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At Wine Enthusiast, we bring wine to life. Have you ever dreamed of paying off your mortgage? I know I'd sure like to get rid of mine. But what if you didn't have one in the first place? What if you figured out a way to get through your entire life without ever, ever having to take out a mortgage?

My guest today- and no, he didn't just rent. My guest today has done just that. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Josh Rasheeds. I thank you for being here. Today is Tuesday, October the 14th, 2014. 10, 14, 2014. Cool date. I am thrilled to bring you today's show, which is an interview with Rob Roy, who's written an entire book called "Mortgage Free." I think this is a very, very viable path to financial independence for many people.

Years ago, I was browsing around in the library and browsing around the finance section and the real estate section, two of my favorite sections, and I come across this book called "Mortgage Free." And obviously, with a title like that, how could I not pick it up? What I found in there was not the same old tired advice that I'd always read, but a very different approach to finance and a very different approach to housing.

And I read the book and really enjoyed it. And I went on and I've done a lot of research in some of the strategies that are espoused by it. Today, I am thrilled to bring you an interview with the author. His name is Rob Roy. He is an amazing guy.

He's got a really interesting story. And I think that this is one of those strategies, as he walks through in today's interview, he walks through exactly how he has successfully avoided having a mortgage his entire lifetime, and yet lived very well. I hope you enjoy. So Rob, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

I appreciate your being here this morning. Thanks for having me, John. So I've got to say, I've been excited to talk to you. And I read a lot of books, but ever since I read your book "Mortgage Free," I found it in the library a number of years ago, I always have come back to it as just a very inspiring book, because it seems like you've figured out in a modern era how to live in a somewhat abnormal and atypical manner.

How long have you been without a mortgage? Let's see. I've never had a mortgage. No, I've never had a mortgage. We had a land contract. We bought our land here in upstate New York on a land contract, which extended over a five-year period. And that's the nearest thing we've had to a mortgage.

Wow. And how old are you now? I'll be 68 soon. That's pretty impressive to be 68 years old in 2014 and never having had a mortgage. So how did you do it? What has been your story with home ownership? Well, it's kind of a long story. I actually moved to Scotland when I was about 19 years old and found an old stone cottage there that I was able to get for £1,200.

Actually, that's not right. It was £1,000. It was £1,000. That was $2,400 in those days. And Harold Wilson was the Labor Prime Minister at that time, and there was a government grant program where the government, on houses that required rehabilitation, the government would put in half the money and you would put in half the money.

So I actually used--I never went to college. I used college funds. My parents had laid by $8,000 or $10,000 for my college education, and I put in half the money. Harold Wilson put in half the money, and the end of that was I owned my own cottage in the north of Scotland.

Wow. It's a beautiful place today. It's worth over a quarter million dollars today, and we're still friends with the people who live in it now in the north of Scotland. Were you working there or just living there, or what did you do? Yeah, well, it was part of my second trip that I'd taken hitchhiking around the world back in the days when, gee, you could hitchhike right across Asia from Beirut, Lebanon, right through Damascus and Tehran, Baghdad and Tehran, right to Afghanistan.

It's been a wonderful week. Afghanistan was a wonderful country in those days. So, gee, it's like another world a lifetime ago. Wow. So you lived in Scotland, and then after that, then what? Well, I lived in Scotland for seven years. I met my wife, Jackie, while living in Scotland.

Her parents had retired to the north of Scotland, and we wanted to pursue a self-reliant lifestyle, which was a little bit difficult there because the government kind of looked after people from cradle to grave. I'm a great believer in Thoreau's philosophies, economic philosophies, and he said that the necessaries of life were food, fuel, shelter, and clothing.

Well, we were okay with shelter. We had a mortgage-free shelter. Clothing wasn't a big problem. Food was somewhat of a problem. We didn't think we could grow enough food on our one-tenth of an acre of land to survive on. Later we learned about French intensive raised-bed gardening, and now we realize we probably could have grown all the food we needed.

Fuel was a bit of a problem. We were in the middle of a 600-acre sheep farm, but there were hedgerows and major trees around between the fields, and the farmer allowed us to carry home the dead branches, drag them home, cut them up, and put them in the fireplace.

Well, our perimeter of getting this wood was getting larger and larger, and we were dragging these branches home a mile. So fuel and food seemed to be a bit of a problem. I still had my U.S. citizenship, so we thought we'd come here and look for land and pursue a homesteading lifestyle.

So we sold Mount Ridge Cottage--that was the place I'd done up-- and we sold it for $26,000, which was clean money because by this time, the conditions of the grant was that you not sell it within three years, which I did not. So I had the $26,000 as the grub stake for our homestead here in northern New York.

So you moved directly from Scotland to-- From Scotland. Well, the previous year we had done a land search. We'd bought an old Volkswagen camper van, traveled around the country, and the place we ended up with was here in Clinton County, up in the north of New York, almost to the Canadian border.

What was the criteria that made that upper New York the winner for you? Well, we liked the people, we liked the land form, we liked the price of land. Land was cheap here then, and it still is cheap here now. So that was critical. We were able to buy 64 acres, and actually the owner of the property gave us an option for another 180 acres at no cost.

And then we found that we put in an ad in Mother Earth News saying we found this land and we're looking for other like-minded people that wanted to pursue a self-reliant lifestyle. So we went back to Scotland for a year to finish up our affairs there, and we had over 100 people that we were corresponding with.

There was a big chart on the wall, and we'd correspond back and forth, and the chart was finally kind of self-eliminating down to about a dozen people, many of which met here on the land and several of which bought parcels from the same seller who had given us this option.

And most of those people are still here. So after 40 years, we still have--the original Murtaugh Hill community is still represented by at least one member of each couple that joined in. There were family breakups. Oftentimes the stress of building, for example, can put a real strain on a marriage.

But there's still one member of almost every couple still here. We have about 50 to 55 people still living here in Murtaugh Hill, which is quite good for an intentional community after 40 years. Did you set out originally with the desire to create a community, or was it after the property owner mentioned to you that the land was available, and you just said, "Well, maybe we'd like to live with some other like-minded people"?

It was on the back burner, because on our land search, we wound up in a place for a while called Weedy Rough. It was a community down in Arkansas, and we were there with our Volkswagen camper, and we got a job helping to build a log cabin for Joe Mayo of the Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis.

Really? Yeah. That's where we first heard about Cordwood Masonry, which we can talk about later. So we liked this community. We were there only about nine or ten days. We said, "Well, rather than try to go it alone and not have the support of like-minded people around you, let's see if we can form a community." Then it fell into place with this option on the land, and we said, "Well, we don't need this 180 acres, but other people can make use of it." That's when we put the positions and situations in Mother Earth News and started corresponding with people.

Others joined us within a year or two after that, and now we have second generation. Our son and other sons and daughters are living here in the hill in houses that they built themselves. There's a good chance it's going to be third generation soon. Wow. That's exciting. Yeah. How did you go about the actual process of building and developing the land without taking out a mortgage?

Well, we had our grub stake, which was the $26,000 from selling the cottage. Where does that word come from? Well, it's interesting. The word "grub stake"--grub was what a financier would put up for a stake in your holding. Say you were a gold prospector in Colorado in the 1840s or '50s.

You'd go to a financier who would provide the grub in exchange for a stake in your holding. The grub could be the food, the mule, the equipment, and they became a silent partner, and that was the grub stake. Now we use the word for the money or materials which are needed for an owner-built home.

You're going to need some amount of money. Some people have done it for remarkably little, but you're going to need some money. But people often overlook a good deal on materials or indigenous materials, materials that are there on the land. Wood, sand, stone, et cetera, can be a useful part of the building process.

So when you're looking for land, look at the potential for building of the indigenous materials that are on the land, too. But yes, you'll need a certain amount of a grub stake financially to get this whole thing going. In fact, I devote an entire chapter of Mortgage Free to the grub stake and procuring the grub stake.

So you started with the $26,000, and based upon that, how did you actually go around about building the property? What techniques did you use? Well, we bought the land-on-land contract, and I forget the exact price details of it, but it was something like 20% down and 20% a year for five years.

So I think we had -- oh, boy, I'm going back a long ways now. The original down payment was something in the nature of $5,000, something like that, $5,000 or $6,000, and then we'd pay a couple thousand dollars a year for the next five years plus interest on the unpaid balance, which was 6% in those days.

So that was part of our -- money went out. We also bought a brand-new Toyota pickup truck as the vehicle to build our house with, and the owner of the agency was trying to win a trip to Europe, so he gave us a really rock-bottom -- and he did, and he gave us a rock-bottom price of $3,100, so this was a brand-new Toyota pickup truck that we had for years, and that became our workhorse for building not only one but finally three houses here in Murtaugh Hill.

So that was another $3,000, and then we built our first house, Log N Cottage, for a total materials outlay for $6,000. Wow. So we still hadn't used up our $26,000, and then Jackie was also working as a registered nurse here in Plattsburgh, New York, near Plattsburgh, New York, so a little money was coming in as well.

Yes, so we built our first place for materials cost of $6,000, no labor cost, and that materials cost includes the excavation for the basement, and a basement is something I would never do again, but half our money went into the foundation and basement, and the other half went to the house that was above grade.

I look at things a little differently today, but that was our first place. Why would you not build a basement today? Well, I'd go the extra mile. If I'm thinking of a basement, I'd rather think beyond basement to what we call earth-sheltered space, and the difference between basement and earth-sheltered space is you've got to put a little extra money into things like good light, ventilation, insulation, waterproofness, all these good things.

Our second house, for example, was called Loggin Cave, and it was an earth-sheltered house where your earth burned right up to the east and west walls, the north wall, living roof right over the top, south-facing, solar gain, and now you've got a warm, dry, bright space instead of a dark, damp, dingy space.

The basement at Loggin Cottage, our first house, as I said, cost half the cost of the house, but it got less than 5% of the use of the space, and it was dark and damp and dingy. Loggin Cave, on the other hand, was a much more energy-efficient, warm, bright, dry place.

So think beyond the basement mindset. Think in terms of light, bright, airy, earth-sheltered space, and that's what we've been involved with ever since, this Cordwood Masonry and earth-sheltered housing. I want to explore some of those building design details with you in just a moment, but before I do, so in essence, as I understand the strategy that you lay out in Mortgage Free, my summary of it, is essentially commit yourself to saving a certain amount of money to build up your grub stake.

Then go and shop for a good deal on land and make sure that you purchase land in a place and in a way that will allow you to build on it yourself without having to--that will allow you to build on it yourself. And with the goal of using some of the building techniques that are a little bit easier to do on your own at a lower cost, and then build and develop your property slowly over time, doing the majority of the work yourself.

Is that a fair summary of the strategy? Boy, that's a great summary, yeah. I couldn't have said it better. I distilled your multi-hundred page book down into a couple of sentences. But one of the keys that I liked, however, is that you are focused not on using mainstream building methods, but on using--and this is what's challenging, because oftentimes building with the current building methods takes a great degree of skill and experience, and there is a substantial cost for materials because it's all specialty manufactured and produced.

But you're using some of the alternative techniques that are a little bit more natural, a little bit more easily done by yourself. And that's a core part of the strategy, basically, right? Mm-hmm. So you specialize in cordwood construction. But you've also--because I remember you wrote a book on-- I think it was timber framing, right?

So you have experience with other building methods. Yes. The timber framing book was called "Timber Framing for the Rest of Us," and it's different from traditional timber framing that goes back a thousand years, where you get the finely crafted mortise and tenon joints and wonderful craftsmanship and all. The timber framing that we practice is what most contractors, backyard builders, farmers do, which is actually using commonly available mechanical fasteners, such as heavy structural screws and Simpson fasteners and these sorts of things.

So it's strong. It's easy to do. It's not expensive. I haven't got the skill, the patience, the time, the money to go with traditional timber framing, so I just screw it up. Well played. I like it. So question. I'm 29 years old, and I have a one-year-old son and a wife, and I live in West Palm Beach, Florida, and we have a mortgage on our house.

And it's a very mainstream, traditional--I live in an older neighborhood-- but traditional suburbs right in the middle of the city. You did this back in--I guess it must have been the '70s or '80s. Is it still possible in 2014 to do what you did back then and pursue a mortgage-free lifestyle with this strategy?

Our son, Darren, who's 28 years old, is doing it right now as we're speaking. In fact, after this phone call, I'll be going over and helping him complete the last of his cordwood walls in his house. In fact, this last cordwood wall is mostly bottle ends. It's a shower cabinet with bottles to let the light in, but we're doing cordwood down low.

So that'll be the last panel of his 20-sided cordwood building completed today, and he'll be without a mortgage when the whole house clears. Wow. So, yes, it can still be done today. I don't know about West Palm Beach. It's world foreign to me. It's like another planet to me.

Costs, land costs, materials costs, availability of indigenous materials is so totally different in a place like that that I don't feel qualified to speak to it. There's certainly a lot of the economic philosophies. I mean, you started this conversation by saying that you'd get mortgage-free at the library. That's a great start.

That's where you should get the book. You shouldn't be spending $25 for a book to save money. You should get it at the library. So you've got the right mindset. Yeah, I've researched as many different strategies as possible before we purchased the house that we live in here, and I just came to the conclusion that it's simply not possible to do where I live in Palm Beach County, Florida, do more than anything to the building codes.

And so we live in hurricane building codes, basically, is the primary thing. And so these codes are very, very specific as to what is required to pass the hurricane codes. Right. Right. And so any kind of nontraditional structure, you know, there's no way for the engineer and the inspector to be able to come out and say, "Here, we're going to pass this structure." And just due to the nature of the regulation here locally, it's just astounding what you have to go through.

So I just came to the conclusion that it's just simply not possible. And I don't see any way, unless there's--I think, is it Houston or--it's not Dallas. It's one of the big Texas metro areas. I know it doesn't--has minimal building codes, but it seems like most of the urban areas, that's going to be the primary issue is getting around the government regulations.

Do you not have building codes where you are, or is it just-- There are building codes. They vary a great deal from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some towns or counties are much, much stricter than others here in northern New York. For example, our Murthah Hill Road is actually a town line road between two towns.

On one side of the road, they're quite strict, and the guy is with you every bit of the process from start to finish. On our side of the road, the building permit involves filling out a three-page, eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper, handing the guy $20 and never seeing him again in your life.

Wow. So it's totally, totally different. Now, it occurs to me in your situation that you've got an equity that you could use in the home that you've got in West Palm Beach, and maybe you could use that equity as a grub stake to find a place where land is cheap and building codes are more suitable, and maybe you have indigenous materials.

It depends whether people are in a job where they can relocate. And so many people are now. My wife, Jackie, she's a registered nurse. She can work anywhere. A lot of people working in computers or maybe in the radio industry, you can do your job from anywhere. I don't know.

But people that can relocate can take advantage of a grub stake derived from an artificially high value in West Palm Beach and put that in a place like northern Maine, Wisconsin, or New York for cheap land. Right. Yeah. We definitely could do that. The reason we live in West Palm Beach where we live is because of the community of friends and family and church and the community that we're a part of.

And so I just simply have made the decision to, with a good attitude, do all I can to live as intelligently as possible where I live. And we've got a really great setup. We've got about a half acre of land, but it's right in the middle of the city.

We can walk to the grocery store. We can walk to the library. We can walk to all these things. They're all within about half a mile of our house. But we live in kind of this tucked away quieter part of town that many people don't know exists. And so I'm just working with the property that I have to try to increase it, to try to homestead it in a way.

Yeah, I think that's great. And so I'm trying to do my best to work on the energy efficiency of the problem, to be more self-reliant, to get some food production into the backyard. And it's just a lot of work. It takes a lot of time. Well, a half acre is a substantial amount of property for growing food.

Jackie and I have been involved lately in what we call raised beds. These are raised beds. We're in our late 60s, so we like to work at 32 inches off the ground instead of getting right down on the ground itself. So I've been building these raised beds, which we like a lot.

And you can grow it with the French intensive raised bed gardening method. You can pack an awful lot of stuff in these a few square feet. Tell me about cordwood masonry. What is it, and why did you go to it? What advantages does it bring over other building methods?

Well, cordwood masonry is the building of a substantial wall, a thick wall, of short logs called log ends. And these log ends are laid transversely in the wall, much like a rank of firewood is stacked. What gives it the exceptional thermal characteristics is that the mortar joint is not continuous through the wall.

There's an insulated space between the inner mortar joint and the outer mortar joint. So as you approach the wall, it looks like a cross between a stone wall and a stack of wood. It has the appearance of stone masonry, but when you get up close, you see that it's not stone.

It's log ends that you're looking at. But the mortar joint doesn't go all the way through the wall. If it did, it would conduct heat or cool, if you like, conduct the cold, the same as conducting heat, through the wall. And you'd be bleeding the heat out of the house in North Country winter.

So the insulated space allows you to keep it warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and the house stays a good steady temperature. There's so much mass, particularly in the inner mortar joint, that it takes a long time for the internal temperature to change. So the net effect is insulation is one thing, and it's important, but thermal mass is equally important, and the juxtaposition of insulation and thermal mass is critically important.

So here we've got the thermal mass on the correct side of the insulation where we can control the temperature of it. We can control its heat. We can control its coolth. Coolth is my word for heat at a lower temperature. So the house is a nice steady temperature. Up here we build walls 16 inches thick.

In Canada they build them anywhere from 18 to 24 inches thick, the walls. Do you also incorporate solar design into your house as well? Oh, yes. I can't imagine why anybody would not do that, given an opportunity, providing they haven't got a high rise in front of them stopping the solar gain.

Interestingly, in some parts of the South, like Mississippi, Alabama, and these places, it actually makes more sense to orientate the house north because cooling is the more important energy consideration. But here in the north, we're wanting to take advantage of the sun, and so we orientate the house in a generally southerly direction.

It can be a little bit west of south to get even more solar gain. But we also earth-shelter the house. So our house is a large, round, corded masonry house. Sixty percent of the walls are corded masonry. The other 40 percent are earth-sheltered, and that 40 percent which is earth-sheltered, and this is what's different from a basement, is on the north side.

The walls are waterproofed and insulated on the exterior, so I can control the temperature of the mass fabric of the walls in our earth-sheltered space. So it's tantamount that we're building the house in South Carolina instead of northern New York in terms of the climate from which we're beginning to heat and cool it.

Wow. Is cordwood most appropriate for a certain climate? It's been used in all climates. I've seen it in Belize, for example, in Hawaii, Big Island, Hawaii. It's in the south. In my book, Corded Building, there's one chapter written by a guy in West Columbia, Texas. There's some nice ones just over the Florida line in Georgia.

Back in Florida, back in the '30s, there were these cookie houses, they were called, and they were built of things like swamp cabbage and pine that were corded houses, basically, and there's still one that's kind of a museum somewhere. Don't ask me where because I can't remember, but these cookie houses were popular in Florida in the '30s.

But, yes, they're still built in the south. Most of them are built in the north, however. Wisconsin is certainly the hotbed of corded masonry construction, but there's a lot of it throughout Canada, from British Columbia right through to the eastern provinces, a lot in Ontario and Quebec, for example.

New York has quite a few, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina is pretty popular. If you were trying to set out to build a house where you were strongly focused on energy efficiency and you were doing a survey of some of the--I don't know what to call them, I don't like calling them alternative building methods.

Green building, maybe. Okay, so green building methods, so whether that's you're looking at--and you would know more of these than I would, but you're looking at cordwood, you're looking at straw bale construction, you're looking at--I don't know what it would be--rammed earth, you're looking at cob. How would you--could you give a survey, because you know far more about this than I do.

Could you give a survey of some of the green building methods that are available and some of just the advantages, disadvantages, how somebody would look at them and start to sort through which ones might be helpful and appropriate for them? Well, first and foremost, I think you've got to go back to the basic adage of build with what you've got.

You don't want to be sending for materials 1,500 miles away to get perfectly good materials that you can build with yourself nearby. For example, a straw bale doesn't make too much sense for us because we have to go hundreds of miles to get the appropriate straw bales, but we can get any God's amount of cedar cordwood here that we can use.

Same if somebody's out in the Kansas wheat field, maybe the straw bale's going to make more sense to them than the cordwood. Cob is where you make walls of sand, clay, and chop straw as reinforcing binder. But if you haven't got a good source of pure clay, because it's about 20% clay, then cob is not an option for you.

For us, for example, we had to go quite a few miles away to get enough cob just to build a small cordwood panel with cordwood and cob as an experiment. So cob is not a good option for us either. We just got back from Maine, Jackie and I. We went up to the Common Ground Fair up there and we did a cordwood workshop.

And gee, as far as you can see, there's good appropriate wood for a horizontal log home, if you want, or a cordwood masonry building. So again, use what you've got. And your land may yield what you need. You mentioned rammed earth, and then there's also sandbags that you can fill.

Gee, you could build a house on the moon if you brought plastic bags that you could fill with the sand that was on the moon. So that's your primary design consideration then, is what's available around you, what can you harvest locally so that you don't need to bring in the cost, and also so that you're building in a locally appropriate manner.

That's right. It really does bother me, because I've traveled a lot across the country, and it just seems a little silly to me that if you -- I just got back from Colorado a couple months ago, and I just actually last month drove across the country. And if you go throughout the U.S., I mean, the construction styles look almost identical.

You drive through a suburban development in Florida, and it's practically identical to a suburban development in Denver, and it's practically identical to a suburban development in Pennsylvania. Maybe a few architectural differences. I noticed in Pennsylvania there's a much greater emphasis on the craftsman style, and then you come through the south, and you see the plantation style a little bit more, and then here where I live, there's much more of the Spanish influence.

But practically speaking, there's little consideration given to the design, designing for the climate, and that frustrates me, because it doesn't make any sense to me that a house in Florida should look identical to a house in Maine. And so maybe some of these kinds of -- maybe that is -- I hadn't really considered that as being a primary design characteristic as far as materials, but that makes sense to me.

Well, you're also talking about, I think, you're looking at neighborhood kind of housing developments where a contractor is building dozens of the same kind of things. So he's looking for something that he can assembly line, that his crew is used to doing. Each one might be a little bit different.

Sometimes they're not very much different, but sometimes a properly built subdivision will have -- each house will be a little bit different, which is nice. But they're using techniques that the tradesmen are used to doing. You mentioned that these same types of houses are found all over the country.

I submit they're found all over the world. And you also mentioned the differences of some of the older styles, like your Spanish influence. Obviously, if you go to the southwest in Taos, New Mexico, you're going to see influence of adobe and these sorts of things. But the basic -- certainly 90% of the houses built in this country are very, very similar.

The one size doesn't fit all either. Simple thing like orientation, which direction the house faces. We have a town near us with a planning ordinance, not a building code, but a planning ordinance that says the house must be built parallel to the road. Now, wait a minute. Which direction is this road facing?

A town with a regulation like that could be costing these people 30 to 40% more in energy cost if they build their house "parallel to the road." So I build them round, and they're parallel to the road no matter which way it runs. You touched on energy costs, and that's exactly where I was going to go next.

How much does your home, the current one you're living in, how much does it cost you on whatever basis you track it annually to provide for your utilities, for your water, for your electricity, things like that in northern New York? Well, that one I can't answer because we deal with it every year, every year.

We buy most of our firewood now. As I said, I'm in my late 60s. I do derive some firewood from improving the forest, cutting down the dead trees, bringing them home, just like we were doing in Scotland 40 years ago, dragging over dead branches and cutting them up. We still do that.

But I buy probably 80, 90% of my firewood, and it costs me, this year it's going to cost me $840 for my firewood to heat this place through the winter. So that's my total heating cost is $840. Wow. And that's high. When I was doing more of it myself, and the firewood price has gone up a little bit, but for years and years we were averaging $300 to $500 a year for firewood.

And that's our sole heating plus what we get through the windows for solar gain. Remember that by earth-sheltering it, we're putting it in a more favorable ambient temperature from which we begin to heat. So we're at 40 degrees above zero instead of 20 below as far as our starting temperature from which we begin to heat.

Electricity, we're off the grid. We make all our own electricity. So our electrical cost is roughly the amortization of the batteries. So that's about -- we replace the batteries about every 10 years. So you're looking at $80 a year for batteries, and that's our electrical cost. Now, once your system is paid for, I suppose our system is worth today, to replicate our system today, it would probably cost somebody around $6,000.

Are you using photovoltaic panels? We're using photovoltaic panels, yes. I used wind energy for many years, but when I got into my 60s, I got bored with climbing the 108-foot tower to repair the thing, which would normally happen around the shortest day, December 21st, when it was below zero.

And a friend of mine said, "Rob, if you had another 500 watts of panels, you wouldn't need that wind plant." So another friend had 450 watts of panels sitting in cardboard boxes that he was not using yet. So he said, "Well, we borrow ours." So we set up his panels, and, gee, we were laughing.

We didn't need the wind plant. So my first friend was absolutely right. And then we had a chance to pick up 720 watts of panels at a great price. They were, believe it or not, on the end of a dock in Miami Beach. Really? Yeah. They were made in Massachusetts, evergreen panels, and they were going to be shipped somewhere.

And the deal fell through. And this guy that we knew in Pennsylvania was buying the whole lot of them, $24,000 worth of them. And we agreed to buy, I think, $4,000 worth of stuff from him. So then a crane falls on the dock, and nobody can get to the end of the dock to get these panels, which are out on the end of the pier.

And we thought we'd lost our investment. The other guy thought he'd lost his $24,000. We thought we'd lost our $4,000. And after six months or so, they finally got those panels, and we're using those today, and they're greatly well. Wow. So $80 a year and $840 a year, are you-- Yeah, and then the third thing I must mention, to be fair, is propane gas.

Okay. Propane gas for things that, if you use electric, would be a high--you couldn't do with photovoltaics with an off-the-grid battery system. For example, you can't heat, water heating, you've got a heating coil in it, electrical baseboard heating, a large refrigerator, which has a heater going constantly in it.

So these kinds of things, we use propane gas for. Propane gas is a much more efficient way to heat water, to heat food, to run your refrigerator. So we do those things with propane. But all our lighting, small appliance circuits, Jackie's sitting next to me here right now. She's on her computer, and we've got our lights on, and all this comes from the battery system.

Any idea what your annual propane costs are? What's the annual propane cost here, would you say, Jackie? $700, $800, something of that nature? She thinks it's gone down to around $500 a year now, but it's somewhere between $500 and $700, $800, somewhere in that range. It varies a bit because the price of propane goes up and down.

Do you--and I'm curious because--and the reason I'm probing is, so I work as a financial planner, and one of the things that I often think about is I try to figure out what the actual costs are. So there are two ways to basically, in my mind, to not have to work for money.

And number one is have a large investment portfolio of some kind that's producing enough dividends and interest that can support your lifestyle where you can buy the things that you need to live your life, or simply to buy the things that you need to live your life and not have need for the--to build a large nest egg, so to speak.

And probably what's practical is probably to do a combination of those things. So do you and your wife, do you consider yourselves retired? No, but you've missed a major thing there. Those are two good ones that you mentioned, but I think a third one is every time that you can do something for yourself instead of paying somebody else to do it for you, there's a tremendous saving, whether it's building your house, repairing the house because you're the best one--a place to do that, or growing your own food, all the things that you can put your value into your sweat equity.

You're not charging yourself for your own labor. I say a dollar saved is worth a lot more than a dollar earned because you have to earn so darn many of them to save so precious few. And you look at people, if they're a really good saver, somebody at a regular job, it's extraordinary if they can save 10% of their income.

As a matter of fact, Americans today are net energy--net negative savers. So if somebody can save 10%, we'd say, "Gee, that's pretty good." So what does that make a dollar saved worth? Well, you had to earn--if you're a good saver, you had to earn 10 to save 1. If I find a dollar in the sidewalk, what's that dollar worth?

It's $10 I didn't have to earn. So if I can save a dollar by doing something myself, that's $10 I didn't have to earn to save that dollar. You see? It's a whole different economy. It's a powerful concept, and we just don't usually--we're not--I was never trained to think in terms of-- well, let me--I don't want to--that's actually not correct.

I often rejected that line of thinking when I was younger. My father would train me to do things myself, but I had a mindset of, "Well, I'll just go and--I do better at earning money. I'll just go and earn more money, and I'll pay someone else to do things for myself." And I think--so I've had to work hard to kind of overcome some of that.

There's probably a balance somewhere, because there's always this constant tussle between doing things myself versus hiring someone else versus what's the highest and best use of my time. Do you apply your philosophy always to simply doing it yourself, or do you-- Oh, no, no, no. For example, I'm not about to--my son in Colorado will do this, but I'm not going to do my own brakes on the car.

We're about to get our brakes done on the car. I'm not going to go take my car apart and fix the brakes. But my son in Colorado would do that. So we all have our lines to draw in that sort of thing, but there's a lot of things that people can do for themselves and save a tremendous amount of money in doing it.

Or just--for example, we talked about the grub stake. And to put aside the money you need for this adventure called building your own house, you have to lay by this money. So you could go on a kind of a materials fast to save money. So if somebody goes out to eat and go to a movie, they go to--a couple goes out to dinner, they go to a movie, it's easy to drop $80 or so, maybe $100 in that evening.

Well, that was--if they're good savers, that was $800 they had to earn to be able to save the $80 that they had for the free money to go out to eat. So by not doing that and staying at home and hiring a movie, they maybe get away for $10 and that's $70 saved and that goes towards a grub stake.

I've had people read Mortgage Free and then go on a materials fast and report to me about how they make a game out of it. And they save a lot of money in a couple years' time. One couple from Wisconsin got out of debt. So in two years, they were out of debt and they were saving money and they actually saved enough money to go to Australia for a while, came back, built their own home.

So yeah, it's--it really is a different mindset altogether. In our society, there seems to almost be just two very different ways of looking at it. When you actually--in many ways, our society is very stressful. So oftentimes, many of us are looking to treat our stress. And so this leads often to a high consumption lifestyle and we feel that in order to treat our stress, that many times we deserve more and we do more and we spend more.

And life can be very expensive. But if you actually look at the quality of entertainment that somebody who has almost no income can enjoy, I mean you can go and you can buy a--you can go and buy a used tablet computer for a very small amount of money. You can toss Netflix onto there and you can have better entertainment that was--then was available to the richest person in the world, you know, 30 years ago.

Because you can have media streamed, entertainment streamed from all over the world. You can read thousands of books on there for completely for free. So you've got this--once you actually kind of step out of it a little bit, you can entertain yourself in a way that is amazing and is amazingly low cost.

But you have to identify the opportunity and pursue it. Yeah. You can't argue with any of that. I wanted to ask one other question on water. Are you collecting rainwater or do you have a well? How do you handle your water and septic needs for your house? We do have a well.

It's a well dug by a track excavator. We had a water dowser come in, identify the location of the water. It's a beautiful, almost artesian well. That is to say it doesn't bubble out of the ground. My son's does down below. He's just below us here. Really? He actually has water bubbling into it.

We've made a big cistern for it and the water bubbles out of that. And it's beautiful, cold, clean spring water. So we do have--our well is about 28 feet deep. The static level is about 15 feet. So we can pump it into the house with a bicycle pump. That is to say the bicycle is married to a double action piston pump.

We actually used to do that all year round, and now we just do it in the dark quarter of the year when we're not making as much energy. So from 1st of November to February, I get down on the bicycle, and I pump every day and fill the cistern with the bicycle pump.

Wow. Because it's a shallow well. The static level is less than 20 feet. When you get up over 20 feet, now you need a different type of a pump to do the same job. You need something like a pump jack to do it. But that can be done too.

So that's how we get our water. Our son in Colorado does not have a well, and he does collect the rainwater off of his metal roof. He has an earth-sheltered house there, but he collects the water off a metal roof into two 2,000-gallon cisterns, and he always has plenty of water.

How long does it take you during the time when you are supplementing your panels? How long do you need to ride the bicycle to provide your day's water? Well, typically it's about four minutes twice a day, and if Jackie's doing the wash, it's a 25-gallon cycle for each of the wash cycles is 25 gallons.

So I pump about six gallons a minute. So for each cycle, I'll go down and I'll pump for four minutes for the next cycle. And then there might be--how many cycles are there on the washing machine? Two or three? Basically two. Basically two cycles. So a day that she's doing the wash, that's going to add like another eight minutes of pumping.

But, gee, if I do it for another 32 years, I'll live to be 100. Exactly. Well, I just--you know, I think of going to the gym and they put the--if you go to the gym, you can ride the stationary bike. You can have it illustrate the amount of power you're running out.

And you're not doing any useful work. Right, and you're not using the power for anything. It's just all this mental construct, but you're actually using the power. Yeah, yeah. I used to use it year-round, but about almost three years ago now at Heathrow Airport in London, I got slammed by a big red London bus.

Oh, wow. Yeah, and it broke my pelvis, my arm, my finger, and I broke the bus. And that was the end of my water pumping days for a while. Up until that point, Jackie and I had always pumped all the water into the house for over 30 years. And then our son, Rowan, came back from Colorado, and he married an electric motor to our pump because I couldn't pump.

I couldn't move. But now I'm back 100% again and doing everything I used to do. But that changed it to being all bicycle pump to electric and bicycle. What about for-- It takes about 45 seconds to switch it over. Wow. You take the belt off and you put the chain on, and you're way to go.

What about for your septic system? Are you using a traditional-- We have--in New York State, you are allowed to compost humanure. However, strangely, you must still have a New York State-approved septic system. Really? So they don't mind if you use your compost, but you still have to have the septic system.

In some places, for example, the Adirondack Park of New York, which is a large so-called park in the middle of the state, about the size of the state of Vermont, in the Adirondack Park, you have to identify not only your drain field, but another drain field for use when the first one fails.

So now you've used twice as much of the land surface to compost humanure, not even compost it, but just to get rid of it. Better is, in fact, to compost it. So do you guys--do you compost it or do you use the septic system? We have guest houses at the building school here.

We run a building school in New York, and we have four guest houses. And we have two composting toilets. And, again, our son in Colorado--and our son here, the one that's building next to us-- they're all using the Joe Jenkins Humanure Composting System. Yeah, I read his book. It was excellent.

Yeah, Joe's quite a friend of ours. He makes it entertaining to read. He certainly does. When you're dealing with probably the subject that would cause more people to be uncomfortable, he deals with it in a very funny way. It's a simple system. It's basically poop in a bucket. Right, right, right.

Yeah, I've threatened my wife with it, but I haven't followed through on it actually yet. But who knows? You never know. Entrepreneurship. What was your path to doing the building school? Was it with a goal of just you would solve a need and wanted to share your knowledge? Or was it you wanted to make money?

What's been your path through entrepreneurship? Well, I've always been a teacher. I had my own water ski school in Massachusetts years ago. I taught algebra and geometry in high school. I've always been a writer. And when it came to building a corded masonry house, there wasn't any information out there, written information.

Jackie and I actually traveled up into Ontario one day with a friend, and we looked at some old corded masonry houses that people were gracious enough to show us. But on the way back down from Ontario on a Sunday afternoon, we came across a farmer laying up a corded barn.

He was gracious enough to share what he knew, the extra lime in the mortar and this sort of thing. And I realized that it needs to be a book to tell people how to do this. And I knew how to write, and I knew how to teach. So it started out with the book, and then I started teaching at the Mother Earth News Echo Village in North Carolina.

I was teaching earth-sheltered housing down there, actually, three or four years after we built our first house. And then I wrote a book on earth-sheltered housing, and now we've written 15 books. Now the last one is called "The Coincidental Traveler" that Jackie and I wrote together, and it's kind of the mortgage-free of travel.

So the subtitle is "Adventure Travel for Budget-Minded Grown-Ups," which is us. What are some of the strategies that you explore in that book? Well, some of the strategies in that one are similar to what you get in mortgage-free. First of all, extend yourself. It's possible to cultivate coincidence. You can create things happening by extending yourself.

You can do this in building. You can do it in travel. You've got to let your need be known. And in low-cost travel, we travel chicken buses, for example, in Central America. And not only do you get to really see the country from the local point of view, but you'll meet wonderful people who will--and you extend yourself, and they extend yourself, and pretty soon, instead of staying in a hotel, you're staying in somebody's private home somewhere.

Right. This has happened--oh, couch surfing is something that Jackie and I have joined, and we're in our 60s, and couch surfing enables you to stay with people all over the world for free. As a matter of fact, it's against the rules of couch surfing to charge anyone to have them stay with you.

So you might contribute to take them out to eat or contribute to the household food stuff and all. But we just recently went to Ecuador and stayed with local people in Quito and in Cuenca, and we spent the night couch surfing in a tent on top of a 14,000-foot mountain in Ecuador.

Wow. So these are the kinds of things that--another strategy that Jackie and I employ is called taking advantage of ourselves. As I said, we haven't retired yet, so we teach corded masonry all over the world. So our corded teaching has taken us to Tasmania, New Zealand, Chile twice, Labrador.

We taught with the Innu people in Labrador last year, Alaska, Hawaii twice. We've worked with Mapuches in Chile. It's just--everybody is something. You don't have to be a corded teacher. You could be a tennis player, a quilter. You've got friends all over the world that you haven't even met yet.

Just Google "quilting," and you'll come up with 35 quilting societies in New Zealand. It tells you when they meet, who the person is that runs it. You contact this person, and, "Oh, coming down from North America? Stay with us while you're down here in Huayngaray." So, you know, you've got instant friends all over the world, and all you have to do is extend yourself.

And it's so easy today with the Internet to do that. Right, right. Yeah, I noticed this years ago. I used to be a member of Toastmasters International, and my thought--I said, "Man, if I ever were to travel, the first thing I'd do is just find the local Toastmasters club, show up, you know, sit through their club, and you automatically have this connection, and you'll make some friends, and you'll probably get a couple of dinner invitations.

You may get an invitation. You just make some friends and build a community, and then you don't have to deal with-- I don't really enjoy being a part of the tourist infrastructure, but I enjoy traveling. And I love to take people who come and visit me. I love to take a day off and take them and show them around.

It's really fun for me. And so the same thing for other people all around the world. Well, you'll need to get The Coincidental Traveler. I think I will. I've enjoyed-- Go to our website. It's the first book on our books and media page on our website. And the website is cordwoodmasonry.com.

That's right. You've been watching this--and I don't know the word to use. I'm trying to find a descriptive word. It seems so stupid to say an alternative lifestyle or whatever, but you've been watching cultural shifts. Let's pose the question in that manner. You've been watching cultural shifts happen over the last at least 40 years, whether it was from the '70s back to the land movement up through today in 2014.

What have been your observations from the perspective of having watched and been involved in these cultural shifts? Are people moving more toward the kind of lifestyle that you teach? Are people moving away from it? Is it a mixture? What have you observed culturally speaking over the last 40 years?

Not much difference percentage-wise. I think this is going to appeal to a certain kind of people, and I don't think their percentage has changed a great deal from the '70s up until the present day. I'm always thinking, "Oh, wow, this thing is going to reach critical mass and it's going to take off," but it never does.

And I don't know what members would be interested in living the way that we do, but certainly it's a small percentage. It's significant but small, 10%, something like that, I'm guessing here, but not a great deal of change. We just came back from the Common Ground Fair in Maine, and we were very impressed with how many people are interested in organic farming and building and stuff like this.

But it's in a certain area that is conducive to that sort of thing. Occasionally travel to places like where you live, and there it's going to be very much fewer people are into those sorts of things. So unfortunately, and I say unfortunately because I think the world would be better off if we were not such great consumers, but rather conservers of things instead of consuming them.

Just to digress for a moment, in Europe they have an equal standard of living by all the things, the standard of living measures on half the per capita energy consumption that we have in the United States. It strikes me that that means that we must be wasting half of it.

That's true. So certainly Jackie and I in our household, we perhaps consume 10% of the energy of the typical American household. So if people lived the way that we do, we'd be net exporters of energy. We wouldn't have to go bombing other countries for their oil and things like that.

We'd be self-reliant. So I perhaps digress a bit from your original question, but I don't see a great change. The same amount of people are still interested, have the desire, the imagination, the wherewithal, whatever it takes, and the kuja kuja to pursue this lifestyle, and happily, too. And some try it, and they decide it's not for them.

Why do people not want to pursue the lifestyle? Why do people try it and decide it's not for them? It didn't work out for them. They got themselves into a sticky wicket. Things weren't going well. They were living uncomfortably, living in a construction zone. The family breaks up. As Zorba calls it, the full catastrophe.

Right. We had some of that here on Murtaugh Hill in our community. We had family breakups. It's not an easy lifestyle. We look at our son right now. The way he's living is like Jackie and I, like we were living 35 years ago. Still the composting toilet, no hot water in the house yet, and things like that.

It's hard to believe. And yet, when you think about it, he's living with clean water. He's got basic electric. He's warm. He's better off than, what would you say, 75% of the people on this planet. Right. I think a lot of these things, there's a big mental shift that can happen.

I don't want to comment broadly on cultural perspectives, because people are individuals and they're unique. But I think that even for me and for my family, my hope is that we can train ourselves to be resilient and flexible. I remember an experience that I had when I was traveling in Central America.

I lived in Nicaragua with a very poor family way out in the sticks for a week. This family was very gracious to host me. It was part of an organized tour I was doing with school. It was prearranged that I would stay with them for a week. They were very gracious to host me.

But the village that we were living in, it was just very poor. I remember when we got to Nicaragua, we were traveling from Costa Rica to Nicaragua. The first few days in Nicaragua, we stayed in some hostels. The hostels did not have hot water. That was the worst experience for me ever.

I just remember I couldn't stand taking a shower. I would just grip my teeth and I would turn the water on and I would be done in about 90 seconds. Soap up, rinse off, be done, just shivering the whole time. Then I went out in the campo with this Nicaraguan family.

In this situation, the toilet was a concrete pad with about three foot walls around it right in the middle of the development, an outhouse without a house on it. The shower was basically a shower enclosure made with flour sacks. It was about three feet high and a five-gallon bucket of water.

So I took one shower and that worked fine. I've since learned how to shower much better in those conditions and enjoy it, no big deal. But at that time, I was still kind of young. I was not confident. So I took one shower and then I didn't shower the rest of the time.

So by the end of the week, I was just ready for a shower. Well, we pick up and we get out of that city and we go in the bus to--I don't remember the town. It may have been Granada or something like that in Nicaragua. I remember getting to the hostel.

We get to the hostel. The hostel, of course, has no warm water, but it has a shower. And I remember just standing there and there was no hesitation about the cold water as far as, "Oh, it's so cold. I have to get in and out." I remember standing there just luxuriating in the cold shower, just so thankful to have a shower.

Yeah. How cold can the water be in Nicaragua in the first place? It felt cold to me. I was a little bit--I was a weakling at that time. Not that cold. I was struck by how in one week I had gone from, "I cannot believe how cold this shower is.

This is the worst experience of my life," to standing there luxuriating in the cold water and not even worrying about the fact that there was no hot water. And it was a lesson to me that I've tried to apply since then to always test myself and challenge myself and expose myself to extreme circumstances so that I am a resilient, flexible person.

Because I'm convinced it's much less about the external circumstances and much more about the character of the person. Well, I'm reading "Fata Hiva" right now by Thor Heyerdahl, the story of his early days in the Marquesas with his wife. They moved from Norway to the Marquesas and lived in Fata Hiva.

And boy, when you read what they went through, you realize, "Holy mackerel, you can do anything." It's a very inspiring book written back in the '70s, but it tells the story of his time in the '30s. And "Fata Hiva" is very inspirational. Two final questions for you. I recognize that you said that the same percentage of people are interested in living the kind of lifestyle.

Have you seen an improvement in the technology being developed? Oh, yeah. Definitely. Particularly in things like solar. As a matter of fact, thanks to the Chinese and maybe Musk, the price of photovoltaic panels has come way, way down now. So it's very much cheaper per peak watt than it was when we started out.

Solar is good because you can add on to it incrementally as you can afford it. You can add another couple of panels on, for example, as opposed to wind where you're in for the whole thing at once. So solar cells are better. They're cheaper. That's a good thing. Battery technology has been slow to improve, but it's slowly getting better.

The equipment that goes along with the photovoltaic system, the outback charge controllers, the trace equipment. I mean, our trace inverter is still working perfectly after 30 years. So it's good stuff. But, yeah, equipment has improved a lot, and I think the cost has come down, particularly on photovoltaic panels.

So there are improvements that have been made. What I'm hoping is that we can have a lot more innovation in the technology. And what's interesting to me is in many young people that I know who are not pursuing any kind of lifestyle that would be a, you know, any kind of back-to-the-land lifestyle.

They're not crunchy. They're not hippie. They're not pursuing any of that. They're living a mainstream urban lifestyle. And yet many of my friends enjoy researching some of the technology that is available just simply through YouTube. And I know me, I do that, and I go on YouTube, and I find all these interesting technologies.

When I find somebody who's built a hot water -- you know, has built a rocket stove to heat a barrel of water, and they've built the whole thing with $30 worth of parts. But they've built an amazingly efficient hot water heater. And then I look at that, and I say, "That is amazing." But yet look how -- if we can focus some engineering technology on that, whether it's something, you know, as well known as a rocket mass heater or something like that, or whether it's some of the earth shelter technology that you talk about, whether it's solar design technology, whether it's food production technology, things like that.

If we can focus the engineering and the innovation on these areas, what an amazing growth we can have over the coming decades. And it doesn't seem to make sense to me that we can learn from past technology, but we shouldn't necessarily just be trying to copy the lifestyle from the 1830s.

Let's take the good things and make them better. The really big difference between now and 40 years ago is the access to information and equipment. 40 years ago, when Jackie and I started out, photovoltaics were things that went on spaceships. Right. And you didn't have books that tell you how to build cordon de masonry or sheltered housing or any of these things, cob and all the rest.

There was no such a thing. So we were -- the people who want to pursue this lifestyle today are at a great advantage because there's so much available stuff. But it still hasn't changed the impetus. We haven't reached that critical mass yet. Whether we will or not, I don't know.

But the information is there. Well, when you got guys like me, traditionally trained financial planners, talking about this as a viable financial planning option, I think it can -- and I look at it from a financial perspective. I say if you can have a debt-free house and that house can cost you in northern Maine, looking at your numbers here, $1,600, so let's call it $1,800 a year to run your utility costs.

So $1,800 a year plus taxes, no mortgage. That's a relatively low lifestyle cost. Oh, yes. That's right. Because that means now it compounds. Because now it means you can earn less to take care of what Thoreau calls the necessaries of life. And when you earn less, it puts you in a lesser tax bracket, too.

So there's a savings on that as well. Right. You know, my father said that if somebody makes $100,000 a year but they spend $110,000 a year, they're poor. But if a man makes $10,000 a year and spends $9,000 a year, he's rich. Right. And that's the one thing I've never forgotten.

And that's how you -- and he also said you never go broke taking a profit. And these two things are very, very closely related to each other. We've tried to live that way all our lives. Spend less than you earn. People have this goal of having their mortgage paid off because of the peace that that's going to bring them in their life when they have their mortgage paid off.

But the challenge is that if I were to have my mortgage paid off in the house that I live right now, my mortgage payment is -- total including taxes and insurance -- is about $1,250 a month. The problem is that only about -- I think it's what, $700, $800 of that is principal and interest payments.

So even if I did have my mortgage paid off, I've still got a $3,000 to $4,000 a year property tax bill. I still have anywhere from -- I've got an insurance bill if I'm going to insure my property. And because I didn't build it myself and it's such a large dollar figure as compared to something that I could build and repair myself, property insurance is largely necessary.

Then you take a look on that and my house is so horribly energy inefficient that my electrical cost this last summer averaged between two to as high as $280 per month. That is a massive cost on a monthly basis to support. So what happens is that many people are stuck in this lifestyle where they come to me as a financial planner and even with a paid off mortgage, which is supposed to be this utopia -- I have a paid off mortgage, I finally own my house, the American dream -- well, no you don't because you still have all these other costs.

But you'll be $14,000 a year better off though. You are, but you still have a massive still amount of other costs. So I look at it and I say, "Yes, the mortgage is important." But what people I think -- what we have this traditional idea of which pervades our culture is that in the past, the mortgage was the biggest cost.

You had lower utility costs. You had lower tax burden. You had just basically lower costs. So when people were thinking of the mortgage, they were thinking of those all-inclusive costs. And the only way I know how to do that is to pursue strategies like yours or to accumulate enough money where you can comfortably fund the expenses.

And ideally, it's both of them. So investing in insulation in my house is a very high priority for me because I've got to lower that electrical bill. And people should consider all of these facets of the strategies. Do you plan to ever retire? We get asked that question every few years, and every few years we say, "We get asked that question every few years." So here's the thing.

We enjoy our work. We enjoy working with these young, enthusiastic people, and not necessarily young. Sometimes older people, too, are coming and making a life change. And they're enthusiastic. They're where we were 40 years ago, desperately seeking this information. And we bounce off of that. It brings us alive to see ourselves 40 years ago and have the information that we can share with these people.

So first, you must enjoy your work. And we enjoy our work. And it's a vehicle for travel all over the world. We're hoping to do workshops in Ecuador. We did some couch surfing in Ecuador last year, and we met two different people who would like to have us do coordination workshops in Ecuador.

So that's a chance to travel and see some parts of the world we haven't seen before either out in the country. So, yeah, we really enjoy it and can't see any reason to retire because we enjoy it. We're probably not working as hard or as long as we used to, but retirement's not on the cards right now.

As a matter of fact, Jackie and I are hosting the fifth Continental Corded Conference next July. The first one was held here in '94, and there have been three since. So about every five years there's a Continental Corded Conference, and this will be a world Continental Corded Conference because we expect to have people from all over the world here sharing innovations in corded masonry.

So that's a lot of work to organize a conference like that. That's what we're working on over this winter, and everybody will be assembling here in July, probably 100 to 200 people. I would ask you not to retire because, A, you're going to get old if you retire, and that would be bad.

But, B, I want to bring my kids to your workshops and teach them the skills in the future of how to actually do some of these building methods. Well, you should come yourself. I will. I would like to. I can't see--if I were willing to move out of West Palm Beach in the future, I would make my own education in the practical hands-on of actually doing some of this stuff a very high priority.

And I may reach that at some point, you never know, but at the moment that's the primary thing that's affecting me. But I do want to, as I build more margin into my life, I actually want to learn some of these skills. I want to learn and come and do some of the workshops, and my hope is I'm going to do it with my kids as a kind of a family event.

Yeah. Rob, thank you for coming on the show. You're welcome. It's been fun. And now I want to actually ask you one bonus question, which I'm going to put at the end of the interview. Are you still moving big, heavy rocks? Oh, yes. Yes. In fact, in about a week's time, we're going down to look at the Sophia Project, which is a 50-ton stone, 32 foot 5 inches long.

It's lying in the field at the Center for Symbolic Studies in New Paltz. And I'm project director to demonstrate transporting and erecting this Sophia by hand. The project's dragged on too long, and we're short of funds right now to get the necessary wood. See, we want to limit ourselves to equipment that the Neolithic people would have had available 5,000 years ago.

That requires a lot of heavy timbers, ropes, that sort of thing. So Michael Barnes, who did the original Nova series on Stonehenge and the obelisks and the pyramids, he's on board trying to find a producer that's going to like mega movers, for example, to do a program about this and maybe pony up some money.

We need around $10,000 for the various equipment that we need to do this. So, yeah, it's still alive, but the project has dragged on way too long. I'm hoping in a week's time I'll have a little bit more information on that. Are you guys getting to the point where you can actually figure out how the people in the past have moved the massive-- Oh, absolutely.

We have successfully transported and erected a 20-ton stone here at Earthwood. So Sophia is just the next step up from that. We're moving from the 20- to the 55-ton stone. The ancient people were moving stones-- There's a standing stone that stood for 5,000 years in France called the Grand Menhier Brise.

It finally fell down about the year 1800, 1799, I think it fell down and broke into four pieces. That was a 350-ton stone that they transported at least a half a mile from the quarry and stood it up. 350 tons. Now, if we get Sophia-- I shouldn't say "if." When we get Sophia up, it will be one-seventh of the way to what the Neolithic people were doing in France 5,000 years ago with no hard metals, just wood and rope available to them.

Wow. So it's exciting stuff. That's kind of our passion. That also takes us around the world, too. We've done stone workshops in other parts of the world. Yeah, it's really-- Keep it up. I think that's a cool hobby to have, and I'm interested. I haven't actually learned anything. It's very empowering.

When you actually-- We moved to--Julie's saying there's our 20-ton stone here at Earthwood. We could always--we could transport, raise, and erect--Julie's saying with no more than 16 people. That means each of us is responsible for one and a quarter tons using only wooden equipment. Wow. It's a great--and you're not struggling.

You're using your weight, not your strength, just your body weight and your brain. I'm going to need to spend some time on YouTube and see how you guys are doing some of that, because I don't even know where you start. I haven't researched it. I just heard about it and read about it on your site.

My major book is--the biggest book, that is to say the one I'm most proud of--if you like Mortgage Free, you'll love Stone Circles. It's a 380-page book. It took a couple years of my life to research and do that. Of course, a lot of it's backed by your own experimentations.

Jackie and I, in our 60s, we loved to just go out and move a half-ton stone in the garden just for the fun of it. You guys are oddballs, you know? I resemble that remark. I like it. I like it. Rob, thanks again for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Pretty cool, huh? I wish many, many more people would follow Rob's path. I really do. I think it's just an awesome--it's not for everyone. Clearly, he says that even in the interview. I don't think it's for everyone. What a much different way of approaching life if we could just simply build our own houses that are cheap but are well-built.

I feel like sometimes sitting here staring at society saying, "Why is it that our houses have to cost so much?" "Why is it that the ones that cost so much are so stupidly inefficient?" You would think that in 2014 we could do a little bit better. I know in 2014 we can do a little bit better.

I'm doing my best on my end to improve my situation. I hope that each and every one of you listening to today's show is doing the best on your end to improve your situation. Hopefully, many of you maybe come from an engineering background. We can together figure out some better engineering for all of our climates and locations.

We can build housing that is more efficient, less expensive, more comfortable, more beautiful, less toxic, just healthier in every way for us as individuals and our individual lives. Also, for our societies, our communities, for the earth we live in. I really think we can make some major progress here.

This is some of that low-hanging fruit. If more and more of us will follow Rob's plan and get to the place where the regulations don't get in the way, I think we can continue to make some major progress. I hope you enjoyed today's show. Thank you so much. If you're interested in today's show notes, come to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/81.

You'll find all the show notes for today's show. Drop me a note. Let me know if you like this kind of thing and if you know other people that have inspirational stories like this. I'd love to bring them on the show. Make sure you're subscribed to the show on iTunes or on Stitcher or wherever you listen.

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