So, I ABSOLUTELY know there's massive variation in this. Just want to get ahead of that.
What I'm looking for is...what do finances look like, casually, when you have a 100% paid off small (SMALL!) home. When a mortgage is out of the way, what's left to eat up your paycheck?
I suppose I'm looking for the sort of casual knowledge of expenses for this sort of life that your kids might pick up if they lived in your area with you in your home. En mass, pulled from multiple lemmy folks, so I can get an idea of general trends. I'm partial for info from the USA, but others reading this might appreciate statistics from other areas. :)
(People mistake how valuable this sort of "general idea" info is, I always see people going into the weeds on how every situation is different without bothering even giving a crappy signpost so I can see if I'm looking at a $5 expense or $500 or $5000. Knowing if something is going to be $5 or $5000 is very valuable, even if it's not some exact precise number. But I don't need to know if it's going to be exactly $392.29 if I wiggle my ears and tug my nose to get the right loophole, I just need to know that closer to $500 is correct, or whatever.)
I don't have family, so I missed out on "casual learning" opportunities, and don't have anyone to talk to IRL to get this info, so it's really hard to apply my city-living experience to try to extrapolate what life might be like if I make a goal to buy a small home in Nowheretown, USA to retire in 20 years down the line.
Anyway. So what do expenses look like if you have a small paid off house? What range do utilities run in for you (in your particular climate), what's home insurance like, what sort of unexpected expenses pop up when you own instead of rent?
What's utilities like for sewer and trash, especially? Those have always been rolled into my rent. Is rural internet still limited to DSL or satellite (or Starlink I guess these days), or has better infrastructure been rolled out in places over the past 20 years since I last looked for this info?
Edit: Also...talk to me about well water and well expenses, and septic tanks instead of sewer lines, and oil heating. I promise I'll listen!
Edit 2: Also talk to me about how propane works.
Thanks everyone. :)
I'm personally in a small 3 bed 2 bath single family house in MN. The place looks like a crack den on the outside but the inside is cozy enough. It's not even rural, it's technically in a "minor metropolitan area" (aprox 70,000 population).
I pay about $950 per month for mortgage, taxes, and insurance. (It's all in escrow so IDK what they are individually off the top of my head). I pay about $120 per moth for 100GB down 20Gb up internet. I pay on average about $200 per month for electricity (more in summer less in winter). My water and trash are a basically just a rounding error alongside the rest (less than $100 per month combined).
As far as unexpected expenses go, the big ones are furnace and water heater. I had an emergency furnace repair last winter and that put me back like $500 despite the issue just being a bad gas valve and him having to do all of 5 minutes of troubleshooting because I had identified the exact issue prior to the tech showing up. If you can do your own work then you can mitigate these costs quite a bit but generally you're best off having like $5,000 laying around in case of any emergency issues not covered by insurance.
When it comes to more rural my dad lives not far from me and he has a well and septic tank. Both are nearly 2 decades old and have not needed any maintenance other than getting the septic tank pumped every few years which costs about $300. Well expenses are just maintenance costs (like I said his hasn't needed any in nearly 20 years) and the electricity cost for pumping the water which is negligible. Regular water testing is also generally recommended but generally speaking if the water starts out fine then it will stay fine unless something major happens in the area. He only heats his garrage via oil but it's really not too much different from other methods. Generally you will pay a company that fills your tank at regular intervals and they'll just bill you for how much they have to put in. So it winds up being much larger payments but you also only make them once or twice per year.
I have some relatives who are really out in the boonies and their internet is really garbage but they could also probably get better internet via satellite and I'm not sure how that works. If you're really remote like that you will also want things setup like backup generators and you will need to know how to do your own emergency maintenance because sometimes you just can't make emergency service calls. You also need equipment to manage your land, most of those relatives have at least a tractor with a bucket and blade attachment. You will also need a vehicle that can handle unmaintained roads especially in areas that get heavy snowfall.