Stupid Questions May 2015

Gondolinian

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

buy an acre of land on the outskirts of town

Opportunity cost. 15 years later that is suburbia. (And the current suburbia is a slum. Never buy a house unless you are 95% sure this won't happen!)

If you think that the land will be more valuable in a few decades, that is an argument for wanting to own it. If your solar adventures can pay for just the interest on what you bought the land for, then you have the upside of land speculation without the downside.

1Nornagest11y

That should already be priced into the present value of the property. On the other hand, if you can see the land value going up, that'll have an effect on expected property tax rates; but that should be a relatively minor line item. And not all cities are expanding in that way; if you pulled this right now in the States, in fact, there's a good chance that the cheap land you're picking up would once have been intended for a subdivision before the bottom fell out of the housing market. Meanwhile, the barge full of solar panels will probably have needed hull repairs at least once in those fifteen years, and its batteries (assuming lead-acid, which give the best energy-to-price ratio with current technology, and assuming a cycle per day) will have been replaced two or three times.