> Charter houses could solve this problem neatly. A charter house or two could easily be set up with positions offered to people who are filling these roles, providing them with a minimum of support — at the very least, free rent and free high-speed internet. These people are professionals, so this may not be enough for them — but there’s no reason they can’t get support from the charter house and make additional money in other ways. They can supplement that support by consulting, getting a real job, being a bounty hunter, etc.<p>Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm not sold on why this charter house arrangement is better (for either side involved) than just... paying people a salary.<p>Certainly it's easier to do regular payroll than to buy a huge house and be its landlord (really leaning into the "lord" part) and manage its residents' food + housing + transportation + healthcare needs. Most of that can be purchased with plain old money, and employers can offer insurance to employees without having to be their landlord too.<p>And then on the residents' side... it's bad enough <i>now</i> that I'll have to get a new health insurance policy if I quit my job, but if I had to find a new roof over my head, too? The power dynamic here doesn't sound great.<p>Like, in the context of "we want to fund a handful of random open-source contributors": if you have the funds to do this charter house thing, why not just open an LLC and use it to directly pay the people you're trying to support? Why does a literal house need to be involved?
You want rules, trust me you want rules.<p>I have lived in something really close to this situation – seven furries, one four-bedroom house in Seattle’s suburbs, one person with a high-paying IT job – and it fell apart. And a big part of why this fell apart is because we never even talked about things like “maybe we should set up a chore rota”.<p>This also sounds a lot like “fraternities” and “sororities”, which certainly have rules. Or maybe “a commune” depending on how far outside of the city is, and those certainly have rules too. If you want to actually try to make this happen I would recommend looking at rules for those sorts of organizations, and asking yourself “what horrible mess happened that lead to this rule being enacted”, because I can guarantee that somewhere in the history of the organization, there was something that happened for <i>every single rule</i> that threatened the continuing survival of the organization.
Cool general idea, some of the specifics around $$ numbers are a bit... off<p>> Big investments generate quite a lot of money — you can draw off about 4% of an investment every year without depleting the principal, because you get back that much or more in interest.<p>That is not at all what the 4% rule they linked is talking about. The 4% rule means, roughly, from the original source, "95% of the time you won't completely run out of money in 30 years". Indefinite withdrawal from an endowment is a very different problem.
I generally love this idea but, historically, the risk with people building private communities that they're in charge of is that they may or may not turn out to be abusive tyrants and you can't do much about it and probably the abusive tyranny will come out thirty years later with a lot of "I told you so"s.<p>c.f. cults, "dude ranches", "wilderness therapy", foster homes, asylums, etc; the list goes on quite a ways. All <i>in principle</i> good ideas and in practice... probably... sometimes good and sometimes really awful.<p>It is hard to differentiate "a nice compassionate living situation" from "a mechanism for abusers to build tiny empires" without a lot of regulation and transparency.
One challenge (among <i>many</i>) is simply that many areas limit the number of unrelated people that can live in a house. When I owned a house in a college town in the Midwest many moons ago that number was 3, for instance.<p>(I have heard that this is sometimes aimed at limiting brothels, though that sounds a bit like an urban legend?)
One thing OP seems to gloss over is that there is a strong correlation between places where people want to live in, property prices, and rent prices.<p>In other words, the places where people pay 1k for renting a room are not usually the ones where a 7 bedroom house sells for cheap.
On a tangent. My partner worked for several years as a healthcare assistant at the (possibly?) original Charterhouse[1] in London. One of the infirmary residents he looked after was Dr Bill[2] - a truly remarkable and fascinating person who was still studying and working well after his 100th birthday!<p>[1] - <a href="https://thecharterhouse.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://thecharterhouse.org/</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Frankland_(allergist)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Frankland_(allergist)</a>
If you are curious and sincerely interested in this general concept, check out what we are doing at <a href="https://focusretreatcenter.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://focusretreatcenter.com</a> and ping me if you want to set up a prototype trial run scenario for your group/concept. We already did the "buy a giant house for cheap" part and are still experimenting on exactly what to do with it.
> Even if you did nothing but stick the money in an S&P 500 index fund, the historical average is about 10% per year.<p>* With dividends reinvested, before inflation<p>Say S&P dividends are always 1.5%<p>10% total return - 1.5% dividends (ignoring the quarterly compounding aspect for simplity) = 8.5% in equity growth<p>Say you wouldn't reinvest them because you want cash flow equivalent to 4% of your principal<p>4% drawdown rule - 1.5% dividend paid out as cash and not reinvested = 2.5% drawdown needed<p>You really only need to pull 2.5% with the 4% rule, no? (0.625% a quarter 4 times a year?)<p>However, inflation is usually 2%, so you need to pull 2.5% + 2% = 4.5% every year on top of the 1.5% dividends being paid out to you? Is this accurate?
Yes, 10% per year return “for free” by just investing it all into the SP500; except the rate of inflation makes that negative, and you’ve also got to reinvest any return to see this “10%”.<p>The real rate, not the imaginary rate of inflation.