What is total cost per year family must pay? This would include any cop-op fees, property taxes (saw post said around $1000 yearly for $160 K house) and loan repayment for money loaned to build house buy solar cells, etc. Assuming total loan was $150K for house, garage, solar cell grid, barn and well (which I read all are required).
Hypo Scenario – Say you have no savings or job then move to co-op and start home business makes $500 for first 3 months then $1K next 3 months then $1.5k next 3 months but total fees are 2K monthly do you get kicked out first month you can’t make payment or have 6 month grace period? How does it work in detail?
When starting a home based business (if it doesn’t make enough money) is there a guaranteed way to make money that anyone can do in addition if so what?
Paul, great question!
This is the first such community we’ve ever built. In fact, we don’t know of another community that is combining an agricultural co-op with a land cooperative. We might be the first. So, there’s no track record to follow, but we can guess on a few annual expenses:
Co-op fees….. 0
Property taxes… $1,000
Mortgage…. 0
(you can’t have a mortgage on your homestead for at least two reasons:
1. a bank likely won’t loan on a house in a land co-op, and
2. If they did, the co-op wouldn’t want to get tangled up in court
if your bank were to foreclose on you).
Utilities… 0
(assuming you’ve built a passive-solar home with a geothermal heating/cooling system.
Admittedly, a few families are planning to use propane to fuel their appliances instead of solar
panels. In that case, there’d be a cost for the propane and its delivery).
If someone guarantees you can make money immediately in a home-based business… they’re likely selling snake oil. We’re thinking a home-based business in our community will take maybe a few months less time than the average 1 to 2 years to become profitable. To plan otherwise would be unrealistic.
If a person doesn’t have the resources to fund building a house (even with the savings achieved through the co-op), then we currently only see these options:
a. Borrow the funds from family. You can’t mortgage your 2 acres, but you can have personal debt.
b. Go in together with family on building out a homestead. We have a current shareholders whose adult children are going in on a share and building a large homestead where they all plan to live.
We are hoping that some day, we’ll have sufficient donors to our “Perpetual Immigration Fund” (which now has $10 in it), that we would be able to welcome young families who have no resources. But that’s not an option at the moment.
Why are property taxes so high?
CKCooley, COVlD is driving up costs, especially for lumber. Our best ballpark guestimate (no one is close to finishing building out their farmstead yet, so we don’t have hard numbers) is that it will take a minimum of $150,000 to build a small passive-solar home, barn or shop, greenhouse, septic system, and dig a well. I’d imagine the average will definitely be higher than that figure.
Adapt, we don’t know exactly what Juab County will charge for property taxes. This is what we do know:
1. Utah has the 12th lowest average property tax rate in the nation.
2. Juab County’s median property tax (according to Google results) is $984 per year for a home worth the median value of $163,000, so my $1,000 guess is likely not too far off. (In contrast, I pay $2,400 a year in Utah County).
3. The county plans on taxing 1 acre of your two acres as residential, and the rest as agricultural.
Also, here’s a newspaper article from 2020 explaining Juab County’s property taxes work.
Thank you for this summary. This project sounds so cool and I really want to be a part of it one day. Unfortunately I don’t have enough equity in my house to think about selling it to buy/build out there.
I’m assuming the sky is basically the limit to how much starting a homestead could cost, but what would you say is the average cost for starting a passive solar powered home with geothermal heating and cooling?