Financing An Earthship

Financing for your home purchase, or refinancing your existing home can be a complicated process.

Get help here.

If you've read the closing chapter of Earthship Volume II, you know our stance on banks and most money-lending institutions. We've seen a number of clients waste hours, weeks, even months trying to convince a bank to invest in them. Investing that much effort in yourself and your own saving program can yield much more rewarding results.

We recommend trying smaller, shorter term loans: personal loans, small business loans, and lines of credit if you must borrow money - any OTHER kind of creative financing.

Above all, don't bite off more than you can chew. Build a little with the money you have, move in and start saving on living expenses. Use the money you're not spending on rent to add on as it's possible.

We've never seen it take as long as the 20-30 year mortgage for the Earthship owner to get comfortable.

Earthship Global Model greenhouse

- First Ever Earthship myEnergyLoan
- Earthship Forums: Financing
- Earthships Land in Conventional Real Estate Market
- Energy-efficient Homes offer Loan Prospects
- Permaculture Credit Union
- Updated Green Building Tax Credit Guide
- Reduce Expenses

Click to read more Earthship Financing articles.

If you just can't save or wait or sacrifice, go to the bank. A mortgaged Earthship is better than no Earthship at all. But, while getting bank financing for any home is a lot of work, getting financing for an Earthship can seem an almost insurmountable task in locations where the building technique is unfamiliar.
We've asked all our clients to keep us posted on financing possibilities and have recently come up with some great new opportunities.

Banks & Credit Unions with experience lending on earthships..

Volume II excerpt: financing earthships
Unconventional Housing: Energy Efficient homes offer loan prospects.

Arizona Financial Incentives for solar and wind generated electricity.

Banks provide both construction and long-term loans. However, they often have more difficult underwriting guidelines and more policies regarding owner builders than credit unions and mortgage brokers.

Credit Unions provide competitive long-term loans and in some cases construction loans also. They often provide a construction to permanent loan which reduces the loan fees by combining the loans into a package loan.

Mortgage brokers can usually get very competitive rates for long-term mortgages,however they often don't provide construction loans.

Private financing for owner builders is common for a construction loan because formal lending institutions often restrict such loans to those who are licensed and insured contractors. However, this usually means higher interest rates.

Savings/IRA-Savings are an important aspect when building a house. The more money that you have at your disposal the more favorable in the eyes of the bank.

Collateral such as property that you own or equity in your existing home, can be used for a construction loan.

Family/relatives can also be a source construction money...

Another thing to keep in mind is that the cost of building Earthships themselves is likely to go down, not up. This is simple economics: as long as something isn't mass-produced it will be expensive, but the more people become "pioneers" and invest in the concept, the cheaper it will eventually become. The same will probably NOT be true about land.

So my advice to anyone who dreams of an Earthship is: buy your land now, and build the Earthship later if you must. Find some cheap land even if it is far away from you, and hoard it against your future. It won't cost you much per month and you can make up the difference by sacrificing something else. Trust that meanwhile prices of things like solar systems will continue to come down, and new innovations be made, and eventually you'll be able to build that Earthship. Start collecting tires and cans meanwhile. Do what you can.

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Earthship Global Model greenhouse

 

 

 

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Please contact us for help with financing your earthship

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Discuss (1 posts)
Financing An Earthship
May 09 2010 07:01:54
from Facebook:

Chad Castellanos:
If we had a true free market earthships would probably lead the way to the future as banks would compete to finance the future innovation of peoples immediate needs and wants. Unfortunately we have a system that subsidizes politically connected industries and ideas whether it be to protect the rich corporations or the poor individual. As a result, banks are now dead zombies propped up by the government that will continue to socialize losses and privatize profits.

Nothing has changed from one administration to the next. They will continue to subsidize conventional housing (with a minor "green" nonsense incentive) in a time when there is a gigantic oversupply of unoccupied conventional houses that no one can afford. It is no mistake that the government has to insure over 75% of residential loans at the present time. This is because the free market would not supply credit to an industry that allready has an oversupply of houses that no one wants.

The free market would force industries and people to make tough decisions on which direction the housing industry would have to go. It would force people to decide if they would like a home that heats and cools itself, produces its own food, and harvests its own water, or one that is a "cracker box" that needs constant cash flow and relies on centralized utilities. Unfortunately the politicians keep shoveling money into an industry that has been dead for a very long time, and only remains alive through tax payer subsidies. The people that are encouraging this reckless behavior of adding EVEN MORE supply of houses to the market then scratch there heads wondering why houses continue to lose value?

I believe that Earthships on the other hand are a useful commodity that will ultimately defy conventional housing price declines, and satisfy the majority of peoples needs and wants. It is unfortunate that hardly anyone knew what the hell one was before they gambled in a casino of wallstreet, and government housing.

Thanks to the internet which is fortunately so far a very unregulated technology that the government has no subsidies or guarantees for earthships have been able to poke their heads into the mainstream. Earthships are almost like a new discovery that no one knew about until the internet started to spread the message. People are absolutely amazed that there is a way to heat and cool a building without using any utilities yet Michael Reynolds helped pioneer catching this natural phenomena almost 40 years ago. The free market gives people what their immediate needs and wants are, and unfortunately the ideas of Michael Reynolds were suppressed for way too long by government bureaucracy and probably corporations not wanting to deal with true competition because they knew people would go to the most logical solution (which is an earthship). Fortunately ideas are contagious and if we continue to have the internet free from regulation this idea is going to go mainstream because of pure common sense.
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