Well, I guess I'm obvious, but it's really nice to see this conversation! I've been around the forum for years and had no idea there were so many of us.
We are not yet off-grid but may do it eventually. We almost did it immediately when the electric co-op first quoted us $30k to run power up here, but they backed off fast and "remembered" they could put in a long buried run for $1,800 when I turned to my husband and said, " that's more than what I priced a solar setup for, so let''s just go off-grid."
Snow's not much of an issue for us this far south; we go when it's minor, stay home when there's much to it. We do now have a 4wd vehicle as our primary, and I don't think we'll be going back. I could not make the hike in to the house for a while with a back injury (our usual issue is mud, not ice). We do plan to pave the road in before we turn 70 - I don't want my husband having to shovel on a steep slope at that age, but paving will run us over $20k, so it's on the back burner for a few more years. It takes priority over the solar, though that's a shame since we set the house up for solar when we built. We do have primary solar heat because we designed that in with sun angles and high thermal mass.
Our electric is actually not bad because it's TVA; we pay 8 cents a kWh. Water is county, first time in a long time we've not been on a well, and the bill is always under $20 a month. No sewer, of course, and my husband can and has done minor septic work himself. We'll hire someone with a truck to pump, but that's all.
No cable available, probably never will be, and of course no gas. We're all electric. DSL for Internet, and it saves more in fuel going in to work on days I work from home than we spend. Comes with a bare-bones landline which we can only use for incoming calls and 911, but we do get a surprising amount of mileage out of the incoming since our cell reception is extremely spotty. Skype for outgoing because we can get calls to phones for $30 a year.
Shopping is difficult, for us even online since we don't have postal delivery and UPS and FedEx only come up the private road when they feel like it and otherwise dump packages down by the public road to be stolen. So we don't use them, and therefore don't order anything that won't deliver to a PO box.
However, Walmart's prices here are better than the ones most posters on the forum report at Costco, and for even better prices there's a Sav-a-Lot in a town about ten miles off. Just don't expect to be able to buy anything "exotic," like coconut milk. :)
Medical specialists are 50-90 miles off. Airports are over 100, though there is a tiny one at 45. I've walked down onto the tarmac and climbed the stairs into a couple of planes there for work trips, but work gets grumpy about the extra costs, so I often take a shuttle from work to the bigger airport.
There are two private companies that do trash pickup out here, and we've hired one of them. At $212 a year, we think it's worth it. We haul a bag down to the road when we're going somewhere anyway, because while it's only about a quarter mile, it's almost 300 feet of elevation change over that distance.
I wouldn't change it. Well, maybe the UPS and FedEx situation, but not most of it. I definitely wouldn't move back to a city for any reason.
No public transit of any sort in at least a 40-mile radius. I think that's the only increased cost we have though, transportation. Everything else costs us less than it did in the city years ago. If we chose to try to live like people do in a city, of course it would cost more, but we don't.
