Three West

Well, it’s official. There are two teams playing the game of container home building. There are the “Get Rich”s and there are the “Get Free”s. I mentioned in my first container home post I felt there was a hovering aura that some are trying to figure out a way to make money from container homes. The more I searched for container home information the more I began hearing “at or below what you would pay for a traditional home” when referring to container home costs. Why on earth would building a home from a shipping container cost anywhere near what a traditional home would cost unless you get ridiculous with the labor, land and materials? Then what’s the point?

The “Get Rich”s can do whatever they like, however, polluting the planet is not the only issue the world faces nor is it the only issue the “Get Free”s are trying to address by building a container home. I must also add there are some businesses who are providing modular buildings/homes made from shipping containers and have been doing so for a number of years who I feel are not “Get Rich”s because they charge a reasonable amount for the end result. So my issue isn’t the commercialization of container buildings/homes, it’s selling something for $500 that cost you $5.

So what brought this on? The same thing that always makes me alert when I’m trying to do something “unconventional’; running into naysayers or people doing the same thing but trying to maintain the status quo. I have not run into any naysayers of yet but recently encountered an individual who is a part of a group of individuals who are very much trying to capitalize off of container home building. However, I won’t entertain the situation too long. I’d rather use this post to encourage the “Get Free”s to continue on their path and do what’s necessary to “Get Free”.

My interaction with a “Get Rich” gave me incentive to search the web for container home projects made for what I would consider a reasonable cost. This was hard to do because there are few with a website that actually exist (sure there are tons of container home sites, but you will notice 99% of them are all computer renderings of what could be while the rest do not list building costs). So I will do the best I can to list all costs for my container home. I’ll declare $20k to be my budget for this project.

I felt this needed to be addressed because I’ve seen this before in two of the creative areas in which I operate. The first being the music industry. A music contract is nothing more than a high interest loan to fund a musician’s career and I’ve also witnessed many an individual go bankrupt buying studio equipment they thought they needed to be “real”. All that is really needed in a studio is a room with great acoustics, a great microphone and a reliable medium upon which to record. The only reason I didn’t fall into that same trap when I created my own home studio is because I am a performing musician and I knew creating a great sound had nothing to do with any type of studio equipment. Next there was and still is the filmmaking community’s obsessive need to spend obscene amounts of money on films. The emergence of high quality prosumer camera’s should have made filmmaking seriously cheap for independent filmmakers and it did, if you chose to see it for what it is. But the majority still insists on spending large amounts of money on films in order to be “real”. It’s as ridiculous as someone saying, “hey, this diamond is yours for $2″ and someone saying “no way, I’ll buy it for $2000″.

An even better example is when I went to Ghana in 2002. Trading to obtain goods and services is a big part of the culture and economic atmosphere there. While there, I pretty much traded my whole wardrobe for a new one. The outfits there were so beautiful, I was buying them for myself and people I know back in the states. The African outfits were costing me anywhere from $10-20 for dresses, skirt and pants sets. My roommate even had a designer come in, fit her and make her an outfit and that still only cost about $40. When walking in the cities you can see scores of women working on those old cast iron black and gold Singer sewing machines and they were making the most amazing clothes.

I get back to the States and what I or my family and friends can’t fit, I decided to sell for about $5-10 more than what I paid for the outfits. After some time I was wondering why on earth they weren’t selling. These clothes were amazing! A couple I’d met a while back came over and I asked them what they thought. They go to Ghana several times a year and have an automotive business there. The woman quite simply said, “You aren’t charging enough.” I was surprised. Of course I wasn’t charging a lot because I didn’t pay a lot for them. She said “I know, but if you don’t charge enough, people won’t think they are authentic.” I was in disbelief. I reluctantly raised the prices between $150-400 and people bought them! I was disturbed. The same happened with the wooden masks I brought back. It is just a wild bit of conditioning. And it’s also this conditioning that makes it too easy to find yourself drowning in debt and/or being taken to the cleaners financially.

Being an IT professional, I can say that I’ve made what I consider a lot of money over the years, however it has not lead me to the life I desire. In taking a moment to look at where all that money has gone, it has gone mostly to “acceptable costs and debt”. That is unacceptable to me. These acceptable costs and debts include, unreasonable apartment rental rates (and now having been a landlord myself, those rates seem even more unreasonable), mortgage payments on an unreasonable loan amount, car payments (I’ve only had one car loan in my life because I’ve always driven older cars I could buy right out and the interest rate on the loan I had with Toyota was 17%!), bank fees, utility bills (I’ve had heating bills in the winter be $500+ before), and expensive supermarket food. These are things most of us can’t do without. I just feel at this point, we can make better choices over what we pay for, even for the necessities.

This realization is important to anyone who is trying to not only live without causing distress to their environment but who are also trying to improve their own personal existence by eliminating debt, having more access to the money they are working for and needing to work less and spend more time on the people and activities they love. Period.