Mortgage Free!: Innovative Strategies for Debt-Free Home Ownership, 2nd Edition

by Robert L. Roy

Book Overview

mort-gage (mor -gij)
n. from Old French morgage, mort gage, literally "death pledge"

As a wave of foreclosures sweeps the country, many people are giving up hope for owning a home of their own. They have good reason to turn their backs on the banks, but not on their dreams. In this revised edition of Mortgage Free!, Rob Roy offers a series of escape routes from enslavement to financial institutions,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1603580654
• ISBN13: 9781603580656
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Should be required in high school as part of curriculum

Unfortunately we do not educate our children to be conservationists. Most of them grow up to be consumers, indebted to the banks all their lives through mortgages, car loans, credit cards etc. This book is a must read for everyone and it should be required in high school as part of the curriculum,

Interesting advice

This book contains some very interesting information on becoming an owner-builder. The advice herein acknowledges that this book cannot provide detailed construction information and refers the reader to other in-depth books. While the advice is primarily about the problems associated with building a house, the author also goes off on tangents that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. This can become annoying and seems to take up multiple pages in which the author could instead have elaborated more on some aspect of land-buying or home-building. All in all, this is an interesting read, even though I'm not sure that some of the projects built in the 1970's could be built today, considering modern zoning.

A ray of hope

This is such an inspiring book! Me and my partner have both jobs with very irregular and usually fairly low income, and right now it looks pretty much impossible for us to buy a house the "usual" way - paying mortage, I mean. However, this book has reinforced my point of view that it IS somehow possible to eventually build our dream house, we are not doomed to like in a tiny flat just because we chose to do the job we love most! We can change that, and this book offers a good amount of tips and tools that will hopefuly help us with it. It offers a "plan" to those who really don't know where to start (you can change that plan to your likings, of course, but it's a great starting point). The prices and maths done in this book were not very helpful to us, for one thing because they're (as the author states himself) prices from quite a few years ago, and for another thing, well, we live in Spain, so the cost of real estate in the US are not of much help to us here. But this is not the book's fault. Anyway, I really loved it and I hope to put some of the tips into practice someday!

DIY: for real.

Well, I just finished Mortgage Free! and I'm pumped more than ever to build that timber frame in the mountains. I couldn't be a more accurate target audience for author Rob Roy. I'm a late twenties art teacher and woodworker (and ex-carpenter/blacksmith) that perpetually annoys my friends and family with H.D. Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Neil Postman, and E.F. Schumacher passages. I'm married, have a decent "grubstake" (savings for land and house) no children, and limitless energy. This book is probably the first real estate/building/economic philosophy book that I've read in my short years that truly aligns with my own thinking. It has nothing to do with the TV nonsense of flipping homes, buying and selling foreclosures or short sales to get rich, or how to be a landlord in the city. Its greatest merit is the argument that we can live this life unchained to the typical work-a-day existence of mortgages, corporate ladder climbing and consumer/energy gluttony. This very merit, although a proven path even ten years ago, is untested in our current lousy and price-bloated economy. Roy's main thrust is that we should avoid the death pledge of the mortgage at pretty much any cost-and here I agree. What this book really needs though, (indeed lacks) for me, are tangible case studies and numbers that come even close to the typical prices of anywhere else except the Upstate NY area where the author is familiar. I live in California, but I've also lived in Chicago and Denver. Prices in the West are often ten times the updated prices you find in Mortgage Free! The advantages that couples in the late 60s and early 70s had with open space, low prices, and inheritances, are unknown to me. For the first five years of my working life I made nearly the same wage as my father twenty five years before at the same age... except that everything costs ten, twenty times the prices of his day and the joke of unlimited growth of property values is coming to a rude end. Despite these drawbacks, Mortgage Free! is well worth the money for its honest and sensible approach, clarity and style of the writing, and truthful, enlightened position on energy and economy. My determination to make it to those green mountain pastures in the Sierra Nevada has much deeper roots than this book alone...(and so should yours). So, you should buy Mortgage Free!, read it, and put its good message to work. Thanks Rob.

A guide to breaking free of the bank's grasp on one's finances

When five or six or even more figures in debt, getting out of it seems impossible. "Mortgage Free!: Innovative Strategies for Debt-Free Home Ownership" is a guide to breaking free of the bank's grasp on one's finances, and conquering a plaguing mortgage that all too often dominates an American's life. Rob Roy has a huge selection of tips and advice for digging one's way out of debt, outlining what's truly necessary in one's life, smart shopping in the homeowner's market, planning for the long term, and so much more. Anyone plotting buying a home needs "Mortgage Free!".