$375/mo Tiny Home Lot Rent Unlocked a Debt-Free Retirement

We're Sean and Heather. This tiny home has allowed us financial freedom and to travel our great country. We were able to sell our home and, with the proceeds, come out without a mortgage. To be able to go ahead and retire is a big deal. So as you enter our tiny home, immediately we come into our living area. What we've really enjoyed is it's set up for our hobbies of watching movies and enjoying TV. And we're able to seat five, six people. As we have our family or friends over, we can eat in here. We can set up. A lot of times we'll go out on the deck, set up a table there and sit by the fire pit and eat dinner. Depending on the weather, we can be inside or outside. We were very fortunate that this was built just exactly the way we would have wanted it with the TV in the middle and great storage around. So the adjustment from our four-bedroom home to this, what we found was really interesting was that when our kids moved out, we lived from living room to kitchen to bedroom bathroom. And that's exactly what we have here. So we really haven't felt a difference in our lifestyle or our space. Being able to work remote, I'm able to work on my laptop from the couch or chair, even the bedroom. Or when it's nice out, I get out on the deck and sit in the sun and can work there. And it's really been pleasant to be able to be productive and yet be in a great home space. Just past the living room is our kitchen. Come on in. Transitioning to a tiny home and the different sizes of kitchens, we had a fairly large kitchen in our other home. That's been an adjustment here. There isn't as much space. And in the beginning, it was a little tricky. We're really adjusting and finding it easy to navigate now. I don't feel like I lost that much space. Even though there was a lot of space, you still kind of keep yourself inside of a box when you're prepping and preparing your meal. In our prior home, we had a lot more cabinet space and most of our cabinets were full of things that you just gather over time. So yeah, we had to do a really big purge, gave a lot of it away. And then when we moved here and got things put in, we had to do another purge when we got here. So we really just kept the very basics, but honestly, we haven't missed any of it. Just like most of the things we got rid of, you realize you don't really use those things. You just store those things. We're really grateful that the appliances are pretty much full-size. So that wasn't a big adjustment for us. So we have really a bigger microwave in our tiny home than we actually had in our larger home. Full-size stove. We have a full-size refrigerator, ice maker. So that we love. Full-size washer dryer, which obviously is a must. It's not something that I wanted to give up, moving to a tiny home. Sean works from home. They don't really make a lot of noise. They do have a cute little upbeat song when they're done. And I always say they're trying to trick me into thinking laundry is a lot of fun. But yeah, they're pretty quiet. As far as where they are is okay with me. It really feels like this would be wasted space if we didn't have something here. And so it's a very natural place to have it in our tiny home. We did have to downsize here on our dishwasher. It's much smaller. We do have to do our dishes more often. And so sometimes we'll forget and wake up the next morning and not have a bowl. The size of our sink, I love it. It's actually, again, like the microwave, bigger than the sink I had in our regular home. So I love the style. I love that it's deep and wide and it gives me plenty of room to work. I love that it's a touch faucet. That's something I've never had before either. All in all, downsizing to a smaller kitchen has not been a big issue for me. It still functions in the way of a large kitchen and all of those aspects that you use in a large kitchen are still here. And we love to be in our kitchen, prepping and using it in all the ways that we use our large kitchen. Where the tiny home would be, it just so happened that when we found this home, it was already in a tiny home community. Financially speaking, we were able to sell our home and with the proceeds come out without a mortgage, pay off all of our other debts and give us the opportunity to put a big chunk down on the van and to be debt-free. And so that allows us now for Heather not to have to work. To be able to go ahead and retire and be able to get out in the van and travel and go now while we are still young enough to do that and enjoy that is a big deal. The lot that we're on here, it's 375 is what we pay. That's not just to have our unit here. It includes the trash and the water and the ground. And we only pay for electric. In our 1900 square foot home, the electric bill was typically like peak summer. It's gonna be near $200. When we moved here, it was peak summer and our first electric bill was, I wanna say $65. That's a big, big difference. Welcome into our bathroom. The dimensions of the bathroom are probably about seven or eight feet by probably six feet. Our bathroom that we had prior to this was very similar in size, one sink. And so that's what we had there. So that hasn't been a big adjustment for us. This is our bathroom sink and there's plenty of room to get ready in the morning. And across from that is our shower. It's a large shower. We love that. There's a lot of room to move around in it and it has a rain shower head, which we love. In a tiny home, you've gotta figure out a way to store what you need in the space where you need it. We just really try to even keep our towels stored inside of our shower, which is another great reason that we have the rain shower head because it doesn't spray onto the towels. So we just contain all that inside the shower and don't have to spill out with hanging our towels anywhere else. And then again, in our cabinet, it's a really good size. It's tall. We've done a lot of bin storage so that all those small things that you use in your bathroom don't spill out and stay organized and contained. At the back of our home is our bedroom. Here, we've actually enjoyed space that we didn't think we would have. We have a king-size bed. We have ample storage underneath, built all the way around under the bed. We have a full-size closet with a cedar chest in it that was bigger than we thought it would be. We were able to purchase additional storage for clothing in this unit. We have the electric screen for a projector system so we can enjoy watching movies in bed or fall asleep to that. And also, hanging a TV in here is challenging because of the big windows. So the projection screen also serves as a blackout screen if you wanna sleep in. On both ends of the house, we have mini split AC units, which, surprisingly new to me, but are very efficient and work well, both heating and cooling. And outside our bedroom door is our back patio, which we enjoy because of the nature behind us. So we can sit in the front, but in the back, we get nothing but trees and animals. We have a generator system in the back. So if we lose power, we can rock right on and have power. So the outside of our tiny home is what we fell in love with immediately. We love the brick and the wood with the vaulted roofs. And then we were fortunate with our property owners, Wayne and Kalana, to be gracious enough to let us put a carport and garage up beside it because we knew we wanted a van for traveling. We didn't know how tall it would be. So I had to build it tall enough for any Sprinter that we bought. And then I put a 10 by 20 garage in the back for our motorcycle to be stored in a workspace there. The pinnacle of tiny home living for me is twofold, I think, because I do enjoy the simple life. And somehow that just resonates with me and my spirit. And I just enjoy that compact, simple space, but then also the tiny home as what has made van life attainable. And so for me, it's that freedom to get out and to see the world. Thank you for taking the tour of our tiny home today and our journey to financial freedom and adventure. If this type of lifestyle suits you, check out the links below and maybe even Dogwood Hills here in Nacogdoches, Texas.