I had owned until yesterday a total of 220 acres in five 40 acre tracts and one 20 acre parcel. I sold all of it but the home 40 acres yesterday. So here I am Today as a small 40 acre Homestead/Farmstead. A lot of people wait until they are my age to make this move. So I will pose this. This is my home 40 acres as it was in 2007 when I bought it. I had Exactly $21,000 available to start building my Homestead on it. It was RAW Land with no utilities and nothing on it except the falling in depression era house on the South Side. The only thing worth keeping from that house were stone blocks it sat on, the well and the stone cistern about 3000 gallon capacity. Say this is your brand new dream land farmstead/homestead and you have the same $21,000 budget to get it up and running. What would you do with it? This is the same land in 2020 and what it looked like in 2022 prior to the big projects. Say you have the same $300,000 budget available to spend on upgrades and projects that I had in 2022. All of the 300k has to be spent on the land or improving your position on the land. What would do and spend the money on? At this point it has 3 barns, one 30x96 high tunnel, a larger market garden around the high tunnel, A small 20 fruit tree orchard, a large hen house and yard, a 12x32 commercial kitchen, a 12x32 Warehouse, a 16x46 Cabin, two old never go dry wells one by the Red Roof Barn and one by the South Barn and a 3000ish gallon cistern by the South Barn, and the center and to the East fenced and cross fenced with Sheep and Goat fence topped with 2 strands of barbed wire and 2 more strands at 4" and 8" from the base for hog deterrent. Fenced like that from the South Dirt Road to the north tree line. It has a 1200amp mainline grid electric and two 400amp services with room to add another 400amp service. It has Rural Water that runs to the Commercial Kitchen and the Cabin. Had to have the Rural Water lines to open the commercial kitchen. It has a large aerated Septic tank for the Kitchen and the Cabin. That is what you have and the money available to work with. The Sat is due to pass over again and take click clicks in May 2023 and it will look much different again when it does. Pretty sure we all know via my post what I did and will do in 2022 and 2023 with the $300,000 budget. I am curious what everyone else would do with it. Yes I sold off 180 acres to my friend and row cropper that has leased it since I bought it. I paid a average $1800 per acre for it between 2007 and 2010. With the 2022 harvest and 2/3 1/3 lease and generous grain prices paid for my 1/3 the land paid for itself in full with my grain sale this year. The land appraised at $6900 per acre and I sold it to my friend at $6,000 per acre. I kept hunting and wandering rights, the cell tower leases and first right of refusal for myself and heirs, in the Very Unlikely even he or his heirs ever decide to sell it. Now the accountant is working on ways to legally avoid the Capital gains. I would not have sold to anyone but him. It Connects his North and South Farmland and padded my retirement investments with a nice chunk of money. So we both won. I decided last week that other than a handful of my oldest most loyal customers that I AM DONE with the outside world and all of the deception and pretense that is standard operating procedure in the fake world. I am now 99% Retired and working pretty much only for myself and those that have been loyal over the years. I am keeping a Bull and 5 Cows, a Boar and 3 Sows and the two breeding lines of Barred Rock and Rhode Island Red Chickens and turning the market garden around the high tunnel into more berries, grapes and fruit trees. The way I see it about 85% of the people out there are not worth the air they breathe and the 15% that are good honest folks are getting harder to find and are withdrawing from the insanity themselves. It has gotten to where every time I go to town, I return home annoyed and pissed of at the state of things and society. So I am just not leaving here except for absolutely must make excursions into the fake world. I like here in the real world where everything is tangible, there is no deception, no illusion, no pretense and there is purpose and reason in everything. Everything just is what it is here in the real world and other than medical I have little reason to expose myself to a degenerate society. LOL Mr I hate buying online has been doing a lot of buying and having stuff shipped to him from Amazon and the Box store .com online stores. Without the business side I just don't need the additional 180 acres to support a business that is going to be running at 7% of what it was. The Crop Lease money was nice but the investment income from the money for the land sale will be = and more stable. I play the Conservative long game in low risk lower yield investments....... LOL won't find any Crypto in my portfolios I am in a very good place in both life and finances and just don't have to expose myself to all the BS out there anymore The Home 40 acres is all I ever really cared about and would never sell. The 180 was a means to a end and I had no real attachment to it beyond not having unwanted neighbors living beside me It was income, grain for feed, and hay and pasture on 60 of it and the people buffer no more and no less. And in many ways today is like kind of still owning the land but not having to pay the taxes on it every year LOL. My advice to young people that are not genetically predisposed to being morons and idiots. Make good life choices, live as far below your means as you can, save as much as you can! Compounded interest over 30-40 years is a powerful thing!!! And always work hard to improve your position in life. You to will be in your 50s someday and will find you have less and less opportunities to advance with each passing year when you get here. Still opportunities that arise they just don't seem to be as good or as often as they were between 17 and 50 Living paycheck to paycheck, saving nothing, being ass deep in debt and having nothing to show for it after decades of working crap jobs or collecting the welfare sure does not look appealing to me.
And I notice the Sat Images get better every time it passes over. World of difference in the 1999 pic and the 2020 pic
"...live as far below your means as you can, save as much as you can! Compounded interest over 30-40 years is a powerful thing!!!" Excellent advice of which I still, soon to be 70-years old, follow and it has served me well. I have no debt own all my belongings and myself outright. I cannot tell you how many times people have told me how stupid it is to purchase one's home/property outright saying that you lose the tax write off by doing so. I seldom argue with them anymore, it's not worth it as lowers me to their level of ignorance. Anyway, you have done damn good and should be proud!
I hear the same thing...... Not worth the effort to try and convince others of the wisdom in it. LOL if you have 4 apples and spend 6 apples you owe someone two apples I guess if everyone did it like we do, they say the economy would crash because it dependent on Mortgages, Auto Loans and Consumer Credit. I check my credit report once a year to make sure nothing funny is going on and for 15 years have maintained a Perfect 300 Credit score. Checked this year and it is 524!!! Sent me into a panic that my credit was less than perfect and after sorting through it found that a Medical Co-Pay had been sent to collections. Sorted that out yesterday with the hospital, I can't owe you a co pay when before you do anything I have to pay the co pay!!! It is removed now and my credit score should return to perfect over the next year. LOL I find it odd though that collections sends me from 300 to 524 and ruined my credit for the next 8-12 months!!! Everyone tells me that my idea of a perfect credit report is insanity
KK - Using current tax law, the current capital gains tax rates are probably the best you're going to get. B99 - I explain it to people like this, assuming they itemize their deductions on their tax returns: You can spend $7,000 in interest, and you'll pay out $2,000 less in taxes. Or, you can not pay out the $7,000 in interest, but you'll pay $2,000 in taxes. So, spend $5,000 net, or spend $2,000. That's the $3,000 question. And now with the standard deductions so high, many people don't even get the tax benefit of the interest, as their itemized deductions in total are still below the standard deduction for their filing status. So then it goes from being a $3,000 question to a $7,000 question.
Mucho respect for you and your decisions in life . And damned good advise for anyone with enough braincells to listen to you . If they heed your advice ,, they will prosper . I know this now . I never figured I'd have lived this long , I was a little on the wild side back in the day ,,, was always on the edge of death , I felt . Either I cheated death ,,, or death cheated me . That ,, coupled with a kid and a bad marriage ,, makes for bad life decisions at an early age . But ,, I don't dwell on the life choices ,, just the life experiences .
