Benefits of Tiny Living
+How Tiny Homes can be Sustainable
Now that I’ve given you a brief intro on tiny homes and regulations, what is the benefit of tiny living? Why go through all the trouble of researching and complying with tiny home regulations when you could just buy a regular house? Well, No.1, “just buying a regular house” is actually not so simple. And No.2, a tiny house also comes with many other greater benefits. I will categorize them in 3 main sectors: Environmental, Financial, and Additional.
Environmental Benefits:
- Lower energy usage: Less electricity and heat required to power and warm a smaller space. Less fossil fuels burned. Using Solar and Wind power.
- Lower water usage: Using composting toilets. Gathering rainwater.
- Fun fact: A single American on average uses around 100 gallons of water per day. Yet one person I met stored 42 gallons of water in his tiny home on wheels and it lasted him 3 days! That’s 14 gallons of water per day. 100 → 14. Huge savings.
- Less waste created: Less materials used to build the house, less trees being cut down, less synthetic materials needed, less fuel used in gathering, creating and transporting materials.
- Overall smaller carbon footprint created because living tiny helps you live sustainably.
Financial Benefits:
- Lower expenses: Less expensive to maintain, less spontaneous purchases because there’s only room for so much! → Greater savings
- No property taxes if your land is rented for a THOW, lower taxes in general
- Possibility of no mortgage: This is a huge savings. Having no mortgage means having to not pay interest. While yes, buying a regular sized house is less expensive per square foot, all costs accounted for, a tiny home is much cheaper. When I ran calculations on how much it would cost to buy an average $750,000 home, putting 20% down, and having a mortgage interest rate of 3.623% (the lowest today), I found that I would end up paying almost $400,000 in interest on my mortgage ALONE. (See calculations below.) $400,000 + $750,000 = $1,150,000. Your $750,000 home actually costed you over a million bucks.
- Cost of Regular House: $1,150,000
- Cost of Tiny House: average $30,000–40,000; $200,000 on the pricier side
- In Summary…
- You could buy 25 nice little tiny homes, live in one of them and rent the others out on AirBnB to vacationers. You would therefore be living happily, helping the environment by living more sustainably, and making some money on rentals instead of being straight out of $1,150,000. At least this is my way of thinking of it, and yes, you would then have to buy a piece of land and pay property taxes and such, which even after accounted for, still leaves you with a decent amount of cash to work with. Just think of it as making money off money — like any other investment, why blow it on something big and unnecessary.
Additional Benefits:
- Easier to maintain. Easier to clean.
- Gives you the opportunity to grow. With all the free time you have that won’t be taken up by cleaning and fixing things, you can pick up a new skill, learn new things and become an expert in anything you want!
- Less stress due to living off-grid and simply relaxing.
- Mobile aspect, providing the ease of relocation. Travel, explore the world.
- Encourages you to live a more simple, minimalistic lifestyle. (The great benefits of this will be discussed further in an upcoming post.)
- Overall gives you more freedom.
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Thanks for reading the benefits of tiny living. While there is no doubt that there are downsides to tiny living, I personally think from my research that the benefits outweigh the negatives. However, I also believe that you will never truly know until you just do it and live in a tiny home yourself! Only then will you be able to experience both the positives and negatives, and make a decision for yourself!
