http://forums.silverstackers.com/message-65967.html#p65967 - here is the initial endorsement of the idea I thought that tracking all of these would be a good way to understand when we're near the top.. Happy to update these monthly here, as I'd do this for myself anyway, unless members believe it's not useful to them.. Happy to hear your thoughts.
$1500 per month for food, lmao =D. What do you guys eat? Anyway nice spreadsheet, I'm thinking about putting one together as well to provide an indication on how things are going. How do you handle the part where food also rises as a result of inflation? What if food cost $3000 per month in 5 years time and gold is $2500. Do you keep track of how much it cost for food? Slam
Interesting observations s1lv3r. You've done a great job and I for one would be keen for you to keep doing this. It would be interesting to see how house prices compare in each capital city. I live in a small country town where the median house price is about 800 oz of silver (at today's silver price), so I'm glad I don't live in the 3150 postcode in Melbourne
I was thinking exactly the same thing, thats $375 a week... I guess its reasonable if your feeding the Brady Bunch
Nice and very useful thank you. Not really a SS question but where are the suggestions for 1 acre of good arable land? Country towns I presume.
Ok, I see everybody is jumped up on my food expenses We eat local farmers (and organic food shops) organic/free range produce (eggs+vegies) and organic grass-fed meat. Aside from that we don't eat anything else, so we buy lots of it. And the meat is expensive. But it's very good. But that doesn't stop me - I'd rather pay for the quality food.The choices stemmed from a particular health situations and our beliefs about what we should eat. Btw, I do realise that our food choices are not mainstream and if that bothers anyone, am happy to remove it from the forum's edition spreadsheet Or replace it with whatever the crowd here believes the average food monthly basket.. Slam: Regarding the inflation - that's an interesting one. I must admit I didn't think about it. I actually do keep track of my food expenses, but not by item - by class. So, indirectly, I will probably be able to see the inflation component at play.. But, considering the purpose of the spreadsheet to understand where the gold/silver has topped - I don't think the food will be the major indicator here. Most probably it will be the share markets and houses prices. What's your opinion? malachii & JulieW: The acreage - I don't have that much understanding of the agricultural areas comparing to residential housing locations. So all I've done is went to realestate.com.au and ran a search for farms land, with a house on it, making sure that the description states some sort of either "crop-good land" or cattle activity. Then I take 8-10 cheapest of those and average a price for an acre. Sometimes they publish $ per acre, and sometimes they just give a price per whole property - I decided that price per acre is better indicator. Happy to adopt any other method if someone presents any (i.e. I understand that not all lands around Melbourne are equal for such purposes, but I don't have enough knowledge to spot such areas. If anyone's willing to share specific areas which I should be tracking - happy to do so). And yes, my understanding that all of them are rural/regional areas. Silver is Money: I have some knowledge of Sydney area (lived there for 2 years), however have no idea of others Again, when you say "would be interesting to see how house prices compare in each capital city" be careful - my opinion that there are lots of price areas in a given capital city, so taking an average of all of those is meaningless. I can add couple of typical Sydney sububrs, if you (and anyone else?) wish to. Re: the "small country town" - see Mildura example, 3rd column - yours probably is smaller.. and cheaper!
I think you'll find $ per acre isn't really representative as you'll find that you cant buy 1 acre with a house for that. Where I live in country Victoria, if you buy a farm (greater than 100 acres approx) you'll pay $10 000 per acre (total price $1m) but if you want a 1 acre block by itself you are looking at $200 000+ and if you want a house on it it will be closer to $350 000 and that is for an old farm house. So you see the difference between $ per acre and buying an acre is massively different. malachii
I see what you mean. All my search results had multiple acres in them. I think the minimum was 18 and the maximum was few hundreds. And yes, there was a difference in pricing for these.. If we need to tackle this, I need to make a limitation to acreage size. That means we need to decide what an average stacker means when says "an acreage of arable land" Between 0 and 50? 50 and 100? 100+?
Great work and great progress. average stacker should ideally look for land which can feed at least 10 people. Not sure what size that would be. Look for 2 acres to 25 acres. Above 25 gets too large and thats for forming 'organic' villages ( organic meaning self sufficient ).
Well judging by most of the replies around here, I daresay most stackers would want acreage in order to be somewhat self sustaining, so I reckon the best bet is to think of the amount of land needed to acheive that for a family group. Now I am only half a country lad, so I only have half an idea of what that would be Its my belief that you woud want at least 50acres, as I have seen what can be done with 50acres of good soil... enough for a large and vaired orchard, an equally large vegie patch, and enough spare paddocks to rotate a few grazing animals through. On the other hand if you wanted farm land to make a decent living through farming off..... well you need a lot more. No serious farmer in it for a living will have less than 1000acres to their name. thats my 2cents at least
As someone living on 1.8 acres currently we are flat out trying to keep up!!! I wouldn't suggest you go with anymore than 5-10 acres and that's only if you want to raise animals. You could comfortably have an orchard, vegie patch, soft fruit and berries, chooks and a cow and couple of calves and sheep on 5-10 acres depending on where it is (you need descent arable land with good rainfall). You would be pretty much self sufficient on that. We would be probably 75% self sufficient with foods, liquids, heating etc on our 1.8 acres and there is 7 of us. Would like a bit more space for a few more meat animals but that is probably all. malachii
Ok, so far the options are: 2 to 25 50+ <10 I could probably wait for a bit more opinions to see where's the majority is headed..
I've lived on 200 + acres and it is work from dawn to dusk. Noxious weed eradication, fence repairs, animal husbandry. Better an acre with half in fruiting trees, a place for poultry, a decent garden and room to see people coming. Suggestions invited. Time to move back to friendly neighbours!
But of course, that was the initial purpose Offtopic: Btw, how about these ASEs and maples I asked you about 3 months ago?
Couple of observations: As you may notice, price of acreage has gone up - this is the result of limiting the maximum to 25 acres, based on the above discussion. As was mentioned earlier, the less acres, the more expensive it is (am not saying this is the only cause..). Interesting what happened with the toyota hilux - can't see any reason why the prices would go up that much, so probably initial pricing was my mistake somewhere. I've rechecked all the results this time, we'll see what happens next month (if there's another jump again, it's not a mistake and I'm starting to stuck used trucks! ) .
This info is gold... or should that be silver . But seriously this is a public service average aussy income would be nice but the list would go on... http://www.livingin-australia.com/salaries-australia/
