Dreams and such...

I hate, loathe, owing people money.  I despise making monthly payments.  I am sure I am not alone in this, of course.  I feel a bit insane with the debt cycle.  Buy something to provide stability (i.e. a home) but have to consistently make monthly payments for the major part of your life until you actually own it.

We, like most of Americans, bought our house with a 30 year mortgage and even 9 years later we have only paid off about 20% of it, and that’s with never missing a single payment.  Really!?!  I’d like to be debt free before I’m too old to be able to enjoy it. 

So the wheels started turning in my mind and apparently the hubby’s as well and we started scheming, okay that sounds bad, like we were planning on knocking over a bank.  Dreaming, we started dreaming.  That’s more like it.  Mostly just talking about the “what ifs”, like what if we didn’t have to make a mortgage payment, what if we had the security of owning, out right, our home and land, what if neither of us had to work, full time, outside of the home (homestead) and could spend that time with our family, teaching, loving, working alongside one another.  Those what ifs sounded really good and so we kept on talking about it and how it could come true.

If you have read some of my other post you’ll know how we got a great deal on a piece of property.  That was the big break on our dream.  This is the start.  The first BIG step in the right direction, so what is the next step?  What is our goals?

Our goals are mostly guidelines for decisions we need to make in the future.  A lot of things are up in the air still, we’re not 100% on most of the specifics but here are the goals we have for the future.

Have our land paid for and build debt free.  Now that is a huge undertaking.  We know that it might seem like a big task to build debt free but it is our goal.  We are not looking to build a very large home since we have some crazy belief that many of our family members grew up in small homes and it created more togetherness, more family time and, the end result, a closer family.  That is what we want with our children.  We plan to take a page from our Appalachian ancestry and build a little at a time but more on that later.  Once we get our land paid for and home built we can start really throwing money into savings for retirement, travel, cars, emergencies and never have to use debt again (hopefully)!

Produce as much as we consume, within reason.  It started out mainly as our edibles.  Have a garden, grow our own vegetables and fruit, our own grains, our own animal feed or be able to barter or trade for some of those things.  Have some animals that we can sustainably grow and keep.  Animals like chickens for eggs and meat, a dairy animal like dairy goats or a cow, maybe a pig or two to raise a year, sheep or cow for meat each year as well.   Whatever our land can support without too much burden.  Now are also starting to consider things like our energy needs.  Looking at renewable energy sources, solar, hydroelectric, things we can produce from our own property.  Now I’m not talking about being completely off grid, though maybe one day, but producing some of what we consume would be wonderful.

Having these two goals in mind will help us make the big decision that will be able to provide us with the life we want…but we will have to make some sacrifices.

I’m sure most folks will think we’ve flipped!  We’ve talked about living in a single wide trailer or in a tiny house for the first little while as we build our home.  Things like that don’t scare me, I’m not afraid of making sacrifices.  Sometimes the end result is worth all of the sacrifices that we are willing to make. 

I am just crazy enough to believe that we can make these dreams come true and being able to keep these goals in mind along with our resolve, I am sure we’ll get there one day.