January 25, 2016

Living The Dream.  Living on this farm makes us so happy.  Is there work to do when we finish our other jobs?  Yes.  We love doing it so much, however, we don't call it work.  Do we spend money building infrastructure to make it pay off some day?  Yes.  We would rather do this than go on vacation or drink fancy coffee, or even go to restaurants (which we do occasionally.)  Did we get the farm debt free by money that was handed to us or an inheritance?  No, we have worked on this goal by being frugal our entire lives.  When we bought our first house, a fixer upper few other people wanted, we were so poor that in order to get it we even had to borrow the brokerage fees from the real estate agents.  However, we paid that off and worked on our house, then sold it at a profit and bought our next house.  We did the same with that.  Our third house was our first house in which we managed to pay off the mortgage.  Believe it or not, we started paying extra when my husband lost his job in a massive layoff and was unemployed for 9 months.  We were so worried about not being able to pay the mortgage, we stopped most spending and started paying it off.  Once we had that done and our last child had graduated from high school, we decided it was time to finance our dream.  We got an equity loan on the house and bought the property, knowing we would pay it off when we sold the house.  We bought a modular home in which only the downstairs was finished.  We then finished the upstairs ourselves.  We move on to a new project every summer.  We are halfway off grid at this point and are exploring what changes we need to make to  get off the grid  the other half of the way.  It's not just about money, as if we change our habits, less money is needed.  We have three children and helped them through undergraduate college so we were all mostly debt free (one very small loan for one of our children).  Life is expensive, but you find a way if you want it badly enough.  If I had to do it over again and could do it with all the knowledge I have gained, I might just jump in , and start small with a house I could add on to as our family grew, without debt.  Please learn from our mistakes.  There is no reason we couldn't have had this kind of happiness much sooner.