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That is what the wife and I are doing, to a degree. We're squirreling away money in places where most people don't have places. We lucked into taking over the mortgage on our current house from her brother (ain't families grand?), and we're less than two years from paying it off and burning the note. Kept the property taxes down by filing a homestead exemption. We've got our general area of relocation picked out, and are slowly ramping up to find the ideal piece of mountain land through tax auctions. Once we have that nailed down and we're ready to pull the trigger, we're willing to take an offer for significantly less than assessed value to utilize toward our down payment, and to hell with the banks and mortgage companies. If we own perc-tested land outright and put down at least 50%, someone will give us a fair shake. About ten years ago, we went through this, but with much less equity. After all the lion-taming and ass-kissing requisite to get the financing secured, the whole thing went into the crapper when we went to the county assessors office to get the plat for the land we were buying, and it was IN A FREAKIN' FLOOD ZONE!!!! LOL In hindsight, I think that was The Good Lord's way of making us hold out until we got a little more marital mileage under our belts with each other, and decided what we really wanted. For us, it's gonna be an open-rafter log home in the mountains with a walkaround fireplace in the great room, on at least five acres of land (with crappie pond or trout stream, thank you), or it's nothing. And I don't care how much longer it takes. I plan on being buried in the back yard, but I don't plan on going yet, so I ain't in no hurry. (But in lieu of my plans to live until I'm a little old Viking, I'll probably have my carcass interred at the veteran's cemetery back home, a short walk from Papa Viking. They can just throw a stone plaque on top of my hole, reading, 'PFC-For-Life Viking, U.S. Army. He never did get anything right.' LMAO)