Home » Latest » Instagram » Dan Price’s underground home, art & philosophy on $5,000/year

Dan Price’s underground home, art & philosophy on $5,000/year

2

InfoSearched 95 0 Instagram, Outdoors

7.2

SaveSavedRemoved 0

An artist in eastern Oregon has been getting by on $5,000 a year — and living better for it.

Dan Price hasn’t held a conventional job in decades, and he doesn’t want one. Videographer Kirsten Dirksen tracked him down in Joseph, Oregon, in September 2015, at a river meadow homestead where he’s spent years perfecting the art of needing almost nothing. What she found was a hand-dug underground shelter, a zine he draws by hand, and a budget most people spend in a single month stretched across an entire year.

• Price walked away from a suburban life, mortgage, and career after his marriage collapsed decades earlier, and has lived on roughly $5,000 per year ever since.
• His underground dwelling is a hand-dug, circular shelter about 8 feet wide and 4 feet high, reinforced with pine supports, earthen walls, heavy plastic sheeting, and sod.
• He leases the meadow plot from a local family for about $100 a year in exchange for handling seasonal maintenance on the property.

The Hobbit Hole He Dug By Hand

The centerpiece of Price’s compound is a shelter that looks pulled straight out of the Shire — dug into a hillside, low enough that standing upright isn’t an option. At roughly 8 feet across and 4 feet tall, it forces a stooped, deliberate way of moving that mirrors the rest of his life: nothing wasted, nothing extra. Price framed the interior with pine supports and packed the walls with earth before sealing the whole thing with heavy plastic sheeting and a topping of sod, so the structure sheds rain and holds heat without a furnace or a mortgage payment.

Readers who’ve followed the underground-housing trend on this site will recognize the instinct — the same one behind Australia’s underground homes and the whimsical build featured in this adult-sized hobbit-hole treehouse. Price’s version, though, isn’t a design statement. It’s a cost-cutting tool. The $100-a-year lease he pays the local family who owns the meadow is, by his own accounting, close to the entire housing line item in his budget.

A Compound Built From Micro-Structures

Price didn’t build a house. He built a scatter of single-purpose structures across the meadow: an open-air shower rigged along the river, an outdoor cooking station, and a tiny detached studio shed set apart from the sleeping quarters. Each piece does one job, and none of them costs much to run. A modest solar panel and simple battery bank cover what electricity he actually needs — charging a phone, running small electronics, keeping a light on after dark. There’s no generator, no propane tank, no utility bill.

Decades of living on about $5,000 a year, by prioritizing autonomy and creativity over material accumulation.

Moonlight Chronicles and the Case for Low Overhead

The studio shed is where Price actually works. It’s where he writes and illustrates Moonlight Chronicles, the handcrafted zine and published body of work he’s kept going for years, using micron pens and watercolors rather than a laptop. That’s the whole point of the setup around him — the underground room, the $100 lease, the solar trickle-charge — all of it exists so he doesn’t have to trade his hours for a paycheck. Cut expenses down far enough, his logic goes, and you buy back the one thing money usually costs you: time.

Price’s approach sits alongside a growing catalog of stripped-down, off-grid living stories, including this radically simple permaculture life on a quarter acre, where the same trade-off — less overhead for more freedom — plays out on a different plot of land entirely.

Dirksen’s camera doesn’t dwell on hardship, because there isn’t much to show. Price still puts out issues of Moonlight Chronicles, still leases the same meadow for the same $100, and still spends his afternoons with a paintbrush instead of a punch clock — which, for a guy who quit the whole conventional-career script decades ago, is exactly the point.