A lot can happen in 5 years. Especially when you start with a plan. When Farmer Nathan and I got married in 2018 we set several goals and made a list of the things that would need to be accomplished to achieve the vision–buying a homestead. While we had to be flexible and shift as life will always throw curve balls, having a step-by-step plan in place allowed us to keep making forward progress.
On the surface these goals may seem just financial, but the end goal was still a homestead of our own. Here’s how we planned to move from the suburbs to our homestead and a bit of our story along the way. We hope it inspires you to dream big and learn how to break down the lofty vision into mini-goals along the way.
Pay off the mortgage
I purchased an old cottage prior to meeting Farmer Nathan in a “transitional” neighborhood near an up-and-coming small city. I landed there mostly because it was in the price range of a single librarian salary and close to my job downtown. By old cottage, I mean it was 75+ years old and had been a rental house for 8 years. It needed some work to fix up, but we were both blessed to have a handyman fathers that guided and taught us along the way.
Both Nathan and I are debt averse, so we knew we wanted to minimize or eliminate the need for any future debt. So our cottage became our “nest egg” for the homestead plan. By paying off our mortgage, it meant that 100% of the equity in our house could be used to fund our next one. We chose to live small off of one income once we were married and then used the other salary and any side hustle income to pay down the mortgage over the next three years. A blessing we didn’t anticipate was how much our home appreciated in value over that time period. By mid-2021 we had paid off the mortgage and were ready to start looking for land.
Save a down payment
After the mortgage was paid off, we continued to live off of one income and saved the rest to go towards a down payment on the homestead. This is where things didn’t go 100% the way we had initially planned. Enter a global pandemic and the rollercoaster economy that followed. Rural land prices in our area doubled and finding a house on acreage was nearly impossible in our price range. One of the places in our price range had a burned out house on it, not kidding!
Rural land is being snatched up by developers in our area so fast and for so much more money that an average person can’t compete. We had to adapt and be flexible with our plan since obviously the goal of our cottage paying for both land and a house was no longer an option. We decided to allow our cottage to pay for a house build while we took on a mortgage for the land as there were good interest rates for agricultural land purchases at the time.
Build a Farmhouse
From the beginning of our land search, we were open to fixing up an old house or building a house. The sad thing in our area is that most of the old homes would be parceled off from the land and you could either get a house or land, but not both together. The longer we looked, the more we realized that building was going to be the better option in the end. What we couldn’t have predicted was pandemic supply chain issues and the skyrocketing prices of construction materials.
Building a house when lumber and other construction supply prices varied weekly and wildly made it hard to budget or even plan what money we needed for anything. You’d get a quote for say the roof, but the price was only good for a few days when the price of metal changed…again. Could be more or could be less. No one knew. It was a total gamble. HVAC was another tough decision; prices were predicted to jump 30% from 2021 to 2022. We begrudgingly took out a small loan to lock in the lower price for HVAC. Thankfully, we were able to continue living small off of one income to fund the rest of our house with cash. This small loan plays a part in our final goal in our first 5-year plan.
My Employment Status
The last goal on our first 5-year plan? Shifting me down to part-time or no off-home employment by 2022 or 2023. We had practiced living off one income for years and knew it to be a comfortable quality of life that we would be happy to maintain. What we valued more was having time and margin return to our lives. Farming and homesteading take time and we’ve maximized our days down to the hour to fit in raising chickens, growing a large vegetable garden, preserving our harvests on top of both working full-time and the usual household tasks.
In order to step down, a few qualifications needed to be met. 1. Have worked long enough to have full social security credits (aka I’d be able to get a full SS check when I reach retirement age). I met this requirement in mid-2021. 2. Worked long enough to be “vested” and able to take the retirement savings from my employer with me. Met this requirement in 2021 as well. 3. We needed to be 100% debt-free except for the mortgage on our land. Uh oh…this is where that pesky HVAC loan we didn’t want to take out put a minor delay on those plans.
Thankfully the delay was just 6 months as that debt will be gone in March of this year. April 1st, 2023 will be my last day working full-time as a digitization librarian. While I have fond memories of a decade working in the library world, I’m so excited and ready to enter this new season as a homemaking homesteader. Being able to have the time to enjoy our homestead rather than rushing to and from a job off-farm when my heart is on the homestead.
To be continued…
Well, this blog post turned out to be much longer than I anticipated! Kudos to you for reading all the way to the end. We’ll continue next time with what we are planning for our next 5 years. Here’s the next blog post.
What are you working towards right now?