You are listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper. Buzzered by Duct Tape. The real duct tape. It fixes everything except that decision. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America. From border to border, coast to coast, and all ships at sea. Here is your host, Keith.
SPEAKER_01Hey all, you're listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast for July the 27th, 2026. And I want to do an episode reference an email that I received several days ago. And the person asks, Keith, why do you want to live off grid? 50 to 100 acres, no neighbors, a cabin in the mountains. I'm not questioning your choice. I just want to understand it better. So I appreciate the email. Honest and respectful. So I will give you that answer. And I'll go into a little more detail than I have in previous episodes about living off-grid or semi-off-grid.
This is not a sales pitch. This is not a manifesto. This is just the straight scoop. I'm not retreating. I'm choosing. I'm not running from anything. I'm not building a bunker because I think the world is going to end tomorrow. At least I'm not building a bunker that you know of. I'm not hiding. I'm choosing. There is a difference, in my opinion, between retreating and being deliberate about how you want to spend the years that you have left. I'm not a spring chicken, nor do I necessarily have one foot in the grave, but I've lived long enough to know what drains me and what fills me up. And at this point, I think I have earned the right to be selective about who and what gets my time, my energy, and my attention. That's not bitterness, that's just clarity.
Let me talk about the noise and the static. My tolerance for nonsense has gotten very low. My BS meter has been nearly pegged for quite some time. I'm the you kids get off my lawn kind of guy at this point. And quite honestly, I've made peace with that. Society, in my opinion, has lost its way, not in some dramatic the sky is falling sense, but in a slow, grinding everyday sense. The volume of everything has gone up, the substance of everything has gone down. Everybody has a hot take on everything, but nobody listens. Everyone is outraged, but nobody is thoughtful. And I'm tired of it. I'm not angry, I'm just tired. And I realize that physical distance is the most effective volume knob I have. The mountains do not have opinions, the trees don't want me to pick a side. I want to hear birds, maybe a plane now and then, and rifle and shotgun reports during hunting season. I want to hear the chickens in my front yard. That's not silence, that's the sounds to me that sound right. A hundred acres doesn't ask anything from me except for me to take care of it. And to me, that sounds like a fair trade. So why do I not want neighbors? And I've been asked about this before. It's not that I don't like people, that's not it. But I've learned something about myself over the last 10 years. I do better when I choose my interactions rather than having those interactions forced on me. In a neighborhood, and I live in a great neighborhood, don't get me wrong. In a neighborhood, you don't get to choose. You get whoever moves in next door, you get their noise, their habits, their drama. If you have an HOA, I'm sorry. You get the guy who runs a leaf blower at 7 a.m. on a Saturday. In my case, he might wait till about 7:30, but it's normally on a Sunday. None of this is the end of the world, but every little bit of the noise and the static chips away at something. It chips away at your soul. Sorry to get deep here, but that's how I feel about this. 50 to 100 acres is not a compound, it's merely a buffer. It means that I can't see my neighbor's house and they cannot see my house. If I want to talk to someone, I'll drive into town. If I don't, I simply stay home. That's not being antisocial, that's being deliberate, that's making a choice.
So why is East Tennessee on the short list? A very few practical reasons. The growing season in East Tennessee is long enough to sustain a serious garden. The elevation is high enough to avoid the worst summer heat, but not so high that winters are brutal. Water is abundant, streams, springs, and then regular rainfall. You're not fighting the land for moisture. Land is still affordable in the mountain counties. Fifty acres in East Tennessee costs what half an acre costs in most suburbs. And here's one thing that matters more than most people realize. Tennessee has no income tax, zero. No tax on wages, no tax on pension, no tax on retirement income, no tax on Social Security. So I'm drawing a pension through the state of Virginia. That pension gets taxed as regular income. The state takes its cut every single month. In Tennessee, I keep every dollar of that. So depending on the pension amount, that's potentially thousands of dollars a year. Over a decade or two of retirement, that adds up to real money. Money buys firewood, seeds, property tax, truck maintenance, a million other things. The things that actually sustain a life out there. And yes, I understand that I still have to claim the pension and all that as income. So this is not an emotional decision. I made this decision several years ago in parts, and there's a spreadsheet behind most of it.
So what does 50 or 100 acres actually mean to me? So when I say that amount of land, some people would picture like a ranch or a compound, and that's not it. Like I said before, it's just a buffer zone and a resource base. Sight lines. If someone is coming up my road, I know it long before they arrive. Water. Enough acreage in the mountains usually means a creek or a spring on the property, your own water source that doesn't depend on the city or county that you live near. And if that creek has enough flow and enough drop, I would love to get a small water wheel or micro hydro setup that would supplement my solar. Running water does not stop generating power when the sun goes down or when the clouds roll in. That's a 24-hour energy source from something that was already there. Communications. Starlink for the internet when I want it, and Starlink for emergencies. It works anywhere you can see the sky. And a proper ham radio setup, not a handheld stuffed in a drawer, but a real base station. HF for very long range, UHF, VHF for more local contacts. When the internet goes down, when cell service goes dark, ham radio still works. Ham radio was around long before the internet, and it'll keep on working during the next internet outage. So between Starlink and Ham, I'm truly never really cut off unless I want to be. Firewood, a hundred acres of hardwood forest means you'll never run out of heat. You rotate sections, you cut deadfall, and the land replenishes itself. Deer, turkey, bear, other small game, enough land to hunt on without leaving your property. Plenty of room for a garden. A half acre garden is plenty. It's not excess. Every acre does something. Every acre of that 50 to 100 acres has a purpose.
So what am I giving up? What am I sacrificing? I have an episode, I have a draft that I'm going to drop in a few days that talks about urban preparedness, about how you should talk to your neighbors. That is a tremendous asset. How communities recover faster than isolated individuals. I believe that. I still believe that. But I'm choosing to trade that. I'm trading proximity to a hospital, proximity to a grocery store, proximity to help if something goes wrong at two in the morning. Not really sure what I'll be doing at two in the morning that'll go wrong, but I guess we'll find out. So I'm trading convenience for self-reliance. And to me, that's a fair trade. I'm trading community by default for solitude by choice. And I'm okay with that trade. And I want to be honest that it is a trade. There is no version of this where everyone gets everything. The question is not which life has no downsides. The correct question to ask is which downsides can I live with? I can live with driving 45 minutes to a grocery store. I cannot live with another 20 years of leaf blowers and people who think volume is a substitute for substance.
So that's my answer. That is a very long-winded response to a very short email. So if you're someone who loves the city, who thrives on energy and people and activity, you do you, that's not wrong, but that's your answer. If you're someone like me who's reached a point where quiet sounds better than convenience, that's not wrong either. Preparedness is not a one size fits all. And neither is life itself. The listener who sent the email asked me to help them understand, so I hope I was able to answer that for them. It's not complicated. I want the land to work for me. I want silence that I don't have to ask for. I want to spend whatever years I have left on my terms in a place that does not ask me to perform, to pretend, or to participate in things that I no longer believe in. That's it. That's the entire answer. As always, please be careful out there, take care of one another, and until next time.
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