Say you want out of your median life: earning $45k a year and renting in Metro Detroit, commuting for hours each week, addicted to your phone, and scrapping for work in the ever-hollowing auto industry.
Say you’ve had a dream: a house you could pay off near the lake, time spent with a line in the water, and more free time to enjoy the state you love.
You can do it here. The Michigan housing market isn’t terrifying if you optimize for leisure over status and comfort. Take this listing:
Not big, but many boomers were raised in homes like this. The kitchen has working appliances. Any kids you might have can just share bedrooms.
Best of all? You can probably ditch your car payment. It’s a 15-minute walk to the beach, and five to church (a great place to find a mate). Only seven minutes to breakfast at Big Boy and a meat market. It would take a third as long to bike to any of these places. Meijer is less than two miles away, as is downtown and the local public library.
If you need to travel farther, or the snow has piled up too high to bike, this Up North town has a Dial-a-Ride bus service for $1.50 a trip. Sure beats a note on a depreciating asset.
And what would you do for money? In short, anything.
You wouldn’t need much. With a 5% down payment for a first-time homebuyer, you’d just need to scrape together $4,000 for the down payment. Then it’s $544 a month for mortgage and insurance, $500 a month for food, and let’s just say $466 a month for other expenses—$1,500 a month to cover costs. The rest would be gravy.
You don’t even need a college degree. If you worked for $18 an hour for four hours a day 300 days a year, you’d clear $22,500 after taxes, more than enough to cover your costs, and you’d have $4,250 to spend on hobbies. And maybe you don’t even need a gas-reliant fishing boat. Maybe you just find a fishing kayak for cheap that you could tow to the beach on your bike.
You could work as a bus driver for a local school, as a server at the Big Boy, or as a salesperson at Tractor Supply. If you’re dependable, you could do nearly anything you wanted and only work half the time.
Does this life seem unrealistic? Abhorrent? Of course it would to most.
That’s because this is an exercise in what your life would look like if you were optimizing for something other than comfort and consumption. This is a life without an Amazon subscription, on-demand entertainment, and the hamster wheel of working to pay for your ever-expanding material desires. This is the easy life the internet pioneers envisioned for us.
You might not have many shiny new things, but you could pick up a TV and a DVD player cheap at a garage sale and have anything worth watching or reading available to you at the local library for free.
You could fish every afternoon in good weather and eat a lot of whitefish, just as the settlers of our great state once did, reducing your living costs further.
You could become a regular at Bogart’s Tavern, a 15-minute walk south, and catch all the Lions games there with friends. They run $3 Bud Light specials on game day.
Most of us can’t imagine walking a path other than the one we’re currently on, but Michigan has an abundance of land, shoreline, and little towns begging for people to live in them. And those places can offer you incredible freedom.
In this great state, you can always live a different life. You only have to commit.
Mark Naida is managing editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
