well, for us we bought 3 lots in a small town of 2,000. We bulldozed everything and built a "tiny house" (large size for tiny house).
Land was $45K, house was $75K. We have money to pay it off, but at 3.79% we are letting it ride for a bit.
All our utilities (heat, water, electrical, sewer, trash, internet/phone), including property taxes, city tax/fees and insurance come out to about $115 a month "at 100% capacity". But we aren't at full capacity.. yet. We're actually living in a big city right now. We plan to move out there once we save some more.
Why did we buy it?
we want to live in a small town. Both of us are six figure professionals with high stress jobs. We want to "retire early" to a quite place with low cost of living.
It's hard to rent in small towns and most place to rent are shitty trailers.
We wanted a yard. We have enough property for a very nice hobby garden
It's close to family
It's far away from city life
We can walk to any point into the town within 10 minutes max. That is, we can get rid of our two cars and expenses associated with them.
We reduce our propane bill to $0 if we burn wood (it can heat up entire house). fire wood around here is generally free, but not as convenient as propane.
We can reduce our food bill by about 1/5 of what it is now. Food is cheaper there due to lower cost of living and everyone is farmers. Farmers sell fresh foods at rock bottom prices and lastly our garden helps. Fish is great (but we try not to eat too much). Lots of cheap [or typically free] venison from the hunters.
Our electricity is much cheaper, almost nothing. We have two solar panels which feed back into the power company, during high summer months they actually issue us a small credit
We like hiking, camping and ATVs. We can walk out our tiny house and walk 3 blocks to a trail head that leads to state park.
No crime.
Every month we work up here we can pay for a year (probably more closer to two!) of living down there and being "idle"
As far as freedom, we just leave. We actually have [working!] shutters on our house, we close them up for storms and turn everything off and never had a problem. We have friends and family down there that will watch our place. We do plan to travel a lot once we "early retire", but thought it would be nice to have a "base camp".
To your question of "stop accumulating", that is the plan. The biggest problem right now is health insurance and also we are in peak of our careers. We plan on stopping once our streak ends... Health insurance though, really expensive to buy on your own. We are both very healthily and fit, but it would cost us more than all other expenses combined [we live in the USA].