Well, I did mention that I’m drunk at 3 am, buying land on eBay, right?

A few places I really like and have given to my kids or other family members for a second home spot or recreational getaway.

Two are located in places that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to live in full time, I let the neighbors “rent” them (for a a few pesos a year) to use for farming or whatever. One never knows how the world will shape up, maybe they come in handy. If not, maybe a grandkid can use it.

Others I have undoubtedly forgotten about and have been confiscated for taxes, I suppose.

The value I have seen generated for others by my reckless dalliances are more than worth the cost. I mean, one of the best ones only cost $300.

I could easily spend that on a night out, and no way that is going to fundamentally improve anyone’s life. It’s like gambling for the chance to make someone’s life better.

I have also been known to midnight purchase sailboats in places I want to visit. Sometimes you can get great deals on boats that the owners have left behind. Usually I’ll go there and tinker for a few weeks, enjoying myself and sailor culture, take it out sailing until I want to go home, then sell it for (usually) much more than I paid and I get a free vacation.

A few years ago I bought a 32’ roberts (comfortable, but a bit of a pig in chop) near San Fransisco. She was $900 with a great slip and a flaky outboard. I spent a week getting her in shape, 500 dollars on a one-season racing sail and another 300 getting it recut, bought a few sandbags because she seemed a bit tender with the heavy pilot house, and sailed around the canals for a few days, then spent a week cruising the bay. After that, I spent a few days at the municipal dock, 100 feet from million dollar condos in a fantastic part of town.

Great times and great street culture back then. I hear it has kinda gone downhill?

Anyway, I used it for a “vacation home” for a few years and sold her at a fair but beneficial price.

I’m a little more settled down now, raising a new batch of kids…but if there’s a secret to life, it’s to own land outright, and avoid debt at all cost. Buy it when you’ve earned it. Until then, buy what you can afford to own, where you can afford to live. The compromises you have to make will pay excellent dividends. /grandpa rant

Also ymmv. My advice kinda assumes you aren’t trying to fit into some kind of pre-prepared slot. If you aren’t wanting to take full responsibility for yourself and your life, and the resultant outcome, my advice is probably bad.

Half application of good advice is usually worse than no advice at all. I should mention that I’m basically hardcore unemployable because of my attitudes in life, and for the short periods of time that I have been an employee, I have been a poor one.

If you aren’t looking for the path of high resistance, you should probably write me off as a crackpot geezer.

He's using the ultimate geriatric investment strategy: Simply being in the way of people and obstructing them, by the virtue of being born earlier. Genius.

Ah yes, the reason that life is a struggle is that there are other people that got here before you lol. Funny thing, there were also people that got here before me, so I’m having a tough time with your logic.

It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago!

So tell me, wise one, at what age do you plan to euthanize yourself? You do know that Logan’s run was a cautionary tale, right?

Every generation builds on the scraps of the last one.

That said, uselessly being in the way is irresponsible. I do try, not always successfully, to make sure my actions are useful to people. I am pretty sure my land hobby has opened more doors for people than it has closed.

Maybe it is irresponsible to keep a boat on a slip to not be used 99 percent of the time, I’ll give you that. That’s one reason I am no longer owned by a boat.

My current hobby farm project has created 9 new homeowners and is a source of economic support and food security in the community.

Maybe stop looking to others to explain why things aren’t easy.

I love to see deserving people prosper. By deserving, I mean simply people that also love to see people prosper. That’s how we build a world. People that think that the problem with the world is that there are people in it are the actual problem.

> It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago!

Much more recently than this I would say, when abandoned land was given away for free by the government to anybody who wanted it. Almost everywhere in the world, less than a hundred years ago.

Land was not always owned by somebody. I was born in a place which is very sparsely populated. Uninhabited or unused land was considered to not be owned by anybody, until a rotten generation arrived in the 50s-60s and decided that every remote piece of land had to be owned by somebody. Then there was a scramble of which families could lie the most and bribe the most to "prove" that the land was theirs. Now young people cannot live there anymore because they cannot afford to pay 200 years of their wages to have a scrap of land. They either have to be born into the landed gentry or they have to move the fuck out from where their ancestors have lived thousands of years.

> That said, uselessly being in the way is irresponsible.

But that's exactly what you're doing with abandoned land "investment", if I haven't misunderstood? When somebody actually needs that land, you are there to say "uh-uh, pay the toll first". What other reason would there be to purchase land to leave it abandoned? I have nothing to say against productive investment.

> My current hobby farm project has created 9 new homeowners and is a source of economic support and food security in the community.

That sounds like productive investment.

You buying plots of land out in the sticks is probably not the reason for my problems or for the problems of anybody else, but buying land where people need to live and then just sitting on it for a cash out is one of the most common geriatric investment strategies and has had enormously damaging effects for humanity.

Yeah, it’s not an investment strategy for me. I give them away to people I think can use them or,rarely, leave them in the use of neighbors for some unlikely future use. I generally don’t ever sell land. Except in rare cases, to buy more land.