midwestern city. You can find houses for less than 50k in safe neighborhoods by California standards. For 50k you get low property taxes, decent neighborhood, reliable internet, nearby hospital, Costco, cheap gas and cheap electricity. And plus, when the county wants to fuck people over with taxes or developments, they have to deal with half a million angry people rather than just you. That’s crucially important. I’ve been researching this intensely for a year and casually for almost a decade.

And you can live cheaper than you think. If you live in your house and aren’t selling in the next two years, you can perform almost any alteration to your house yourself. You don’t have to hire an electrician or plumber as long as you pull permits yourself and follow code. You could build a whole house yourself in most places — just need an engineer to draw plans. People have no clue about this, they just assume you have to pay thousands to do anything. You can live quite well outside the rat race if you are smart.

I hope you have been saving because the next 6 months will probably be the best time to do this in the last decade. I bought a cheap house just like this a month ago and while I still paid very little, I am kicking myself.

Would you be willing to share which states you've considered?I've been looking into this myself, and although cost is not the only factor I'm considering, I find it's intertwined with other social factors.

I’ve visited almost every state at least briefly. In the past couple months I visited El Paso, New Orleans, Huntsville, Lincoln and Omaha, Wichita and Des Moines. Des Moines was the best by a mile.

Absolutely. I know someone who bought 5 (I think, it might have been a bit more) acres of land about 90 miles north of Minneapolis for $15,000 back around 2009. It went cheap because it's too rocky for farming and would cost too much to get utilities put in.

I also know some other people who bought cheap land in the same area. They have a trailer home up there for a weekend getaway.

If you are interested there is already a culture of doing this in Alaska. The search term you are looking for is "dry cabin".

Isn't Alaskan real-estate wildly expensive? This lifestyle appeals to me, but any time I've looked into it the prices seem greater than other comparable west-coast land (e.g. Republic, Washington).

It wasn't that long ago that you could homestead in Alaska (end in the 80s). Go out, parcel out a piece of land, improve it and give the gov't $100 and it's yours.

How hard is this if you want land that is road accessible (so that I don't have to trespass in order to reach it), and has a source of water like a creek?

Last year, we bought a 40 acres in Colorado with a creek and a half-finished cabin for 100k. The land is about 45 min from our house in town, last 2 miles are 4wd only dirt road. There is 1-2 acre that is flat enough to farm, the rest is too steep. In the mountains, if it is steep it will be cheap.

As far as the no building codes dream, good luck finding that. Expect the county to do whatever it can to make your life difficult and extract the maximum of fees from you.

What will you do with the steep portions of land?

I guess the main use of the steep land is to provide physical distance from the neighbors. We do have some trails and lots of trees for hiking and firewood. Hunting is an option when in season. The animals tend to walk on the trails because it is easier, same as humans do. Assuming the virus does not get me I will plant some fruit trees.

It took us about a year of looking to find land that met our requirements at a reasonable price. It is possible to find deals but it takes a while.

How do you go about finding such pieces of land? Agents? Classifieds?

We found an agent in our area that specializes in land/cabin properties. You want an agent that is willing to drive with you for an hour or more to view property, and is not afraid to help get the car un-stuck on muddy roads. The advantage of having a relationship with a buyer's agent is that you can move more quickly when a good listing comes on the market. Land with good value will not stay on the market long.

Also google earth is useful, or your county may have a GIS tool on their website you can use to view property boundaries, example: http://maps.boco.solutions/propertysearch/

I seem to remember there are places with little or no property taxes as well. Nevada, Florida?

I did a search on this a couple years ago and found a table of property tax data (no idea where now). From what I recall, Mississippi, Alaska and Nevada were all pretty low. There weren't as many low-tax areas as you might expect, though, and I'm sure a few of those are less than hospitable.

Property taxes really are the hardest part of this idea. You can find ways to unload almost every other expense (if you have enough time & energy, that is!). I guess you could be a nomad, moving your campsite around a national forest every couple weeks-- but you'd still need permits for any kind of hunting or fishing, and too much gathering might also be frowned upon.

Honestly, this lady was right when she said the only way to really live completely free in this age is to do it illegally. To be fair, though, there are probably a lot of places where you could do it & be unlikely to get caught.

Alaska is an outlier in a lot of ways; they pay you to be a resident. I know a few military/coast guard folks who went up there -- Alaska is one of the top requested posts in the Coast Guard, btw -- and retained their AK residency even after moving elsewhere because of the tax benefit.

Florida has no income tax and high property tax.

ya hes right you can do this in the US without much money

And in Canada for half of whatever you'd pay in the US.

You don't even need to be in a big empty country like that...Even here in Germany there are plenty of depressed rural areas especially in the east.

As long as it doesn't have convenient access to the rail network or an autobahn you can find a plot with a small, old house on it even 2-3 hours drive from Berlin for next to nothing in a village that had 2x today's population in 1990 (and everyone left there today are old people).

EDIT: example via quick googling of the least-densely populated districts in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prignitz

It has fewer people living in it today than it had in 1875 (earliest available data) & half as much as it had in its peak in 1950. It is about 2 hours drive from Berlin according to google maps.

This is simply not true, certainly not for the example. See https://www.immowelt.de/liste/pegnitz/haeuser/kaufen?lat=49.... for listings of Pignitz. Standard (although well sized) row houses go from 250.000. Pieces of land where you can build go for 200k per acre (https://www.immowelt.de/liste/pegnitz/grundstuecke/kaufen?la...)

You are looking at the wrong place (Pegnitz is a suburb of Bayreuth in Bavaria, Prignitz is a rural district in Brandenburg).

Looking at houses for sale in the state of Brandenburg with price limit of €10k gives several results (some of them probably dubious but not all): https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/brandenburg/haus-k...

It will not be a comfy home for a family but for the type of stuff discussed above it would do (e.g. a formerly abandoned but still standing/stable house).

In Canada though you're gonna be 1) very VERY remote, and 2) you're gonna be extremely cold. It's no surprise that the most expensive cities in Canada are also the furthest south.