Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm not sold on why this charter house arrangement is better (for either side involved) than just... paying people a salary.
Certainly it's easier to do regular payroll than to buy a huge house and be its landlord (really leaning into the "lord" part) and manage its residents' food + housing + transportation + healthcare needs. Most of that can be purchased with plain old money, and employers can offer insurance to employees without having to be their landlord too.
And then on the residents' side... it's bad enough now that I'll have to get a new health insurance policy if I quit my job, but if I had to find a new roof over my head, too? The power dynamic here doesn't sound great.
Like, in the context of "we want to fund a handful of random open-source contributors": if you have the funds to do this charter house thing, why not just open an LLC and use it to directly pay the people you're trying to support? Why does a literal house need to be involved?
The eventual plan was kinda cool. Offer a vacation destination as a digital detox zone for the Digital Nomad set. They knew a number of people in that space they could have marketed to. I think if they avoided the weird living/working arrangement it would have been fine.
I have lived in something really close to this situation – seven furries, one four-bedroom house in Seattle’s suburbs, one person with a high-paying IT job – and it fell apart. And a big part of why this fell apart is because we never even talked about things like “maybe we should set up a chore rota”.
This also sounds a lot like “fraternities” and “sororities”, which certainly have rules. Or maybe “a commune” depending on how far outside of the city is, and those certainly have rules too. If you want to actually try to make this happen I would recommend looking at rules for those sorts of organizations, and asking yourself “what horrible mess happened that lead to this rule being enacted”, because I can guarantee that somewhere in the history of the organization, there was something that happened for every single rule that threatened the continuing survival of the organization.
It only costs a few hundred bucks a week to have cleaners come over and take care of the house so most chores are a none issue. Dishes and trash were the only rotating chores IIRC since those couldn't be put off between weekly cleanings. There was a fridge for personal food and a separate communal fridge with a group food budget so all staples were always taken care of. Internet, insurance, water, power, were all split equally. There were no problems concerning the money even though some people were messier, some ate at home more, some worked from home entirely, etc. etc.
That's a far flung situation from the one described in TFA though. We lived together to build a community as adults, not for survival. That changes the dynamics.
Related to the reason why I always avoid roommate ads if they advertise paying for housecleaning once a month, because I can only really imagine living with, um, adults.
(this gripe does not apply to people who are working around childcare)
> Big investments generate quite a lot of money — you can draw off about 4% of an investment every year without depleting the principal, because you get back that much or more in interest.
That is not at all what the 4% rule they linked is talking about. The 4% rule means, roughly, from the original source, "95% of the time you won't completely run out of money in 30 years". Indefinite withdrawal from an endowment is a very different problem.
Given how many communes or nonprofits go bad, it's good to have some sort of accountability to outsiders in the form of 'needing money'. (The recurrent debates over the Wikimedia Foundation's ever expanding budget being a good case in point. Are you impressed by what they have done with the many millions of dollars they've gotten in the past half-decade or so? No? Then it doesn't seem likely they're going to impress you very much more if they become so wealthy that they can operate forever off interest and have to care even less what any donators think...)
A safe withdrawal rate would be like annual rate of return - annual inflation - 1% safety buffer.
So 4% - 2% (target inflation rate) - 1% (buffer) = 1%.
If you don’t include the 1% buffer here you have no margin of safety for a market downturn.
For more information about safe withdrawal rates then you probably want see https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/
c.f. cults, "dude ranches", "wilderness therapy", foster homes, asylums, etc; the list goes on quite a ways. All in principle good ideas and in practice... probably... sometimes good and sometimes really awful.
It is hard to differentiate "a nice compassionate living situation" from "a mechanism for abusers to build tiny empires" without a lot of regulation and transparency.
I bet successful private communities, intentional communities, etc. basically speedrun the recreation of the broader civil society they exist within.
(I have heard that this is sometimes aimed at limiting brothels, though that sounds a bit like an urban legend?)
In other words, the places where people pay 1k for renting a room are not usually the ones where a 7 bedroom house sells for cheap.
[1] - https://thecharterhouse.org/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Frankland_(allergist)
• A Technology Freelancers' Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative: <https://institute.coop/sites/default/files/resources/356%202...>
• The Tyranny of Structurelessness: <https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm>
* With dividends reinvested, before inflation
Say S&P dividends are always 1.5%
10% total return - 1.5% dividends (ignoring the quarterly compounding aspect for simplity) = 8.5% in equity growth
Say you wouldn't reinvest them because you want cash flow equivalent to 4% of your principal
4% drawdown rule - 1.5% dividend paid out as cash and not reinvested = 2.5% drawdown needed
You really only need to pull 2.5% with the 4% rule, no? (0.625% a quarter 4 times a year?)
However, inflation is usually 2%, so you need to pull 2.5% + 2% = 4.5% every year on top of the 1.5% dividends being paid out to you? Is this accurate?
A bunch of people get together and buy a house which they can then live in as a community. As time goes on people move in and out, and in general these function as very cheap shared housing with no landlord and (usually) a flat, non-hierarchical structure. There are usually expectations on pitching in to maintain and run the house.
Radical Routes is the org that helped out most of the groups that I knew: https://www.radicalroutes.org.uk/
Lots of homebrew country wines, asylum seekers in a raised bed above the stairs, curry, good parties and messy drama.
Of course you still find the full spectrum of human bad behavior in any place like this, but generally my limited experience was that these places attract thoughtful, creative, slightly weird people and are shining beacons of an alternative way of doing things.
To the note in the article about rules, my weak impression was that the more systematic, sincere, organized co-ops tended to be the ones that survived - hands-off tended to turn rotten after a while. There's definitely some sort of alchemy involved in making the thing successful.
.. and overwhelmingly examples of "people don't do this for that long in the same place". I'm still trying to figure out if that is important.
The real rate, not the imaginary rate of inflation.
