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Road maintenance is a cost that caught me a little flat footed. 6 years ago it was $7K to get the road paved - my share - due to it falling apart after several of us logged. I also paid about $15K to have my driveway paved.
Then we didn't account for the fact that 4" of asphalt is no adequate to handle the heavy (40 ton) garbage trucks that come every week. So now we need to pave again on top of what we did last time - that would be another $10K for each household, if it weren't for the kindness/charity of one person who offered to pay more than half of it, the rest of us only have to pay $1500 plus what we had left over from last time.
If we pay about $100-$200 per month over the years, that will hopefully be enough for next time.
A gravel road would be adequate, but noisy and dirty (for some - I am back far enough that it doesn't matter) and would still need to be maintained several times a year (regraded) and would develop potholes, plus paving helps the property values. My next place (if there is one) would probably be a gravel road though - at least most of the driveway as I could not afford to pave it unless I won the lottery.
My backup plan is to stay here, put in a greenhouse (which I will do anyway to improve value) and just keep paying on the mortgage. Then when I am gone, the kids will get the appreciated value and they can build whatever/wherever they want - but that is not optimum as it takes time (a decade at least) to setup a place to be self-sufficient.
Then we didn't account for the fact that 4" of asphalt is no adequate to handle the heavy (40 ton) garbage trucks that come every week. So now we need to pave again on top of what we did last time - that would be another $10K for each household, if it weren't for the kindness/charity of one person who offered to pay more than half of it, the rest of us only have to pay $1500 plus what we had left over from last time.
If we pay about $100-$200 per month over the years, that will hopefully be enough for next time.
A gravel road would be adequate, but noisy and dirty (for some - I am back far enough that it doesn't matter) and would still need to be maintained several times a year (regraded) and would develop potholes, plus paving helps the property values. My next place (if there is one) would probably be a gravel road though - at least most of the driveway as I could not afford to pave it unless I won the lottery.
My backup plan is to stay here, put in a greenhouse (which I will do anyway to improve value) and just keep paying on the mortgage. Then when I am gone, the kids will get the appreciated value and they can build whatever/wherever they want - but that is not optimum as it takes time (a decade at least) to setup a place to be self-sufficient.