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BOOK REVIEW:

“Mortgage Free! Radical Strategies for Home Ownership”

By Rob Roy

Published by Chelsea Green  Publishing Co.

Copyright 1998 

Available at Amazon.com starting around $17.50 for a used copy

Review by Sheri Dixon

If you are embarking on your homesteading experience and faced with building your home on vacant land, popular opinion says that you need three things- a banker, a contractor, and an employer. One to lend you money, one to use it all up for you while building your house, and one to pay you while you pay back the banker for the next 30 years. 

In this book, Rob Roy gives hope to the un-lendable and challenges everyone else to do the unusual. 

He takes us step by step from finding and purchasing land, to constructing a temporary shelter, to the actual building of a home that will not only be a reflection of the family who inhabits it, but will be totally or mostly unencumbered by something most people take for granted as unavoidable as death and taxes- a conventional mortgage. 

In 344 pages of clear, sensible writing, Rob Roy not only takes the dream of an owner-built home from the realm of impossible fantasy to stunning reality, but by the time you close the book at the last page, the idea of going the ‘conventional’ route seems positively ludicrous. 

An excerpt shows how tunnel-visioned we have become, yet holds out hope:

“On a world scale, only a small percentage of people live in mortgaged homes, but in North America, particularly middle-class North America, the problem is endemic.  Still, there are millions of mainstream people in the United States and Canada who have managed to avoid the death pledge.”  

For all budding homesteaders daunted and depressed by the cost of doing things the ‘normal’ way- this book is guaranteed to transform you into ‘the Little Homesteader Who Could’.  All together now - “I think I can, I think I can, I KNOW I can……”