Are you thinking of becoming a part of the tiny house movement, but you aren’t ready to take the plunge because you don’t know how much it’s going to cost? Check out this case study about how much it REALLY costs to live in a tiny house.
Several years ago, this is what my life looked like: I was renting an apartment with my girlfriend in my hometown in Texas while working for a health insurance company as a claims examiner. My job was OK, but I often daydreamed about how my life might be different if I had the courage to pursue my ambitions. Rent cost me about half of my paycheck, and there was always the threat of a rate increase because a fracking boom in the area had increased the local population by about 20% in a matter of months, (in addition to making the roads a very real hazard to travel and ruining the town’s only water supply, an open reservoir fed by rainwater mixed with industrial fracking runoff).
Ever since college, I had fantasized about homesteading, and often thought about owning my own small home in the country somewhere, where I could enjoy the splendors of nature along with the potential to retire early by reducing my overall cost of living. So I investigated the culture of tiny houses. I saved all the money that I could, and I laid concrete plans. Eventually, I had to have a difficult conversation with my fiancé at the time to convey to her that I wouldn’t ever be able to get what I wanted out of life without undertaking some major changes. As it turned out, we had already grown apart in this regard, and so we parted ways. But I got what I wanted. I now live in a straw bale tiny house in northeast Missouri, in a community that I love very dearly. I still consider this decision the best one that I’ve ever made, and while I miss a few minor things about my old way of life, I have no desire to turn back.
In this article, I’m going to go over some of the details of my tiny house lifestyle and use myself as an example of what your path into the tiny house movement might look like. Along the way, I’ll make some recommendations to simplify the process for those of you who might be tempted to follow my lead, and I’ll invite you to take some time to visit the village where I live. (We have more than a dozen tiny houses located within a few yards of each other, all of different architectural styles and made of various materials. Click here if you’re interested in learning more about my community.)
How Much My Tiny House Cost at the Outset:
First I’ll go over the basic financial costs associated with my house. I live in a one room tiny cabin with a 9’ x 12’ interior space, and no sleeping loft. I also have a 3’ x 9’ covered porch area, and two outbuildings, one of which I use for storage, and the other I use as my restroom. I purchased the structure last year from a friend of mine, for $8,500. (Unfortunately, I don’t have any blog-worthy pictures at the moment, but the picture above is a detail of the sculpture work in the exterior plaster on the south side of my house.) In terms of amenities, I have a small cast-iron woodstove for winter heating and a little bar fridge for snacks and drinks. Originally, the house came with a pair of solar panels, but because I wanted to connect to our local power grid and felt like I couldn’t afford a grid-tied inverter, they aren’t currently supplying me with any power. My walls are covered inside and out with natural earthen plaster, and my roof is all metal. I also have some attic space, accessible through an exterior panel.
A new structure of a similar size and composition would likely cost somewhere in the ballpark of $13,500, based on a national average price per square foot for new construction of $125. (Mind you, this is a mean average. New construction in the San Francisco Bay area may cost you double or more than an apples-to-apples comparison in, say, Smithville, Arkansas.) My particular home was considerably cheaper than the price I would have expected to pay for a house of this size for two reasons: first, the home is more than a decade old, (and when it comes to natural materials like straw and clay this is a factor that has to be evaluated carefully,) and second, the home was built by a women’s empowerment workshop, rather than a dedicated contractor. (That doesn’t mean the work was shoddy or that the house is otherwise sub-par, but it does mean that the cost of labor for the people who built the structure wasn’t factored as much, if at all, into the price I paid to own the home.) When I moved in, I had the local cable company install wiring for high-speed internet, and an electrician friend of mine set me up with the necessary connections to draw power from our local grid. These improvements, including deposits, cost me an additional thousand dollars or so.
If you take a look on the house listings on this website, you’ll quickly see that prices for pre-owned tiny homes can vary pretty widely, depending on the location of the building, the nature of its construction, and how badly the current owner wants to move on. That said, I consider my home to fall toward the low-middle of the range for comparable structures in similar settings.
Obviously, two major advantages of owning my own tiny home are that I don’t have to work as a slave to a bank by paying a mortgage for the next thirty years, and that my ongoing maintenance costs in keeping my home in good repair are much lower than they might otherwise be. These factors make tiny house ownership, generally speaking, far more accessible to the average person than standard suburban homes of a thousand square feet or more, especially in an uncertain economy that is still struggling to recover from the housing crisis of the late 2000s. There are several compelling reasons that the tiny house lifestyle can be empowering to women in particular, as well – check out this article to learn the details.
Other Financial Costs Associated with my Tiny House:
Of course, the capital outlay involved in the purchase of a home is not the only financial cost directly associated with owning the structure. In my case, for example, I don’t actually own the land my home rests on. Instead, I lease a plot from the non-profit land trust run by my village. This means that I have a lease fee to pay along with property taxes assessed on the house and other improvements themselves, but I do not have to make payments for land, or pay property taxes for the land I lease. Specifically, I pay about $240 a year to lease the land my house is located on, and I pay around $120 a year in property taxes for my home and outbuildings. (I don’t have to own a vehicle anymore, but if I did, I’d also have to pay a paltry sum in property taxes for that.)
There’s an important caveat that I should explain about my specific situation that isn’t likely to apply in your case, (though it would if you decided to move to my village of tiny houses as well,) which is that my home is not outfitted with some of the features many of us are accustomed to expect in a home. Namely, I do not have a kitchen. (This doesn’t mean that I CAN’T, but rather that it would require me to make an additional capital investment to make an upgrade.) I also don’t have a cistern, septic tank or any kind of bathing facilities. I meet my needs for hygiene in different ways, instead.
First, when it comes to addressing my effluvia, I, (along with the rest of my village,) use the humanure system popularized by Joseph C. Jenkins. Basically, rather than wasting gallons upon gallons of potable water to flush away our waste, we instead use a system of buckets and dry carbon-based litter to contain it, before depositing it into a designated compost area. I can assure you that this system, if used properly, involves no odor, is extremely low-maintenance, and avoids unnecessary expenditure of a precious recourse while, over time, generating rich, perfectly-safe-to-use compost for gardening. Many styles of commercial composting toilet can be used with this kind of system in place, though a toilet like the one I have can be purchased or made for less than $50. If a professionally manufactured toilet is more your style, I recommend checking out this article comparing several different Sun-Mar models.
Second, I am able to share bathing facilities with a number of other people in my community. This has several advantages: I don’t have to lay out the money that would be required for all the necessary plumbing and fixtures to hold the water, heat it, and move it through a state approved waste-water management system. (I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty in this article, but I’m sure you can imagine how expensive these kinds of systems can be, especially in the context of retrofitting an existing home.) The showers I use are clean, well-maintained, and I only have to pay a nominal fee for the privilege of using them – it works out to something like $10 a month. There’s another benefit to this shared infrastructure that I place a high value on as well, which is that it is ecologically sustainable. Basically, instead of all forty of my neighbors and I each having to separately construct and maintain various independent bathing facilities, we can all pitch in together and use the same two showers. (Think about it, is it really worth spending thousands of dollars to have your own private shower that you’ll use a few minutes a day, when you could pay a fraction of the cost to share that space with your friends and neighbors, and ensure that the fixture meets 100% of its useful potential?) In my view, the shared infrastructure model is win-win for everyone, as well as the planet.
This same principle applies to kitchen facilities. One of my neighbors owns a larger family-sized home, with a spacious, well-equipped kitchen in it. Rather than cobble together my own kitchen with all the appliances I might like, I can instead join with about eight other people to share the same kitchen space. Again, there’s no need for each and every one of us to buy and maintain separate ovens, refrigerators, etc. We also get the benefit one another’s company at mealtimes, while sharing cooking duties throughout the week. I’m able to save tons of time by not preparing all of my own food for myself, while still being able to enjoy consistent, satisfying, delicious meals. (I consider these advantages a huge boost to my quality of life.)
The Financial Costs of Home Construction:
While we’re on the subject of money, let’s talk a bit about the costs of new home construction. New construction built by a professional contractor is likely to run you in the range of $150 a square foot, though in my particular village, we have two superbly skilled builders who, at least to my knowledge, have quoted prices as low as $108 a square foot. Assuming a couple is looking to build a house say, 250 square feet in size, they could reasonably expect to have the tiny house of their dreams for less than $40,000, which is in the vicinity of 20% of what a typical first home in the burbs is likely to run.
A DIY home might cost considerably less to construct, at least on paper. My friend/neighbor Thomas, for example, built his own tiny home called Mirth Lodge for around $1300, most of which was spent to buy a high quality stove for winter heating. Granted, it took him about a decade to “finish” it, and Thomas has a higher tolerance than most people for living amongst wild things. (At one time, he even had horse nettles growing on the floor of his living room, surviving on just the ambient moisture inside his home.)
Most people, however, would be looking to build something more along the lines of The Flouch, a house built by my friend/neighbor Dan. His overall investment was in the $15,000 range, and he had prior experience with construction, which was definitely made the process much easier for him.
Toward the higher end of the scale you have houses like The Upcycle, which was retrofitted by my very own bromance, Nathan. All told, he spent $36,903 to get a structure originally planned as a three-season workshop ready for him to live in year round. One of the coolest features of his home is an uber-efficient air source heat pump, which he uses to inexpensively heat and cool his home year round for just a few bucks a month.
If you’re tempted to go the DIY route to save money, I have two important cautionary tales for you. First, you should bear in mind that the time you spend working to build a home is time that you’re not spending doing other things, like earning money, raising your kids, and staying connected with your loved ones. The savings you achieve by not hiring a contractor could quickly and easily be eclipsed by lost income and/or the fees associated with divorce proceedings. Secondly, an amateur builder WILL make costly mistakes by virtue of simply not knowing what they’re doing. I don’t care how many YouTube videos you watch, there is basically a mathematical certainty that you will get something wrong, and fixing mistakes is always way more costly than getting it done the right way the first time. I want to especially warn you against the scheme of cutting corners. Skimping on insulation, or buying cheap glazing, for instance, will lead to higher ongoing costs in energy that could eat you alive. (Oh, and if you’re thinking that you’ll spend eight hours a day working at your normal job, eight hours a day homeschooling your kids, and eight hours a day building your new house, and simply NEVER sleep for the several years it takes to finish your project… thing again.)
Additional problems with DIY tiny houses include a severe reduction in your chances of being able to get homeowner’s insurance, (which means that if your tiny house burns down in an accidental fire, so does your life savings,) coupled with a somewhat lower likelihood that you’ll be able to sell your homemade home down the road when you’re ready to move into something else. (There’s a reason so many DIY tiny houses are posted on sale for years and years without ever selling.)
My bottom line, when it comes to new construction, is this: please, please, SERIOUSLY, please, just hire a contractor to do it for you. If you aren’t a professional builder by trade, then you’re almost certainly not qualified to manage something as complex as the construction of a house. If you need help choosing the right builder for you, here’s an excellent article that covers the many criteria you’re going to want to keep in mind while you’re making the right selection for your situation.
The Non-Financial Costs of Living in a Tiny Home:
Reviewing this idea of costs in a more subjective sense, it’s easy to identify a range of costs associated with the tiny house lifestyle that aren’t necessarily financial. For instance, in my case, I live about ten miles from the exact, geographic middle of nowhere. Many aspirants to the tiny house lifestyle tend to romanticize the idea of living on their own in the sticks, doing ALL THE THINGS entirely by themselves, or with only their romantic partner and their dog to help them. In the first place, this notion is completely unrealistic. (I know… you’ve read articles about how so-and-so grows all of their own food on 1/128th of an acre, with enough left over to make a quarter million bucks at their local farmer’s market in a single growing season, but I’m here to tell you that outside of the all-knowing interwebs, this simply isn’t possible.) The point I’m trying to make is that social isolation is likely to be overwhelming at best, and utterly crippling at worst, and until you’ve spent some time living your new lifestyle, you won’t be able to forecast how it will actually feel to live it. It would be unfortunate if you ruined yourself financially by buying land and a house with this kind of homesteading plan in mind only to find yourself trapped and miserable a short time later, especially if it placed an enormous strain on the handful of relationships that you care most about in the process.
My particular village is located in a county of around 4000 people, about 14 miles from the nearest bank and hospital. The closest entertainment options, like decent restaurants or a movie theater, are more like 35 miles away. If you want to hop on the train for some serious long-distance travel, you have to go down to Quincy, Illinois, which is about 90 miles east. We are fortunate, however, to have a sizeable Mennonite grocery store within walking distance – not only do they sell everything under the sun, but they do so at extremely competitive prices because they are more interested in providing a service to people living in the area than they are in making a profit. They also have a small café in their store, where you can get a simple meal for a couple of bucks, with a swirl of soft-serve ice cream for dessert. Of course, this is assuming that you haven’t been “mudded” in. There’s a period of time in the early spring, which can last for weeks, when a layer of mud forms atop frozen ground beneath it – it’s extremely slippery because the water has nowhere to go, and the ruts that result from people trying to travel through it often do permanent damage to our little rural roadways. During this time, my neighbors and I don’t expect to go out much past our front doors.
In a personal context, living in northeast Missouri means that I am separated from my family and most of my long-term friends by thousands of miles. It also means that there is a dearth of single people in our local dating pool, (unless you’re in to retired widows/widowers in their seventies and older).
Living in the country is mostly positive, however. My community is set on a 180-acre piece of land with several gorgeous ponds, including one that we use as a swimming hole, and there are lots of forests and meadows to explore as well. You won’t have to go far to look for wild mushrooms like morels and hen-of-the-woods, to watch birds and other wildlife, or to hook a fish or two.
The Non-Financial Costs of Downsizing:
It’s also worth mentioning that transitioning into the tiny house lifestyle is likely to require some adjustments to your attitude about what life is supposed to look like. For one thing, I own about a third of the stuff that I did when I lived in Texas, (and even then I didn’t have any major pieces of furniture to deal with,) because I live in a fraction of the space that I used to occupy. (Unfortunately, this means that I’ll never be able to have that vast 4’ x 12’ table to play Crossfire with thousands of hand-painted miniatures and carefully made period-accurate, scale recreations of World War 2 era European terrain pieces… but considering that a single game can take dozens of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to play, it’s probably best that I never go down that particular rabbit hole… Sigh.) So, I’ve had to learn to downsize, in terms of how much stuff I own as well the quantity of physical space that I’m at liberty to use. For me, this has been easier than I expected it to be – I have an adequate bed to sleep in, a desk for my income work, and ample storage for clothing and the select possessions that I actually use on a frequent basis. If you anticipate that this might be a difficult transition for you, I recommend that you seriously evaluate how much space you are likely to truly need, before you think about how you want to budget for a tiny house. Personally, I consider 100 square feet to be a realistic minimum for each person in a family, (meaning that a couple with two kids, for example, shouldn’t consider moving into anything less than 400 square feet in size – but that’s only my opinion).
There’s another caveat that I should point out, in my particular case, which is that I have access to several common spaces available to everyone who lives in my village. We have a large shared recreational space where we organize potlucks a few times each month, along with a computer lab open to folks with a laptop. There’s also a shared facility with a stage and a wall lined with mirrors, where villagers gather for daily yoga and exercise, and there are many times throughout the year when traveling musicians will come through and play a concert for us there. Of course, we also have the world’s most famous eco bed and breakfast right at the village entrance, called the Milkweed Mercantile – they serve the best thin-crust pizza in the Midwest every Thursday, and they have the largest selection of organic beverages, both alcoholic and non, for miles in any direction. Living in 100 square feet of space would feel much different if I didn’t have access to these other spaces at least part of the time – of course, most any tiny house you might hope to buy is likely to be near public land, parks and municipal recreational facilities.
The Final Verdict:
If you’re interested in knowing EXACTLY what it costs me to live my particular tiny house lifestyle on a monthly basis, here’s the breakdown for you. (Obviously, given that you’re likely to make slightly different choices than me, your costs in a similar situation could prove to be higher or lower, relative to mine, but this will give you a reasonable ballpark idea.)
HOA fees, (common space usage, common showers, etc.): $88/month
Land lease fees: $20/month
High speed internet and landline telephone: $68/month
Electricity, (expressed as monthly average, with seasonable variability): $38/month, or $460 a year
Health insurance, (this line item is perhaps the most variable): $40/month
Food, (including shared kitchen space rental and miscellaneous snacks, beer, etc.): $300/month
Discretionary purchases, (another highly variable one): $100/month
Services I pay others to do for me: $20/month
State and federal property taxes: $10/month average, or $120 a year
Transportation, (paid to a shared vehicle co-op): $20/month
2% income dues to non-profit membership organization: you can easily calculate your own
State and federal income taxes: you can easily calculate your own
Total, (with some generous rounding up): ~$900/month
Of course, I don’t have any children, so I don’t have to account for any of the expenses that parents are likely to need to factor into their calculations, and, as I’ve pointed out abundantly, many of these expenses will vary widely one way or another for different people. I can’t speak for other rural areas of the country, let alone an urban dweller or someone travelling the world in a tiny house on wheels, but I think $900 a month is a realistic target for an adult living in my community, assuming they live a similar lifestyle to my own, (which, for the sake of perspective, is about a third of what I spent on a monthly basis to live in my hometown in Texas). According to me, I live an exceptionally high quality of life comparable to what any average American would consider acceptable, adequate and “normal”.
How I Make Ends Meet in the Rurals:
One of the downsides of living in a remote location in a village of some fifty-or-so people is the question of how to make ends meet financially. In my case, I work remotely online by doing a variety of things for income – I make sales calls; I write sales-related material in addition to a couple other writing gigs; I get paid to cook for my dining co-op a couple days a week; I am the Town Clerk for my village; among other sundry tasks. I’m able to meet my economic need sufficiently, and save every month as well, to boot.
In the past, I’ve done bookkeeping work, search engine query relevance evaluation, transcription, and Amazon Mechanical Turk, (which was actually the first thing I did when I moved to Missouri – it’s accessible to anyone with a US social security number, and you can get started without any sort of rigorous application within a matter of a couple days). By the way, super-fast fiber-optic internet cables are currently being installed in our village, and should be operational by the fall of 2016.
In my opinion, unless you have a particular skill or credentials in some area, the most likely way for someone to make ends meet in a tiny house, especially if they’re moving to a brand new area or a remote location, is to work online. If you’ve built the idea in your mind that you’re ONLY willing to do a very particular kind of work, and it isn’t online, then I’d think twice about investing a considerable portion of your savings into a tiny house. (I’d also recommend against making a move of this kind if you have substantial debt to pay off.) This isn’t to say that you can’t start your own business – indeed, if you have the savings to float your living expenses for a couple years, then downsizing into a tiny house could be the ideal opportunity for you to develop the career you’ve always wanted. (My friend/neighbor Christina is documenting her experiences living a new life in a tiny house while starting a new business and raising a family.) It could also be a good chance to learn some new skills and pursue the kind of education you’ve been dreaming about.
Anyhow, if you’re willing to do whatever honest work is available to be done in order to realize your vision of lifestyle freedom, then you have my enthusiastic encouragement to take the plunge – I’ve been living in my tiny house for more than a year at this point, and I have to say, the water is fine. I often tell visitors to my village that I now enjoy the highest quality of life I have ever known, along with the lowest cost of living.
How to Have a High Quality of Life by Living in a Tiny House:
I’d like to tell you some more about my village, so that you’ll understand why I say living here has afforded me the highest quality of life I’ve ever known, concurrent with the lowest cost of living that I’ve experienced up to this point in my life. (Apart from all the advantages I described above.)
You might be surprised how much it can enhance your life to actually know all of your neighbors. It’s not as if everyone who lives in my village is my close-personal best friend, (though some of them are,) but I do know all of them well enough to carry on a meaningful conversation, and I do authentically care about them. This is contrast to what I experienced with my neighbors elsewhere – and I think it’s a common experience – which was that I scarcely knew who my neighbors were, let alone their names, what their lives were like, what mattered to them, what their dreams were, and so on. Having a genuine sense of community is a beautiful, precious thing, and moving into a tiny house has enabled me to experience it.
Those of you who have kids would particularly value the lifestyle available in my village. Many of the kids here are homeschooled, (though not all, and I’m told that the local school district is pretty good considering its size,) and children are often allowed to roam free and learn and play in the great outdoors with minimal supervision. They don’t generally have their noses stuck in a screen – not because they have access to any, but because they’re too busy playing tag, or building a fort, or catching butterflies for their collections. We don’t worry about crime; we leave our doors unlocked.
Lastly, living in my village has empowered me to live in a place where I am surrounded by people who share my code of ethics, and support the decisions I make in terms of environmental sustainability. (A quick search into “intentional community” will open a world to you, where you can live in a tiny house as part of a community centered on your religious convictions, gender identification, practices for rearing children, or any other criteria that may be of particular importance to you.)
Of course, in the case of my own village, we’ve come together to strive to live our lives in an ecologically responsible way, while reaching out to the wider world to share out skills. We want to help the world work together to combat the effects of anthropogenic climate disruption, (global warming,) while promoting a cultural model where all dimensions of human diversity are valued, and we can solve our problems without violence and in cooperation with one another. If you also like this sort of thing, or you just want to check out more than a dozen tiny houses in one spot, (we happen to have four tiny houses available for sale right now) then I invite you come visit us sometime soon through our established visitor program, or by signing up for one of the workshops that we offer throughout the year. We’d love to share our sustainable tiny house dreams with you.