I am here to tell you it is very possable. I am a prime example of it. Up until June of 06 I was doing it on a $10 hr wage. Now i make $15 hr I find it much easier. The key is to live as cheaply as possable. For example my rent is only $450 a month, I drive an older vehicle and so does my wife(occational repairs are more cost effective than $1000 a month for payment and insurance). Other than the house, our money goes strictly to needs instead of wants. It just takes a lot of physcal discliplin. When we started this venture we had 13k in the bank, now we have 22k. So our savings is growing faster than our expences.
By the way I have a wife 1 child and 1 child due any day now. Plus I live in Connecticut which has a fairly high cost of living. By the way, What part of MO do you live in? My little sister lives in Russelville, Which a little south west of Jefferson City. Nice area, and land is cheap compaired to here in New England. I was skeptical too, The class convinced me.
Stu
They say a pic is worth 1000 words. Here are 102 pictures for ya!!!!
http://s165.photobucket.com/albums/u64/hemlock77/

Come down to Morgan County here by the Lake of the Ozarks! I don't know what you do for a living but the cost of living here is much less than up there by St. Louis. You can get land here for $1,000.00 per acre and less, although obviously not lakefront property. I'm looking at 10 acres in Morgan County that has an asking price of $10,500. There are not building codes here and the only permit you need is a perc test for your septic. The property taxes for that parcel are under $300.00 per year.

how are you planing to get your trees to build in MO from a logger or from the site itself, ive been looking at land in MO myself just because of the codes thing, freedom from government BS is my aim at this venture as well as having a awesome home for my family to live in ive also looked at land in Dalton AR as well but im not sure of the codes there yet and the trees from the pictures ive seen wont do for a nice size log cabin.

Mark, I also live here in St. Charles, and I think you're right. I've had all the same fears as you about getting the $$$ to work in my favor. I'd like to build a log home (haven't taken the class yet) but buying land around here is impossible, unless you have the money to buy a house and knock it down. St. Charles is getting old (a "mature community"), St. Peters is full, O'fallon is rapidly filling up and they've made a lot of progress already at turning every available patch of grass in Lake St. Louis and Wentzville into another cookie-cutter subdivision. Besides the fact that when you keep moving farther west but still work in St. Louis, with gas at nearly $3, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot. I've thought about moving to Warren County, even further west, where I have family, but it's building up out there too...and I'd definitely have to change jobs, I couldn't drive that far without turning into a raving lunatic (not to mention the cost).

Short of doing that or moving to Lake of the Ozarks, as one post suggested, I don't know what to do either. If I figure it out, or you do, we'll have to find each other and share the knowledge. Maybe the key is to find a cheap forclosure, buy a home off the courthouse steps or something, like Dave Ramsey and the Rich Dad/Poor Dad books would advise, and then knock it down and start over. Even so, where are you going to get local timber?? Maybe ask a local subdivision builder to save it for you the next time they mow down some woods to make room to build more 5-bedroom, $350,000 crackerboxes. Anyway, it would take something radical and out-of-the-normal-box like that, it wouldn't be a straightforward call the realtor and buy the land, then proceed...unless you have really deep pockets; and if you did, why wouldn't you just move to someplace like Windcastle or St. Albans? It almost seems like you have to be in that tax bracket to compete around here, because every time you see a couple of wooded acres, the next time you drive by it's a Walgreens--or a QuikTrip. It can probably be done, but it will take a very creative and unorthodox approach, and I'm having a hard time figuring it out too.