Tag Archives: real estate

Surreal estate

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Warmer weather has finally arrived in western Montana. This can be a bit misleading because Ma Nature has a habit of giving us a couple weeks of summer-like weather to lull us into letting our guard down and then … wham!…donkey-punches us with snow and arctic cold. Sort like kicking someone in the cajones as you walk out the door.

This winter was a pretty long one. I’m looking forward to doing more bike rising, spending time at the range, and possibly looking at real estate. That’s one problem with shopping for real estate in Montana – for almost half the year its under a blanket of white and inaccessible without a snowmobile.

There’s a couple pieces of property I’m interested in going to look at. It’d be a tough swing to put the money together but I can get about ½ of it together without too much pain, it’s the other half that’s a concern. I have a fully paid for house, but after what I had to go through to get it that way I am absolutely loathe to borrow against it.

The owner of the property is willing to carry the note but at an interest rate that I think is a bit much, and, as I understand it, when you engage in those sorts of deals the actual ownership of the property remains with the seller until such time as the terms have been met. Which means if he gets drunk, slams into a school bus, gets sued, and people come after his assets that means I’m frozen out as the land, still being in his name, gets sold to mee the judgement. Or perhaps I have that all wrong, I need to investigate it.

But, as Will Rogers said, “Buy land. They ain’t making any more of the stuff.” It’d be nice to have forty acres to hide in. Of course, I’d have to do some creative means of keeping the ownership information private…but one step at a time, y’know? First thing is to get the money together and buy the bloody thing. Hopefully if the weather is still good in a week or two I’ll go out driving in the boonies and take a look around at some of the prospects.

Waiting on bubbles to burst

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Well, it’s September which is not really the actual beginning of fall but for me it’s definitely a benchmark that it’s time to get out the Filson, but away the summer gear, and make darn sure the winter gear modules are ready for the vehicle and the Bag O’ Tricks(tm).

I’ve been wanting to purchase a chunk o’ land somewhere and have been keeping my eyes open, as well as being rather aggressive in my investing. Thanks to some reckless disregard and a whole lot of covered calls I’ve hit my goals for my real estate fund a tad early. I was talking to someone the other day about when to buy and I mentioned that I thought the current super-hot market couldn’t last forever and I wanted to be in a position to take advantage of it when it eventually cooled/burst. I speculated that when the feds finally raise interest rates and mortgage rates go back up, the housing market will slump a bit. He opined that he agreed with that but he had another take on things that I found fascinating.

He thought that as the eviction moratoriums come to an end, and recalcitrant ‘tenants’ are finally shown the door, fed-up landlords and people who had been meaning to sell their properties will flood the market with houses, driving the prices back down and perhaps ‘bursting’ the current housing bubble. An interesting thought. Regardless of the cause, at some point the prices will eventually ‘adjust’ downwards and I hope to be there, cash in hand, ready to put Rancho Ballistica aka Commander Zero’s Post Nuclear Bunker O’ Love And Lingerie Proving Ground into reality.

 

Skipping the gun show

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“I foresee terrible trouble and I stay here just the same” – Steely Dan

There was a gun show in Hamilton last weekend and…I didnt go. I thought about going but it would be $20 in gas, another $10 for lunch, and then whatever I spent on overpriced panic-driven stuf. And, this is the key part, I didnt really need anything. I mean, really, as far as gun stuff go I’m just gilding the lily at this point. The only thing I need is a scope for my .338 Lapua (leaning towards this one, by the way) and that’s really about it. :::shrug::: I’ve had thirty years to get my gun buying needs satisfied…at some point I was gonna hit the “I think I’m okay” stage. So why piss away thirty bucks I could use for other purposes?

Certainly there are small non-gun things I’d like to get..a few more LED MagLites, some more gas cans, that sort of thing. But…nothing hits the ‘urgent’ chord.

And, somewhat, this carries over to a few other things as well. Food, med stuff, fuel, etc. In fact, so many things are ‘in the green’ that I’m really just focusing the majority of my efforts on the financial stuff. By the end of next year I need to have enough money in the bank to buy a chunk of nowhere. As a result, between now and 12/31/22 most of the financial resources that have been going into guns, ammo, and food will be going into saving and investing.

No, this isn’t going to transform the blog into some sort of financial blog. (Although, to be fair, I’ve been reading a few of those on and off for the last year.) It just means that I’ll probably cut the posts about gun buying by a large percentage and there’ll be more posts about the more mundane things in the wide world of preparedness. And, really, who needs financial advice beyond “spend less than you make, save and invest, think before you buy, contemplate the future”?

The Free Money Machine in DC seems to be in overdrive as it pays people to underachieve and that’s gotta have some consequences somewhere. The music hasn’t stopped yet, but it’s slowing down. Folks would be smart to spend a couple hours in a quiet room with a notebook, pen, and start making lists and have an honest reckoning with themselves about what they need to do to come out the other side of things in one piece. But, really, thats good advice any time.

So, for now, the vast majority of my ‘prepping’ is getting money in the bank, into investments, and hitting WinCo/CostCo every weekend to keep things topped off. And, of course, keep a weather eye on the news. As convoluted, biased, and ‘steered’ as the news is, it’s still worth paying attention to…at least, as long as you get the same story from at least three disparate sources. As the saying goes, theres three sides to every argument – your side, their side, and the truth. I’m not a news junkie but I always check the news first thing in the morning after I power up.

Whether its a straight-up LARPing of the Carter years, or if its a more Fabianistic approach to Directive 10-289, the solid bet is that four years from now things are going to look a good bit different than they do today. Reagan famously asked “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” and I suspect that in 2024 the answer will, for most of us, be a pretty strong “No”.

By the by, if, like me, you occasionally have lapses of discipline and you ‘fall off the wagon’ in terms of keeping up with your preparedness, I highly recommend reading this book. It is, of course, fiction but it isn’t hard to see yourself in some of the situations outlined in the book. Every time I read it I feel like taking the day off and doing nothing but loading up my truck with food, gas, gold, ammo, and heading for a quiet place to raise chickens and vegetables while the world eats itself. Good read.

Tiny house? Nah…tiny *bunker*

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I understand the appeal, a bit, of the whole ‘tiny house’ thing. You’re small enough to be exempt from many building codes, there’s a modicum of portability, it has an “I’m a minimalist’ vibe, and it’s usually cheaper than a real house. Downsides, of course, are the enormous lack of storage, plumbing is often not much better than what you’d get in an RV, and it’s not something that I can imagine anyone wanting to live in full-time. It’d be like a nicely appointed jail cell.

However…I can see an appeal where a hardened, fortified tiny house might make a nice little bolt-hole. Small enough to hide nestled in the gully or trees of a remote piece of property, but ‘full service’ enough to get you back on your feet after two weeks of hoofing it with just the clothes on your back across the post-apocalypse landscape. It would be a …tiny bunker?

Ok, let’s throw ‘tiny bunker’ into google and see what we get.

I suppose it depends on your definition of bunker, but a nice little fortified ‘cabin’ of tiny-house proportions tucked away somewhere unobtrusively might make a very nice fallback plan for when you have to beat feet.After all, if you have to flee for your lives to your Beta Site you really arent going to care that it’s only a hundred or so sq. ft. All youre gonna care about is that it has lights, food, weapons, meds, comms, and distance.

Given the ‘OMG this is it!’ attitude going on right now, I bet a ‘tiny bunker’ manufacturer could easily make quite a splash in the tiny house marketplace which has lost its luster as people realize it isn’t the minimallist panacea they thought it was.

 

 

 

Harder homes and gardens

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I’ve always liked the idea of a little cabin that, while looking rather unassuming and generic, is actually made of a highly resilient material like concrete. I’ve always been fascinated with this product made here in Montana. But, sometimes, for non-residential uses such as secure storage, you don’t really need a nice appearance. And while I have seen plenty of thick-walled concrete structures, the roof is always the weak spot. It seems like you never see a non-flat concrete roof. So, I was surprised to see this in my travels today:

Its a concrete building, about the size of a small cabin, that is used by a local utility for some purpose. But what catches my attention is that the roof is a big slab of concrete. Many concrete structures don’t have concrete roofs…making the roof the weak spot. This baby, however, is delightfully 100% concrete. Forest fires are no problem around this thing.

My use? If I had a place out in the sticks, I’d love to have a place like this as my ‘shed’ where I’d keep my goodies. Trick it out with a more reinfoced entryway (or, better, a hidden tunnel access) and I’d feel pretty happy knowing my stuff was secure.

For a more stylish look, theyre doing amazing things with concrete panles and pouring these days. This one is one of my favorites.

But, for now, I’d settle for a nice chunk of middle of nowhere with a nice concrete building on it like the one shown above. Gotta keep playing that Powerball.

 

Article – Nuclear missile bunker: yours for less than $400k

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One local newspaper described the sales listing, with calculated understatement, as a “mid-century fixer-upper”: an underground bunker built to withstand a nuclear attack, and to house the fire power to retaliate.

The decommissioned nuclear silo in southern Arizona was once home to the Titan II, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile deployed by the US Air Force.

Yawn..another article about a flooded missile base being up for sale, right? True enough. But the 3D virtual tour is utterly fascinating. Highly recommend. It’s like a video game.

I’m still rather partial to the old decommissioned long-line microwave relay stations that dot the US. I looked at one in Whitehall years ago and it was a nice, unassuming little bunker with some serious muscle to it. Ah well…a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else whats a heaven for?

Surreal estate

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You know, when youre a survivalist shopping for a chunk of property, there are certain words or phrases in the listing that jump out at you and make you think “hmmm…that might be just the place I need”. You know, phrases like “year round spring”, or “bordered by National Forest”, that sort of thing. Or, how about the phrase “Local lore claims that there are many hidden bunkers on the property holding the needed provisions to protect and support the members of the group. Current owners know of one bunker, have never looked for more.”

Ok, color me interested.

Backstory: about twentyfive years ago there was a happy little religious cult called the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT) that wound up becoming newsworthy when the feds raided one of their properties and basically found them to be building bunkers and stoking them with some rather serious (but mostly legal) firepower. I forget what the original issue was. Anyway, once the leader of the church moved on the whole thing sorta fell by the wayside and, as far as I know, is now just a handful of believers scattered here and there.

Apparently one of their “Strongholds” is for sale.

121.76 ACRES OF HIGH BITTERROOT MOUNTAIN VALLEY, CLOSE TO IDAHO BORDER. SURROUNDED BY FOREST SERVICE; 2+ M. OF CREEK RUNS THROUGH IT! PREVIOUSLY PURCHASED AS THE ‘FINAL HOLD POSITION’ property of the religious sect CHURCH UNIVERSAL AND TRIUMPHANT (“CUT”).

I’ve seen pictures of some of CUT’s bunkers and shelters before. The ones I saw are not the least bit amateurish. At the height of their membership they had the money to throw around. (I remember the news article with ATF pointing out the Barret 82A1’s they had…. not cheap guns.)

I’d imagine the biggest drawback to a property like this is that if the apocalypse does occur, members of the church my come back to claim it. That could be…inconvenient.

Don’t kid yourself, properties with bunkers (and, in some cases, tunnel systems) are not unheard of out here. They’re just usually pretty low profile…but they are out there. A thousand years from now archaeologists will have a hell of a time wondering what sort of civilization ritually buried weapons in plastic tubes.

Link – https://intershelter.com/

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These look very interesting. A couple things jump out at me. First, these seem like they’d be an interesting way to dump a small, easily concealed ‘cabin’ on a piece of remote property. Additionally, since they’re pretty much a ‘kit house’ I’d imagine you can knock it down and transport it if you needed to.

Not sure how much stress the design can handle, but it’d be interesting to use it as a ‘form’ and shotcrete over it or something similar. Byrying it seems unwiae but it looks like it wouldn’t take much to build up some railroad tie berms around three sides of it to make it all but invisible.

Pricing seems reasonable…for about seven grand you can get something that beats being homeless. If a fella had a piece of undeveloped property out in the sticks, this might make a nice weekend cabin sort of thing to hunker down in while you build the primary residence.

Also might make for an interesting ‘dual purpose’ building…plant int on your property as a shed or storage building that can be refitted as temporary housing in a crisis.

As I said, very interesting. I’d like to see one up close.