[Leonard D Neubache]

(01-13-2019 01:35 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  

(01-12-2019 10:32 PM)bigolteddies Wrote:  

...
What's your plan then where do you think the best places to be are?

The best retreat location will have as many of the following factors as possible.

1) Inside the town boundaries of a functional farming, fishing, mining or milling community that is not completely dead or on welfare.
2) At an increased elevation to any cities in the area, one of which you obviously work and live at.
3) Preferably above the snow line for short periods of the year.
4) Has access to a river or gravity-fed dam-based water source that is unlikely to be seriously contaminated by anyone upstream.
5) If not a farming or fishing village it needs to have a minimal population and good prospects for hunting.
6) Town/area population large enough to mount a serious resistance to outsiders but small enough not to have lost a sense of community.
7) Be within realistic hiking distance from the city you live in.
8) Either be populated by co-ethnics and/or people who can be convinced to recognize and welcome you.
9) Has several defensible geographical bottlenecks between itself and serious population centers.
10) Has several towns with similar qualities between itself and any serious population centers to acts as buffers for refugee drift.

I wanted to expand on this to go into what to look for in the retreat property itself instead of the location.

As always the first thing you want to decide is whether you're buying an investment property that will double as a retreat or whether you just want to buy a retreat property that will remain uninhabited when you're not there.

An uninhabited retreat makes the process more simple but obviously the drawback is that you're putting large amounts of money into something that doesn't provide a stream of revenue. Granted it's not like throwing money away on MREs that never get eaten. It's an asset that doesn't depreciate too much over time. But it's still sacrificing your investment capacity for the sake of survivalism which is something I generally advise against where it's reasonably avoidable.

A good way to manage the benefits and the drawbacks is to seek out a property that has a separate studio-type living quarters that remains your exclusive domain while the tenant lives in the house-proper. A fallback to that is simply to negotiate rights to keep and access a storage space on the property such as a shipping container or the garden shed. This will allow you to store your supplies and have a place to rough it after the bombs drop while the lease runs out or you make other arrangements.

That might sound like a real hassle but there are some hidden benefits. A good tenant will act as your own night-watchman for your supply cache and will also be tending to basic maintenance of the house and grounds. The happiest medium is to find a boring old widow who pays her rent on time and mostly keeps to herself. These are surprisingly common in regions like the ones I listed above. The women outlive the men by about ten years or so. It might be best to run the lease through an agency and give them their cut since the tyranny of distance will make life hard as a landlord. The local realtors also know the local old folks and will have a tendency to put trouble-free tenants on their rosters.

In a slow decline you can bail out of the city at your leisure and decline to renew the lease. You move in and that's that. In a swift decline you can arrive and crash out in the studio, shipping container or garden shed. The tenant is likely going to move in with their kids ASAP. I wouldn't concern myself overly with fears that you're going to be frozen out of your own property. Country folk are extreme sticklers for property rights.

The other option is to simply buy the property for your sole personal use. This denies you a revenue stream from your investment but it on the flip side it allows you to be an absolute scrooge in terms of what you settle for as "acceptable".

I've seen crap-shacks inside of town boundaries go for as little $60K AUD, the repayments on which would be a pittance as an investment property. Usually the drawbacks are that it needs serious work on the plumbing and the electrical and the phones lines etc but if you're buying it as a doomsday retreat then that stuff is suddenly far less relevant, giving you the power to negotiate a rock-bottom price without ever intending to fix it up.
Some of these old rural houses have hot water systems attached to wood fire heaters or wood fire kitchen stoves. If it's functional then this is a real bonus. You can negotiate a much lower price because normally using that stuff is an absolute pain in the ass but the reality is that this is precisely the kind of technology you actually want. Win/Win.

This outside-the-box thinking has it's limits. Check local regulations to make sure you're not going to be forced to fix any of this shit even though you don't need it. Other standards for the house will have to be met just as they normally would. Solid foundations. No termites. Roof is well sealed. Chimneys are in good, working condition as are wood-burning appliances. Plumbing is again a case-by-case question. After things get ugly the long-drop is going to make a big comeback and water will unlikely be something you wastefully blast out of a tap so if the plumbing is rubbish it's not the end of the world. Negotiate the price down accordingly and commit to fixing it or living with it.

As usual make sure the building has permits for all work done so you don't get hit with any orders to demolish or bring stuff up to industry standard.

This is the bargain basement option I'm giving here. As I've said already several times in the thread, it's not wise to mortgage your pre-disaster life preparing for something that may not happen on schedule or perhaps ever. A retreat of the kind just mentioned should not be viewed as a comfy mansion to ride out tough times. It should be viewed as a hell of a tent, which is a fuckload more than 99% of people will have when things go south.

In the meanwhile you can use it as a meditative retreat to get away from the noise of society. Have fun stashing supplies in the wallspaces and furniture. Just remember to lay down a shitload of rat poison where the neighbor's cats wont eat it.