Mortgage-FREE!

Radical Strategies for Home Ownership

Rob Roy

"Yes! It's about time somebody put together a how-to book for shedding those chains of a 30-year mortgage. We don't have to slump through life in bondage. We can live well AND have our freedom, and Rob Roy shows us how in this entertaining, detailed, and well-illustrated book."

—Janet Luhrs, author of The Simple Living Guide (Broadway Books, 1997) and editor and publisher of The Simple Living Journal

This is a banker's worst nightmare—a book that tells you how to live without being enslaved to financial institutions.

Chelsea Green has produced a formidable series of books on innovative shelter. But every alternative building strategy, no matter how low-cost or environmentally benign, requires a complementary financial strategy. the accepted path is to go hat-in-hand to a big financial institution, such as a bank, to borrow a lump sum that is repaid over many years. by the time the loan is repaid, the homeowner will have paid several times the original amount in interest.

The literal meaning of "mortgage" is "death pledge." Author Rob Roy is offering an escape route from a lifetime of indentured servitude. Mortgage-Free! Radical Strategies for Home Ownership is a complete guide to strategies that allow you to own your land and home, free and clear, without the bank. Included is detailed advice about:

• Clarifying and simplifying your notions of what's necessary
• Finding land that you love and can afford
• Taking control of the house-building process, for the sake of sanity and pleasure
• Learning to take a long-term perspective on your family's crucial economic decisions, avoiding debt and modern-day serfdom.

"When someone tells me this book is radical or outrageous, I say 'Thank you!'"

—Rob Roy

"Rob Roy challenges another of life's 'givens'—that your mortgage, like your job, will last almost as long as you do. This useful book will entertain even armchair explorers of alternatives to the standard consumer life."

—Vicki Robin, co-author with Joe Dominguez of Your Money or Your Life

About the Author and Artist

Rob Roy know what it means to live mortgage-free. As director of Earthwood Building School, he has instructed many in the arts of natural building, renewable energy, and homesteading. He is also the author of The Complete Book of Underground Houses, The Complete Book of Cordwood Masonry Housebuilding, and The Sauna as well as Stone Circles: A Modern Builder's Guide to the Megalithic Revival. He gets around. Rob and his family live in West Chazy, New York.

Artist Malcolm Wells is also legendary in alternative building circles for his many books and articles about earth shelters and "gentle architecture." He lives in Brewster, Massachusetts. For more information, please visit his website.