The Best Tips Building a Home on a Budget
Building a home is the goal of many. Dreams are achievable even when the budget available is limited. In this encouraging how-to guide, you will learn some tips about home construction with limited resources. Building a home on a budget can be fun as long as you allow plenty of time for the process.
Tips To Build a Home On a Budget
Every new construction project starts with an idea. Ideas are free. Just start searching on the Internet for things you like. It helps if you grab photos, print them, and make a Wonder Wall, as in, “I wonder how long it will take me to build that house in the photos?”
Don’t be shy about putting up photos of something outrageous. Even a multi-million-dollar mansion can be built one room at a time. Maybe you cannot afford a vast living room with ocean views, but you can afford a new sunroom with views of your tropical garden and koi fish pond.
In other words, dream homes are about your feelings. Making your dream come true is about having the satisfaction of enjoying your new space that started with your first thought about it. Some have told me, “You are out of your mind” to think this way. I thank them for the compliment. Everything I have came out of my mind. Everything was first a thought. People with my attitude know how to turn a clever thought into a wonderful thing.
First Step: Start with a budget of your current living expenses. Add a new item to the budget called “My New Home.” Calculate 10% of your monthly income (take-home pay and all other income) and allocate that to the category of My New Home.
Now, use the Budgetry online tool that is part of the wealth-builder Goalry Mall system. Find the expenses that you can cut to place 10% in your My New Home fund.
Don’t give me the knee-jerk reaction of “I can’t lower any of my expenses.” That is complete B.S. When people cannot access their funds or get any money, they cannot spend anything in an emergency. They must do with less. Force yourself to do with less as if you are in an emergency as one way to collect funds that you can use for your new home.
Make a Plan for Frustration
Very few get a new home of any kind without, at some point, being frustrated by the process. Frustration is a common emotional reaction to the challenges of construction. The first time you hit your thumb with a hammer as a kid is when all this frustration started.
As you work on your new home, the frustration levels will likely rise to a maximum. You might even make the mistake of lashing out to attack a significant because of the frustration or throw up your hands and give up in disgust.
Because you now know that you will face frustration ahead of time, this is the time to plan how you will deal with it. My construction buddy said when you feel you are ready to blow, it is time to go. Implied in this catchphrase was to go off the job site to calm down.
Ways To Save Money
If you spend wisely, there are ways to save money without sacrificing quality and still get what you want.
A 24-karat gold-plated fixture in your master bathroom’s sink may be out of reach, but an elegant frame for the vanity mirror, painted gold, is not. Remember, it is about feelings. If you want a “gold” feeling, seeing yourself surrounded by it when you look in the mirror is a better way to accomplish this than wasting money on the precious metal for the turning knobs to wash your hands.
Here are some other ways to save money:
- Fixer-Upper
- Scavenge
- Recycled Building Materials
- Pre-Fab
- Manufactured Homes
- Steel vs. Lumber Framing
- Natural Materials
- Alternative Materials
- Multifamily
- Caretaking
Fixer-Upper
Instead of starting with raw land, you can buy a fixer-upper home and remodel it. Many people make this work their full-time careers. If you do not have construction skills, partner with someone who has those skills. Then, your job will focus on getting the best prices for the building materials and helping finance the construction project.
To get an idea of what is possible, search the Internet for before and after photos of properties that were run down and then completely remodeled. You will be amazed at some of the miraculous transformations of a crappy house into a designer home.
Scavenge
Always be on the lookout for things to use and repurpose. Don’t be too shy to ask people if you need something they have and they don’t want.
You might want to form a non-profit foundation and register it as a 501 (c) (3) for a few hundred dollars. If the IRS approves your application, you might be able to tell people the value of what they donate to your project may be tax-deductible. Check with a tax adviser to make sure you can comply with all the legal requirements.
Habitat for Humanity is a famous example of a charity that helps people build houses and improve houses. For the people who live in these homes, these are their dream homes. The charity sells donated goods that are not used for home construction through their Habitat ReStore.
Keep your eyes open for opportunities when you drive around. I once saw a massive pile of what looked like a new carpet being taken out of a fancy hotel and thrown into dumpsters. I immediately parked and went inside the hotel to talk with the manager.
The situation was that the hotel owner hated the pattern of the new carpet recently installed in the lobby. The owner forced the manager to rip it up and throw it out. I asked him if he would mind if I took it. He said he would be thankful because the dumpsters were annoying the guests Each one cost money to sit there while they filled them up. On that day, I got about $7,000 worth of brand-new carpet for free, and I absolutely loved the pattern that it had.
Recycled Building Materials
Before buying construction materials in new condition, be sure to search for cheaper, recycled building materials. One of my favorite things to buy this way is glass. If I want sunlight to come through a wall, I use small glass windows placed strategically to catch the angle of the sunlight at different times of the year. For example, to bring in the morning sunlight during winter. These small decorative windows can be very costly. Instead of buying them, I find recycled glass that I cut to make triple pane windows with simple handmade wooden frames.
Pre-Fab
There is no need to build from scratch if you can get many parts of your home already made. My favorite example of these solutions is the pre-fab concrete wall that is good for perimeter security and nicely finished. There are, for example, “rock” walls that are made completely out of molded concrete. The cost of using real rocks to make a wall is prohibitive. These pre-fab walls come in segments. To install them takes offloading from a flatbed truck with its crane into prepared channels in the ground. They connect so quickly and easily that you can do many large sections in one day.
Manufactured Homes
Manufactured homes include the typical cheesy-looking mobile home that I hate. Don’t ask me to live in a double-wide if you want me to be happy. On the other hand, some absolutely beautiful manufactured homes exist. They do not look like something you would find in a cheap trailer park.
Hot Tip: You can use the tools found in the Goalry Mall to manage your debts with Debtry and learn how to get your credit repaired using Creditry and get recommendations on how to find sources for financing your manufactured home with the Loanry advice system.
Deal with Your Money Step By Step.
Join Budgetry.
Steel vs. Lumber Framing
When most builders think of framing a house, they think of “stick” framing. The traditional style of building the frame out of wood uses two-by-fours and other common wood sizes. Recent prices for lumber have gone up so dramatically that housing prices have to rise accordingly.
An alternative material to use for framing a house is steel. Steel framing has many advantages compared to lumber in that it is pest-proof and can be produced in a factory to create all the pieces needed in the exact dimensions. Then, when the parts arrive at the job site, it is like putting together an organized kit of interlocking steel framing pieces.
Steel is good for many parts of the country but not suitable for coastal regions due to the potential corrosion from the salt in the air. Steel may still work in those areas. However, it needs careful installation to avoid water vapor effects.
When you get ready to build, be sure to compare the cost of steel to wood framing to determine the better value.
Natural Materials
One of my friends, Mike Reynolds, makes Earthship homes in Taos, New Mexico, out of old tires filled with rammed earth. Most of the building materials he uses are low-cost or free, although it takes quite a bit of work to smash dirt into an old tire.
The nice thing about making walls of old tires filled with dirt is that they are very thick. They provide excellent insulation to keep out the cold in winter and the heat in summer. These Earthship homes are environmentally sustainable. They can be very simple homes or large multi-million-dollar custom homes. The walls can have beautiful finishes with no visible evidence that there are old tires inside.
Building a home partially underground or into the rock are other novel ways to save money. Consider where the house will be placed and investigate what natural resources may be available to repurpose for your home construction.
Alternative Materials
Foamcrete is an example of an alternative building material. Adding foam to regular concrete makes it lighter while still retaining most of its strength. Foamcrete application is by pumping or spraying, so it is very efficient to use this material. It is especially useful for creating rounded surfaces and domes.
Multifamily
There may be considerable savings in building a multifamily project instead of a single-family home. Much of the costly infrastructure, such as installing utilities to service the property, is sharable between two or more residential units built at the same time. Multifamily construction projects are popular for this reason. Moreover, having a shared common wall or other amenities reduces some of the construction expenses.
You can build a duplex. Live in one unit and rent out the other one to help cover the mortgage cost. Millennials are fond of “hacking” a home. This technique divides a house into smaller rentable pieces. It is possible to have roommates to help pay for the home.
If you are a people person, you can live in a hacked home with a roommate, and if you price the individual portions of the place properly, you can live there for free.
Caretaking
For part of my career, when I was younger, I was a caretaker. I lived in beautiful homes, sometimes for extended periods, to take care of the place when the wealthy owners were away. I loved this experience because I was living in my dream home and getting paid to stay there. I enjoyed taking care of the property as if it was my own. I worked for wealthy people who always wanted their place to be immaculate.
The millions of dollars that wealthy people spend on keeping a home in perfect condition is hard to believe. These homes were one of many that they owned. They always had to be in excellent shape if the owners decided on a whim to stay there. I lived in a Beverley Hills home for two years with a staff of 23 people, and the owners never came to the house even once. Since I was the caretaker, I was the boss. To everyone else, it appeared that I was the owner.
I use this as the final example to show you how to think outside of the box and reinforce the idea that it is the feeling of your dream home you are after. Be sure you understand the difference between feeling good about living in a home and being burdened by it.
A multi-million-dollar home can feel like a prison cell if it represents your confinement and not your freedom. Think about how poor Britney Spears must feel, and you get a hint of what I mean.
Final Thoughts
I want to recommend one thing that will make your search for your dream home easier to accomplish. Try out some homes by renting them for a short period to see how it feels to live in them. One of my female friends told me she always dreamed of living in a log cabin. She had the money and wanted to build one.
I encouraged her to rent one for winter to see how it was to live in a log cabin in her area. She did, and she hated it. Getting wood to build a fire in the winter was a real pain. She did not like doing it. She learned what she thought was her dream home was not the same as a real home of that type. Instead, she built a small cabin on a lake that she uses as a getaway for the summer, and that matched her feelings perfectly.
No matter what you decide, be sure to check out the tools at the Goalry Mall to help you with your finances to support your dream of building your own home.