Lot fees vs. mortgage, utilities, and being debt free :)

So we got our first electricity bill dated from June 6 through June 28....$111.  I'm not sure what you pay for cooling your house in the AZ summer... I would imagine that the cost per square foot is higher for me than for someone in a conventional house, but then again my highest monthly electricity bill in my home was around $400 (we kept the thermostat set at 78 degrees). We were on a monthly equalizer plan so we paid $170/month year round.  So, I feel neutral about my current bill, it's not great, it's not terrible.  What I want is solar panels on the roof that will power the A/C.  That is getting a bit ahead of myself, but I know it is possible and we will work on that in the future.

I'm going to share my monthly expenses - McMansion vs. Hideout during this first month:

Mortgage payment/lot fee (includes interest, taxes and insurance) + Utilities (internet, electricity, trash, water).....

$2060 vs. $525

We are now paying $400 lot rent monthly and the fee includes internet (WiFi), trash and water. Combined utilities for these three things was approximately $190/month in my McMansion.  I also used to have a mortgage payment of $1700/month which included taxes of approx $3000/year to the county and insurance of $1530/year.   Our trailer insurance is now part of our auto insurance and is $150/year.  All in all we have reduced our monthly expenses dramatically even considering the added expense of laundromats.  We will realize a monthly savings of over $1500 in fixed expenses.

With the equity in the McMansion we paid off our truck and now own all of our vehicles outright. We own three vehicles.  We have two gas-efficient vehicles - a  2009 Toyota Yaris and a 2011 Ford Fiesta - and our 2015 Toyota Tacoma truck.  The truck is only used for hauling, pulling, and moving stuff. We drive it up the mountain to our land and to our rentals to do work.  The cars are our commuter vehicles for shuttling kids and getting to and from work. We have talked about getting rid of a car, but they have been paid off for a while and they are extremely cheap transportation.  If we get rid of a car then one of us will have to drive the truck more.  However, we want to save the truck for the day when we can really hit the road with the trailer.  If we find jobs that are location independent we will certainly reevaluate our vehicle situation.  As a side note, all of our vehicles have manual transmissions.  That is just how we roll.  We've never purchased a vehicle that has an automatic transmission and probably never will.

We are officially debt-free!  It's amazing.  The other debt we had was the mortgage on one of our rentals (we have three rentals).  The mortgage payment was roughly equal to the rental income each month, but now we will have passive income from that rental.  More later on our rentals and how they came to be...we've been married for 20 years and have rented one or more homes since the early 2000s.  For a long time it has been apparent that we have been working to live an excessive lifestyle. For about a year we have wondered how low can we get our monthly expenses?  Well, we are living that experiment now!  We had projections, but everything is now in motion and we are testing the theories that we talked about for the past year.  It is a very exciting time!