5 HUGE Lies About Tiny Homes (2023)

Introduction

There are some huge lies about tiny homes spread on social media. They make tiny home living sound inexpensive, glamorous, and easy. In this video we go over the biggest lies about tiny homes as well as speak to a family of 3 currently living in a tiny house and why they are ready to give up owning their tiny home to buy a much bigger dwelling.

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Video

The lifestyle of living in a tiny home, isn't, everything you see on an instagram post or a 4k video.

You see on youtube today, we'll be covering the five hugest lies when it comes to tiny homes.

And before anybody starts with me in the comments section saying, she doesn't know anything about tiny home living.

I have somebody in this video that actually lives in a tiny home currently and they're going to be sharing what their experience is so you're, not just getting it from me you're getting it from the horse's mouth that lives in a tiny home.

Currently the top three states with the most tiny homes are california, florida and colorado and not surprisingly, 15 of them happen to be in california.

So recently, I had a subscriber reach out to me because they were trying to get some kind of financing for their tiny home that they were planning on purchasing.

The thing about tiny homes is that you're most likely not going to be able to get a traditional mortgage for it.

So originally we did finance it.

We went through a company called light stream and it's, basically like a personal loan, except it's ultra low interest.

So it's like interest rates like a traditional home.

But the way the loan is funded is more like a personal loan.

Government-Backed loans must be 65 000 or more most tiny homes aren't going to qualify for that.

So some people will try to qualify for something called a chat, a loan or a personal loan.

And those interest rates can be very high.

The best case scenario when purchasing a tiny home is to pretty much buy cash.

And in most cases, I think that's what most people do because they're trying to basically have a debt-free lifestyle.

And we paid our builders, 50 upfront 40 when the bill was halfway completed.

And the final 10 percent upon delivery, you drop the money in your account and you go with this.

So there wasn't like all the loops with like the mortgage process and that's why I compared to a personal loan, just because of the way it's funded, but the interest was still low.

I think our interest was like which I say low, but it was like five something, yeah, which doesn't sound low now.

But no that isn't bad honestly because like, um, I've seen people that have bought, uh like alternative housing.

And they have like seven to ten to fourteen percent interest, depending of course on their credit, but sometimes personal loans can get pretty pretty freaking pricey.

So I always talk about affordable, housing options on my channel.

And of course, people are turning to tiny homes.

But this is one of those big things that people don't understand even though the home is tiny.

The price per square foot is pretty pricey.

A lot of people think that they're like a pretty affordable because they're so small, but people don't realize you can't really get a decent size.

And by that, I mean, like anything above 20 for less than 50 000 and people are like what you pay 50 000 per, but like you're, paying for you know, the space and for its movements for to still be like traditional home construction.

People don't realize it's a lot more expensive, um than they might think.

Yeah.

The build quality of tiny homes is is typically, um a little bit better than other structures that people tend to like liken them to.

And so I think they can't get with the price.

You can get it as low as like a hundred dollars per square foot, but you can get them as high as like 250 to 500 square feet.

It just depends on what you're going to be putting in it.

I've seen some pretty expensive high-end, tiny homes, and as the cost of lumber.

And all the building supplies have increased across the united states.

In 2020.

The price per square foot has gone up even more.

So even though the sticker price may look pretty small in comparison to a regular house.

If you price it out per square foot, you're gonna be paying a lot.

A subscriber just sent me this, super expensive, tiny home at 2.5 million dollars, it's only a two bedroom, one bath at 516 square feet.

Now it has been on the market for 126 days, but it does include 121 acre farm on high rock lake.

It also includes 5, 700 feet of water frontage.

So would you pay 2.5 million for this tiny home, generally when I'm speaking about tiny, homes I'm talking about the tiny homes that you would put on a foundation.

And in my comment section people have these grand ideas of where they're planning on putting their tiny home.

But what they don't understand is the biggest problem with that is many areas do not allow structures that are less than 600 square feet.

Now you may be able to put your tiny home in the manufactured home park, where you pay rent for the lot itself.

But in many cases, you're not going to be allowed to do that unless you plan on taking off the wheels.

They also have rv parks.

But if you have an rv park and you plan on parking it, there where it stays on the wheels, they usually have a limited amount of time that you can keep it there.

So what is your park? Rent the park right here is 370.

So three cents.

Yeah, 370.

A month plus electric is all we pay for here.

And another thing if you plan on buying a pmrv, you tiny home, they're, actually, not considered for long-term use when they are designed they're designed for like vacation homes like a little cabin just live in for a short period of time, not for long-term living use.

So when you go shopping for a tiny home, that's already pre-built find out what specific building standards that they're built to.

So you can have them built to manufactured home standards, which would be under hud.

You can have them built to pmrv standards, like I just mentioned, which would be to rv standards and they're intended to be traveled down the road.

And for short term living use.

And you also have tiny homes that are built to modular specifications, which would be the same specifications as a traditional built home.

Now if you're asking for my opinion, if I was to buy a tiny home, I pick ones that are built to modular specifications.

But that's just me, you just go ahead and pick out the one that is best for your living situation, mostly depending on where you live a pm, rv can cost as little as 39 000.

But that price can go up exponentially, depending on the type of upgrades.

You receive in your pm, rv now that we've touched a little bit on the financing, the other thing that most people do not consider or think about is the insurance.

Now a lot of people have told me, they ended up getting rv insurance, which is fine, because if you're having a pmrv, yes, it will be insured.

But if it's attached to a foundation, then it's considered a home.

But then this is where you have the problem because of the square footage and what kind of loan you have on it.

And if you bought it cash, so you're really going to have to work really closely with your insurance provider to see what kind of insurance you can have on the structure itself.

We had to make a lot of calls call a lot of different places.

And then we ended up finding, um, a specialty insurance company things called lloyds of london.

They uh, they basically do all types of like weird insurance.

So this is like the most normal type they do even as weird as tiny house insurance is.

And so our policy is up there, though, I mean, we just uh closed on a traditional home and the interest the insurance on that is the same as what we've been paying on this, 200 square foot home.

So you can expect like 800 to a thousand dollars for.

You know, the the premium for the year and always make sure that you have the contents inside covered as well.

And even though it's tiny, if you live in a low-lying area, always make sure that you have flood insurance living in the state louisiana, nothing has taught me more than the power of having flood insurance that has the contents covered in as well.

I saw so many people get flooded and yes, they had flood insurance, but it didn't cover the contents inside, and they lost everything.

So think about that when you're doing a tiny home in a low-lying area, it's, not that expensive to get flood insurance if you're having trouble finding insurance for your tiny home, you may want to check out this website insurify.

You can put in your zip code, and it will let, you know what insurance companies are available for your area.

You may also want to check out progressive and lloyd's of london that was mentioned earlier in the video.

Another huge expense that most people do not think about when they live in a tiny home is the maintenance because they think well, it's tiny, how expensive could some of this stuff cost.

But when you have certain items that are specially sized for your specific, tiny home when it goes out, it can be very difficult to find something to replace it.

And if you do those items could cost you a lot more than you were anticipating.

And we did it ourselves.

We did end up blowing tires left and right.

And we got taken to the cleaners on replacement tires while we're out there stranded.

But so all in I think it ended up costing us about a thousand dollars to do it ourselves.

And if you're traveling with your tiny home down the road, you never know when you're going to be losing shingles and siding and other little things that might be popping up and hitting your pmrv, tiny home.

Now a lot of these things are gonna be covered under insurance if you have insurance for your pmrv, which you should, you always, should if you're gonna be traveling down the road with it.

They do have like a trip endorsement.

So every time before we remove the home, we pay like a one-time fee of like 70 80 bucks.

And it protects us for seven days.

So that if anything wants to happen in transit while we're moving the home, we'd be covered, but it's, just like a little addition that you add on each time, you're gonna move it.

Now if you have a tiny home that's on a piece of land, that's on a slab that has insurance, but you're also getting equipment like solar panels, make sure that is insured as well in any of the equipments and battery packs that come with the solar power.

You want to make sure all that's covered, because you never know what's going to happen, but just like any kind of insurance whether it's typical home insurance or rv insurance.

You don't want to make too many claims on it, because then it goes up who wants to pay more premiums, not me and I'm sure not you either.

So if you were to give anybody any advice about, uh, buying a tiny home, what would it be? Because I know that everybody thinks like it's the instagram lifestyle? What is it? Truly? I think for me, I would say, make sure you plan out how many years you want to live in it.

And then what that lifestyle is going to look like.

So originally for us, we built it to how we were when we first moved in it.

So you know, we work different, um, opposite.

Schedules, and so the loft was important for us to have, um and downstairs space was important as well, because I was up early, and he was up late, um.

And so it was good to have that separate space.

But now once we have a baby it's a little bit more difficult to have a loft.

And so that would have changed had we had thought about being in the tiny house with the baby.

Um, I absolutely think you can do the tiny house with the baby, just not this tiny house for us with this baby.

Yeah, to be clear, though we don't have any regrets like even from the beginning before we ever bought the house.

We said, this would probably be like something we'd rent out on airbnb or resell in the future.

Once we have kids, um.

And so now we have a kid so that's kind of our thing, but it has served us very well.

We've been in it for about four years now, we're able to pay off all of our debt, including the house itself over that time.

Um, bill built, um up some money to start moving into other ventures and other projects and so I'm happy with it for sure.

Now, if you do plan on building your own tiny home yourself, I know that there's all sorts of kid homes that you can buy on the internet.

And you may want to really investigate those companies, even though they have lots of pictures, make sure they're actual pictures of tiny homes that people have built in the past and research the company thoroughly.

And if you want to learn a little bit more about tiny homes, you may want to check out this video right here.

My name is christina smallhorn, your real estate whisperer.

And I tell you all this because good real estate information matters.