If you have not yet read Part 1: Does Your Plan B Include a Second Place to Live if Plan A Doesn’t Work Out? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1 we reviewed the three basic categories of Plan B Residences: temporary (to ride out an emergency); semi-permanent (to weather a recession/loss of income) and permanent (replacing Plan A residence with Plan B residence).

In Part 2, we’ll consider a Matrix of Factors that will help us choose the inevitable trade-offs of costs and benefits, and add a category—permanent maintenance of two fully functional residences.

The Matrix of Factors

While there are many factors in any Plan B, I’ve pared the key factors in Plan B residences down to five: cost, control, security, depth of resources and functions enabled. Each is on a sliding scale from low to high. There are costs and benefits to each being low, medium or high.

Let’s go over each factor.

Cost:

While cost measured by price is self-explanatory, this also includes opportunity costs (what else could have been accomplished with the money?), time (the hassle factor of how long it will take to get something done) and labor—how much labor must be invested to accomplish a goal.

There is even a stress cost: how much will this goal/project add to my stress load? Even if the money needed is on hand, the overall cost can be high in terms of time, hassle, stress and opportunity cost.

Control:

By this I mean ownership (of the land, the house, etc.), contractual control (of jointly owned assets, of any hired labor, etc.) and functional control, i.e. residency.  As many have discovered to their regret, it’s possible to have legal ownership/control but end up with effectively zero functional control, as your house might be occupied by squatters or family members who morphed from allies to enemies.

Control is important because…