Latest / Financial Survival Network / Captain Capitalism/Aaron Clarey Going Off the Grid? #5836

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Captain Capitalism/Aaron Clarey Going Off the Grid? #5836 · Financial Survival Network

• 0:00
  Well, you're a homeowner at twenty two with artist sweat equity and what was
• 0:04
  the opportunity cost? Well, if your opportunity costs is college, you're going
• 0:08
  into debt. You're not making money, You're losing money. You're listening to
• 0:11
  Carrie Letts's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information. You just can't
• 0:16
  find anywhere else to thrive in today's trying times. You need the Financial Survival
• 0:22
  Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survival Network dot com and get
• 0:28
  your free newsletter in gift. Financial Survival Network now more than ever, And
• 0:38
  welcome. You are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host,
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  Carrie lets Well, one of my favorite guests from way back when is
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  with us now. You know we talk about getting off the grid, well,
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  maybe getting off the emotional grid, getting off of the societal support grid,
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  the validation there's a lot of other grids out there, and we're going
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  to talk about how you do it. Aaron Clary, aka Captain Capitalism is
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  with us now. Aaron, great to have you back. So Hey,
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  we were talking prequel. Do you think one of the best ways to get
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  off the grid is just to build your own home. Right. Yeah,
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  Now, I built a home out here in South Dakota. I didn't build
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  it necessarily myself. I did a lot of the trim work and all that,
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  so I had someone else pay for it. But because the tradesmen are
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  of such poor quality, not just here in South Dakota but generally the nation,
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  a lot of people I know are having to do a lot of their
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  own carpentry and home repairs and things like that. And I am no Bob
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  Via or Tim the Toolman Taylor or anything like that. But it dawned on
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  me as an economist that, at least in the beginning. I mean,
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  if you go back and do your younger days, when we were in college
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  and things, we did not have the finest of lodging. We were not
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  living in a five bedroom, three bathroom McMansion. And for a lot of
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  young people today who cannot afford housing or complaining about affording housing, I'm looking
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  at how young people I dare not say invest but kind of waste their time
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  pursuing education. And if people instead were to have kind of a I say
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  renaissance or a movement to actually learn to build their own homes, they could
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  do it and there's a huge economic opportunity to do so. And just to
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  provide a theoretical example, instead of you rushing off to college, if you
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  were to stay at home, you know, work a full time job,
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  make some money, but then also go and buy a piece of land,
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  pour your own concrete, build a frame, drill a well, etc.
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  Etc. Now that that is a tremendous amount of work, but you would
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  come up with a house at the end of four years. So instead of
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  slaving away learning about you know, whatever they're teaching in the schools now and
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  not really coming away with any kind of skill or trade. The education system
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  and I'd even say the labor market is so inefficient that the best opportunity young
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  people have today is to just go and build their own homes. Now,
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  I'm sure there's plenty of programs out there how to build your own homes.
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  There's also like prefab homes and things like that. They're even getting to the
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  point where you could take some of these tough sheds like at home depot.
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  Yeah, where you buy it, you install it. We're talking for like
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  twenty grand, but then you have to wire it up and provide the plumbing
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  and all that. It's an opportunity a lot of people aren't thinking about or
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  seeing because we just you know, got horse blinders on. Everyone has to
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  go to college, but you could very quickly. You know, the cost
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  of land might be your largest expense, depending on how much land you buy
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  it. But for young people today who want to actually own a piece of
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  the American dream, it's it's more possible. It's much more possible than you
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  think, especially doing this this BacT way. If you think about unconventionally and
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  so like it kind of it kind of ven diagrams or flows into like going
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  off grid independent living and stuff like that. But the biggest hurdle there is
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  getting off of the thought process where oh, yeah, we all have to
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  go to college, I got to get a degree, I got to go
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  work a job. It's like no, no, no, no. The
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  institutions of education and employment, especially with all this woke bs where it's like
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  it's no longer marecratic. A lot of people, I think, if younger
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  generations are willing to listen to this, or maybe slightly older generations, like
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  I really want a home, I think the opportunities there hidden diamond and the
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  rough to actually go and physically build your own home, and it would drastically
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  improve people's standards of living here in the United States, no matter what the
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  current housing market or job market has to be today for sure. And hey,
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  I gotta tell you, like, because I'm the kind of person the
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  first thing I do is call a plumber whatever and then have them fix stuff.
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  But then, you know, I had a toilet and it had a
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  thing called the phantom flush, where the toilet's minding its own business and then
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  it just randomly flushes because that thing, called the flapper leaks. So I
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  said, well, how hard can it be to fix that? So I
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  go watch a couple of YouTube videos. I go run down to a home
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  depot buy these flappers. I said, you know, not only am I
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  going to change it in that toilet, I'm going to change all of my
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  toilets. And I bring it back. Of course it said universal wasn't universal
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  as a wrong size. To go back to home depot, trade that in,
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  get the other ones, and I come back. And you know,
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  I missed the part on the video where it said turn off your water before
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  you attempt this, and there's a hoss that goes into the float. I
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  knocked that hose off, everything gets sprayed down. I am soaking wet,
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  cursing, screaming. I shut off the water, get the hose back in,
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  fixed, A flapper work perfectly, Phantom flesh went away all right.
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  So I paid a little bit more and lessons and a life experience on that
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  one, and I go and I change the rest of them and they work
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  perfectly. My point is that just about every household operation repair that you want
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  to do, you can figure out. And even if you don't want to
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  be the lead on it, if you find a handyman in you a system,
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  it's still going to cost you less, and you'll know you'll be able
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  to tell from that video that the job is being done correctly in most cases.
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  And there's also like this cottage industry where I think a lot of people
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  are intimidated with you know why, I don't know how to do wiring.
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  I don't know how to do plumbing, And those are the two main ones
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  you might want outsource, but there's a cottage industry of people like building cabins.
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  A colleague of mine is not too far away from you. That's what
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  she is. She's just this little little woman. She's just this little spitfire,
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  five foot nothing, and she builds these. She built lodging. Not
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  it's not the fanciest, it's not five stories and it's not you know,
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  thirty eight hundred square feet, but you can live in it. And going
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  for especially for younger people, you're not married, you don't have kids.
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  Half of you are forecasted not to get married or have kids. And since
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  there's going to be such a high population of single people, I would strongly
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  recommend, especially with the advent of YouTube and self instruction, you'd be surprised
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  with some with some effort and work and practice, how much you could you
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  could actually build and save. And for example, a lot of people are
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  like, well, I don't know the first thing about foundations. Well,
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  there's ways you're gonna have footings or pilings or whatever they're called, and then
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  you have your house. Isn't sitting on You don't dig a hole, you
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  don't dig a basement, you don't put a slab down, but you put
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  pilings down first, and it's on a frame. So there's a lot of
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  cheaper, faster. It's actually just a fascinating world and there's a lot to
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  learn. But if you just pick up a modicum a medium amount of skills
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  you should be able to do I'd say probably about half the work. The
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  main hurdle is going to be ordinances where Okay, you're in a city,
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  No, you just can't build some random little hut you know, you know,
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  you can't go buy a framed hut over at minards and put it on
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  this piece of property. So it's going to result in you're going to have
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  to move, You're gonna have to go to states where you're allowed to actually
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  do what you want with your property. But it's just it's a it's an
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  opportunity and an option. A lot of people that have that, I don't
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  think they realize that they do have. It's a great point, and it
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  can so lessen the cost of homeownership that you know, you build your house
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  for maybe maybe you save twenty five percent In many cases, that could be
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  your down payment on a home, oh easily. And if you can combine
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  this with a little creative finance, with a little rent to own and you
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  actually do the improvements as you're paying down money every month, a portion of
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  your rent goes to the down payment. By the time you go to buy
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  that house and you get the appraisal, it can be worth way more than
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  than you ever thought. You could actually take money out of it in a
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  refinance or your initial finance. Right, well and put it. Consider this.
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  I know this is an ideal world I'm talking about. Require parents like
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  actually parent and parent on a far end of a spectrum, like have the
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  foresight to see this. But imagine you're eighteen, you graduate from high school,
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  and then you and your old man like, Okay, look, we're
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  going to buy this piece of property and we're going to work on it every
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  night, every weekend for the next four years. So while your colleagues and
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  student friends were going to college and learning whatever. At the end of four
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  years, here you are twenty two. You own a home probably with at
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  least half the equity. It's not the nicest home, but you're a homeowner
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  at twenty two with all the sweat equity. And what was the opportunity costs?
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  Like, well, if you if your opportunity costs is college, you're
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  going into debt. You're not making money. You're losing money. You could
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  work again part times all right, making you fifteen sixteen dollars an hour.
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  You're not making the greatest money in the world. But you're financing and paying
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  for your tools and your equipment and labor. It's it's something that yeah,
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  I'm off in the bushes on this when I'm off in the weeds. But
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  imagine that you're twenty two, you're not even a quarter century. You're a
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  homeowner. You got your little hut. It's a one bedroom, one bathroom,
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  very simple. Uh, you're not going to impress women. It's just
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  you may not have a six car garage, but you do have lodging.
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  And from there on out, you're not paying rent, you're not paying a
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  lot of interest on a huge, you know, four hundred thousand dollars mortgage,
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  you're not complaining and painting the rest of it. You gain avernsing so
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  we don't have to listen to that U. And then over time, it's
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  really the land value that's really going to go up over time. Okay,
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  maybe you do find someone, maybe you do fall in love, maybe you
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  do want to start a family. Well, now you have this piece of
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  property that you could sell or even rent out your little hut or whatever,
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  and now you could maybe build a sizeable home for a family. But again,
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  and this care is it's going to have an effect on housing. Uh
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  down the road, with half the population not getting married, you're having kids,
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  You're not in theory that house could last you forever because it's just going
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  to be you. So with half the Americans forecast to be single forever,
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  I think that I mean now already existing would be condos, which is another
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  simple, simpler way to do it. But for those of you, here's
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  one of the main problems. People are like, there's not enough housing.
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  You're right. Financial crisis wiped out a lot of contractors and tradesmen. We've
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  been promoting people to go to major and fluffy bunny studies, and so there
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  hasn't been an increase of the amount of tradesmen. There is a deficit of
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  housing based on the number of people. It's going to take at least a
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  decade to train another generation of tradesmen tradeswomen to come in and do And on
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  top of it, they ain't gonna happen. You're all going to keep majoring
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  in English, your journalism or political science. So the increase of supply of
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  housing is not coming. It's just not. So why not take matters into
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  your own hand and be like old school people used to be and build your
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  own home. And it's you know, going back to the past is the
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  way I think to do it going forward. Yeah, this is the way
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  they used to do things once upon a time. Here Aaron like you say,
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  you're up your basis. This is what we call sweat equity, and
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  literally it's a sweaty job. But the other thing is you might actually have
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  marketable skills after you complete your own house, and people might pay you to
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  do the same for them. You'll be a skilled general contractor. Effectively,
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  and in an average job, general contractor could take anywhere ten to twenty five
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  percent of the total price of the job, just in terms of profit.
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  Well, there's all yeah, and you're one hundred percent correct, because this
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  would be almost like going to college. But you're you're teaching yourself. And
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  right now I am no expert carpenter, but I'm pretty good, especially if
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  I had to learn to fix and do my own thing over here, because
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  the contractors wouldn't or they just don't show up. But you can't find them.
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  I mean, there's just there's such a shortage of them right now.
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  There is um kind of again a cottage industry. For I have a buddy
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  who just he does handyman stuff and he's paid sixty dollars an hour over in
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  Texas because these housewives can't find their husbands, don't know how to do it,
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  or they're you know, they're busy with their own job. And so
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  if you can just become a handyman and show up like assembling furniture, which
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  is not you. You follow the instructions, but have all of a sudden
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  like like you're saying, you can fix a toilet, or you can tile,
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  or you can frame, or you can sheet rock, maybe you can
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  wire a little bit whatever it is, or simply you could go on YouTube
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  and figure it out how to do it yourself. You, by the time
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  you build your own house, no matter all the mistakes you will make,
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  no matter everything that's wrong with the house, you will have a better skill
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  set than ninety five percent of the college graduates. And you could easily A
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  friend of mine he was never going to run with the idea, but he
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  always tinkered with the idea of having a handyman service called what your Husband Won't
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  Do dot com And so I was like, whoa, hey, hang on
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  here now, well, you know, because there's the honey du list,
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  and the wife is always complaining that it's not getting done well right, and
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  anyone could take this idea. It's not like it's not like there isn't enough
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  work to go around, enough for home repairs and handyman stuff. But that
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  that right there, you're right at the end of that journey. You would
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  have a skill set that you would you never you never have to work for
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  anyone again. You could be self employed right off, right off the bat,
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  Yeah, definitely. And uh, like you said, even as a
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  handyman. You know, there are handyman who change light bulbs right, and
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  and then there are handyman who actually can do some demo and renovate a bathroom,
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  do some work on kitchens, things like that. So it really really
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  you keep building your skill level, you'll be more valuable. And uh and
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  then you know, you can take these wrecks, these uh you know,
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  lips that are in horrendous condition, and you can make them beautiful. Just
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  knowing how to delegate and how how to actually get stuck priced. You know,
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  you learn so many skills, not just the physical skill of hammering and
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  nail into a wall, but actually how to do pricing, how to do
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  how to uh yeah, kind of price a project, right, you know
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  how to how to get supplies, how to negotiate all these things. Because
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  Ball of Life is a negotiation. It could take you way further than you
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  ever thought possible. Yeah. Absolutely, Hey, so getting off the emotional
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  grid, Like you said, you don't really follow the economy, you don't
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  follow politics anymore. Basically too damn depressing, right, right right. I
• 16:17
  don't need to hear about transgenitalia. My life is too short to hear about
• 16:22
  that. Yeah, I don't think I want to hear about it, but
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  they sure are looking to shove it down your throat. But but now we've
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  reached a point where the population appears to be rebelling at school board meetings,
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  at a bud light, at at target, right, target target, all
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  of that. So if we reached a tipping point here, I think sort
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  of. Um, I've never never underestimate the laziness of the conservative boycotter.
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  I mean, like, it took it till your children were being taught.
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  It wasn't, It wasn't. It's even worse than that. Now think about
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  it. For a while, kids have been being taught a whole bunch of
• 17:03
  horrific stuff that is not under the purview or shouldn't be under the domain of
• 17:07
  the public schools. Um, especially when it comes to sexuality. H And
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  I'm I'm pro gay and not straight, and you know if if you legitimately
• 17:15
  are, but that shouldn't be taught to eight year old Yeah, I mean,
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  go do you think But it wasn't until your light beer was threatened that
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  now we get all up in a dizzy and some and so I don't I
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  don't think, you know, I don't know if we've reached we've reached a
• 17:30
  tipping point. There's been a change, and there's been a little bit of
• 17:33
  like, oh no, the normal people are waking up and they're sick at
• 17:37
  tired of having uh you know, trans being taught to their elementary school kids,
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  or politics and any one of their products. UM. So, but
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  I don't know if I still I still heard a conservative firm mine like,
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  well I gotta go to target. It's like, okay, so this is
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  you're not You're not going to change your behavior. So I don't have any
• 17:56
  faith in that. Um. But what I do think is that there is
• 18:00
  a sub segment of people who are going to be saying no more I'm not
• 18:07
  tolerating Gillette hating men. I'm not tolerating Procter and Gamble calling men toxic.
• 18:12
  I'm not going to target and I'm not dealing with any of this in my
• 18:18
  entire life because I think what some people are realizing is they don't have to
• 18:22
  accept woke stuff or politics in their lives. And so you're going to see
• 18:26
  a lot of people where they're turning off the TV, they're turning off the
• 18:30
  YouTube in the media, they're not going to movies. I mean, just
• 18:36
  recently, I have no problem mentioning this, but I used to be a
• 18:41
  member of Anytime Fitness. I'm going to be leaving Anytime Fitness because I went
• 18:45
  to a gym and now there's tampons in the men's bathroom. It's like,
• 18:48
  yeah, I don't have to tolerate then, and I don't care. Well,
• 18:52
  it's the franchise ee, and you have to understand that. I'm like,
• 18:55
  yeah, that's right, but I'm done with having tampons in the men's
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  path That's where the line right, right, And so I don't have to
• 19:02
  participate in the society. I don't have to go watch the news. I
• 19:06
  don't have to be culturally aware. I could spend a lot of time at
• 19:10
  home work on my projects, play my video games or whatever else. And
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  I think that's where you're going to see is a migration where people are just
• 19:18
  saying that's it, I'm done. And you will see this kind of lifestyle
• 19:22
  boycott where instead of like oh, Target, darn you to hell, that
• 19:26
  kind of thing like no, I'm not doing Target, and you walk in
• 19:30
  and whatever, you see some kind of political trade based advertising or leftist based
• 19:37
  advertising, or they're not they're not going to know. We're not going to
• 19:41
  see the Little Mermaid. We're not gonna what is the one that Cleopatra Black
• 19:45
  people? It's like, no, we're done. And so I think people
• 19:49
  are going to start pulling back away. Then a significant percentage of normal people
• 19:55
  are going to start pulling back away to their great mental benefit. And what
• 20:02
  they're going to say is, all right, well, what if society has
• 20:04
  lost its mind? What is there to now invest in? I think there's
• 20:08
  going to be people rediscovering themselves and family and community and friends or just the
• 20:12
  outdoors or as we were talking about that not only has the labor market and
• 20:18
  the education market become untenable, society has become untenable, and so people are
• 20:23
  going to start It's like, well, maybe I will build my own house,
• 20:26
  maybe I will go in and improve myself. Because right now you look
• 20:30
  at society, it's the communist would always say, oh, the degenerate what
• 20:37
  was the word? The materialist capitalists, Well they are, Yeah, they're
• 20:41
  not wrong here in this one. It's like, yeah, I don't care
• 20:44
  to be part of a degenerate society. I'm going to go do my own
• 20:47
  thing. So I don't think it's gonna be the majority of people. I
• 20:51
  don't think the majority of Fox News listeners are going to say, yeah,
• 20:52
  you're right, I should build my own home and I am going to boycott
• 20:56
  Target. No, they're still going to go to Target. There's the conservative,
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  libertarian, good old fashioned Americans are still gonna watch professional sports, the
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  participants and owners of which absolutely hate your guts. You're still gonna watch your
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  sports ball, So that that's going to continue on. But I think there's
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  going to be a group of people that are probably more of the libertarian variety
• 21:21
  not only going to tap out of traditional forms of participating in the economy and
• 21:25
  education and building the homes, but socially as well. They're going to find
• 21:29
  something else to do. So it's going to be a silver line to an
• 21:33
  otherwise dark law. But you know, like for exit, you're going to
• 21:36
  go to a salsa workshop in Colombia. You're gonna have way more fun than
• 21:40
  anyone watching CNN while you're there. I guarantee you that's true. Yeah,
• 21:45
  and so I think that that's where where people are going to start abandoning and
• 21:48
  going investing in themselves. Are agreed, all right? So Aaron, any
• 21:53
  books in the offing, No, because I'm having fun like the one I
• 21:57
  do. I try to do a project a year something. Mostly that's a
• 22:00
  book, but this time I put together a course. Um it's called The
• 22:03
  Dad You Never Had. That was my latest project. That's unteachable. So
• 22:08
  we've got a lot of a lot of guys and gals didn't have dads.
• 22:12
  Dad wasn't around, or the dad doesn't know dad doesn't know how to fix
• 22:15
  a toilet ball. So that course is unteachable. It's twelve hours long,
• 22:21
  it's quite thorough. But that's the latest project I had. UM. But
• 22:23
  I am going to be coming up with um uh. My next book will
• 22:27
  be based on sexual economics. Too. I don't want to give away the
• 22:33
  that's the general topics. It's going to be talking about the uh, the
• 22:37
  economics through the lens of the sexes, not not sex, but the sexes.
• 22:41
  But that one is not going to be told twenty twenty four because once
• 22:45
  my house is done with my little projects I got going on here, I'm
• 22:48
  riding motorcycles, on playing poker. All right, I'm gonna go hike in
• 22:52
  the Black Hills. So yeah, you you won't see me doing too much
• 22:57
  real work next couple months. All right, We still find you over at
• 23:03
  Captain Capitalism dotlog. Yeah, you can find me at the blog. The
• 23:07
  blog is kind of dormant. I haven't really written much. Everyone's been moving
• 23:11
  to podcasting a YouTube, so I guess more modernly, go just go to
• 23:15
  my YouTube channel, just search Aaron Claire. You'll find me there, and
• 23:18
  that that's kind of where most of my new material is. All right,
• 23:22
  well we will. We will put the link to your YouTube channel in the
• 23:26
  show notes this interview on Financial Survival Network dot com. We always wish you
• 23:30
  the best, love talking to you. One of these days, I'm hoping
• 23:34
  that I will see a new book out of you. I loved your books.
• 23:38
  They were literally a chuckle a page left hysterically throughout. Just totally fun
• 23:47
  and hey, one day we'll get together do another event. Appreciate you coming
• 23:51
  on. You've got a question for Aaron or myself. K l at Kerry
• 23:53
  LUTs dot com is the email address. Write your comments on the YouTube channel
• 23:57
  below. Aaron, always a pleasure. Thanks Gary, thanks for listening to
• 24:02
  carry Lenz's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the
• 24:08
  latest, go to Financial Survival Network dot com. Financial Survival Network now more
• 24:15
  than ever,