The Americans Pledging to Buy Less–Or Even Nothing
75 comments
·January 29, 2025bitmasher9
chneu
Reducing stress is the biggest pro of a consumption-aware lifestyle for me. I don't need the latest crap. I don't need flashy stuff. The desire to have the latest/great and more of it destroys us.
ajfriend
Oh man, what an exciting opportunity. clears throat The hacker news title seems to mistranslate the original Em dash to an En dash.
ty6853
The biggest advantage of DIY over buying is no taxes or regulation. I built a house without codes or inspection for $30k, meanwhile it would cost you $300k+ for same.
leetrout
Do you have more details?
How long did it take you?
What's the square footage and number of bedrooms / bathrooms?
Did anyone help you?
Did you include buying / renting tools in that amount?
Already own the land?
Interior / exterior finish levels? e.g. is it a cabin?
yial
Not the original commenter, but I’ve done extensive renovations of different sizes, and walls off restorations of 3 houses.
The 30k to me, sounds possible ish, but also hard especially without a helper.
Personal example, I’ve gotten many materials for free. Including several hundred square feet of hardwood floor.
But thinking through some basics of just tools needed, and being cheap- and also with an assumption that you have time, and land with wood. And assuming you find cheap / used tools but not junk.
Decent chainsaw: $600-$1,000 Alaskan sawmill: $120
Stuff to setup basic kiln house: $600
6-12 months wait on wood.
Planer: $400-600 Jointer: $200-300
Impact, drill, sawzall, oscillating saw, jigsaw, circular: $700
Mitre saw and stand: $400 Table saw: $200
Basic plumbing tools, pex or copper : $200
But when I start to think through things aside from that: If you start to buy materials…
I think it could be done, if you did a cement or block foundation yourself, and did very basic construction.
But my just off the cuff guesstimates, assuming 1500 sq ft ranch house:
Lumber for framing: $4,100 Toilets: $240 Fasteners: $500 Drywall: $1,500 Piping, fittings: $1,000 Electrical: $2,500 (assuming electric stove, and electric dryer) HVAC: $8,000 …. I start to see a hard time doing it for 30k, but, I’m sure there’s a way!
RajT88
Re: free stuff, this is how my house was built.
Leftover materials from a construction site have to be disposed... Unless you are a builder who wants a house and owns a truck and some land... It is a weird house, but built with pretty nice materials. I bought it from the nephew of the builder.
potato3732842
Do not attempt to mill your own lumber for your own house. Unless you are building a log cabin in BFE Alaska where you can't truck anything in and need to remove the trees anyway it just ain't worth it for the labor you'll have invested.
Second, blocks and bricks are a massive f-ing waste of labor when working as an individual since you have to handle them so many times. It's worth forming up 10yd worth of stuff and paying for a truck.
You can probably get it done under $30k if you are super cheap and only buy materials at auction and buy used tools.
glouwbug
I wouldn't recommend it if anything were to go wrong. It's a quick way to end up in bankruptcy if anyone gets hurt, or if your neighbors property gets damaged
potato3732842
Not getting hurt isn't hard. Not trashing your neighbor's property is even easier. But this isn't the kind of project one should take on with zero experience. Do yourself a favor and buy a backhoe that's a runner to start with even if it costs 5x more than a project.
SoftTalker
Thats what liability insurance is for, which you need if you own property, whether anything is built on it or not.
ty6853
You can own a house as an llc.
mmooss
I wonder if you could end up in jail.
cudgy
One less person to compete for the scraps and pay top price for the mass produced craps. /s
535188B17C93743
How did you get permitted without an inspection or adhering to code?
bluGill
In rural areas this isn't too hard as they often don't have the in the first place. Of course there are reasons people generally live in cities.
cma
Also reasons for codes, don't want to have to wonder if every building you're in is a death trap. And when buying a house you don't want to have to tear it apart to inspect it and look for balloon framing or lack of fire stops.
Dalewyn
>I built a house without codes or inspection for $30k
You will, of course, not be able to get insurance nor sell the house later on, among many other hurdles related to liability.
Not dissing the idea of DIY, to be clear. Just noting for the audience that freedom is power and power is responsibility.
s1artibartfast
You would also save 30k in insurance premiums pretty quickly.
ty6853
Someone would buy it for $30k cash, if it were for sale.
doodlebugging
At $50/sq ft for a home you'll have people lining up.
New home prices are more than double that.
Even renting a home costs more than $1/sq ft per month in the area where we own our rental property.
Congratulations. You sound like you'd fit right in with my family. Most of us have been building things for a long time.
Note to anyone else who might want to give it a whirl - you don't have to buy all the tools. Most of them and all the larger tools are available to rent on long or short-term rental contracts at rates that will save you money if you're only gonna do the project once. The skills are the important things to own yourself.
Be open to learning and unafraid of the mantra that you either do it right or you do it over again until you have done it right.
forgetfreeman
Code compliance is not a prerequisite for selling a property with a structure on it, and it isn't a guarantee that you can't get the structure insured. If it was you'd never be able to get homeowner's insurance on older homes.
zdragnar
This depends heavily on where you live. I bought a house in a city with a realtor who was fairly new and didn't realize the city mandated inspections upon sale. When I tried to sell the same house a few years later, the buyer's agent did know about it, and when the city came out, they required several updates to the electrical wiring in the garage and to replace an old-style gas valve that had fallen out of code.
mmooss
I expect older homes are grandparented into code approval?
elif
It is for mortgages
taeric
What? Regulations are in place whether you buy or do the work yourself.
xnx
In a consumerist society, decreasing consumption is a radical act. Saying something against advertisers is tantamount to hate speech on social media.
m463
Sometimes it's also nonsense. Keeping an old energy-hungry 50's refrigerator or driving a 25mpg volkswagon beetle doesn't add up.
from-nibly
If you also drive less the beetle does make perfect sense. Especially when the car is paid off and you fix it yourself.
The fridge may or may not make sense depending on bow long you think your new fridge will go until it fails. Having to buy a new fridge is expensive.
m463
the fridge might be a stronger argument. It's like trying to mine bitcoin with a cpu.
s1artibartfast
Buying less is the ultimate control for inflation. In fact, price discrimination is necessary to control inflation.
kurthr
I'm frankly astounded at the difference in gas prices you'll see. At one point within 2 blocks there was a station selling $1.6 less, and it wasn't even crazy busy. The other station still had plenty of business.
The price difference isn't as large now that prices have come down, but it's $0.7, and both are still just as busy as before.
wakawaka28
Inflation is a separate variable that influences prices regardless of what any consumers think about prices. In the long run, if the money is in the system, it will be spent. Our perception of what constitutes a high price is largely dependent on the money supply.
blackeyeblitzar
We need this but for the government at local, state, and federal levels. The amount of spending and also just plain growth in number of public employees is outrageous, a big risk for the public, and also just disrespectful of taxpayers whose hard earned money is wasted.
Ekaros
Somehow a guy who is trying to do something like that is very hated here...
alephnerd
> Rachel Holdsworth, a part-time nurse and stay-at-home mom, came across no-buy videos around the holidays. Holdsworth wanted to pay off her family’s $10,000 credit-card debt. The 28-year old and her husband, Macy, also wanted to stop living paycheck to paycheck
How do you get $10k in credit card debt?!?
I've gotten up to $4k at one point, but I was using my credit card to pay my college's tuition payment plan.
> Marissa Huertas-Crespo, a 25-year-old financial analyst has done what she calls “low buys” over several years. Whenever she sees something she likes, she takes a screenshot of the item, puts it in a folder on her computer and—at the end of each month—deletes anything she hasn’t thought about. At the end of every quarter, she’ll allow herself to buy something from this folder with money she set aside in a savings account.
That's a smart strategy.
floatrock
A single medical diagnosis or accident could easily do that.
dmd
The average American credit card debt is around $8000. https://www.lendingtree.com/credit-cards/study/credit-card-d...
elif
Try having a family and you can get some of those 10k bills in a single month.
alephnerd
Good point. Haven't hit that milestone yet so didn't consider that.
randall
i started a startup on a credit card.
Sometime in my late twenties I decided my quality of life is good enough, and to not buy fancier stuff. A decade later I still live in the same type of home, drive the same class of car, and eat the same type of food. Inflation made my expenses higher, but my wages have increased more. Living below my means has reduced stress to a degree I couldn’t imagine. When the tech layoffs came, I didn’t stress out because I could go 2-3 years without a paycheck and not miss a bill. When I need to cover a major expense such as AC replacement or urgent air travel I just have cash to cover it.
While my peers might take fancier vacations or drive nicer cars, I wouldn’t trade. I have a confidence in finical stability, and I focus on things that really matter to me.