Finding the land

Andrea found this land months ago, and if you read our previous post, you read how we teetered between properties.

We'll we finally settled on Soulstice Homestead. The land was what I'd been looking for from the beginning. The road was on the north, so the windows of the house would face away from it. It sloped to the south, was elevated (so dampness wouldn't be an issue) and overlooked another 9 acres or so of woods with a small creek on it. The positioning was perfect for optimum solar and wind. The top of the slope was covered in clover already, so I figure the soil would be full of nitrogen. We could hook up electricity from the grid til we weened ourselves off it. The road was rarely traveled, and no houses would be in our southern view.

It's not the kind of lot most people would pay that kind of money for. It's nowhere near employment. Not much road frontage. The red line is the trail we took through it with the grandkids when we first looked at it - it had too many stickers to drag them through it.

It's the leftover land that can't be farmed (not by traditional agribusiness methods at least). That's what you want to look for, because it's cheap by comparison. I'm secretly hoping it fails a perc test just so we can use it as an excuse to create composting / vermiculture / mycoremediation toilets.

I called the local township re: building permits and inspection - they said I could pick up a building permit for $50 at the town meeting every first and third Tuesday of the month, and that Alvin usually shows up at about 6pm to issue them. There won't be any inspectors.

When we originally found it, there was no mention of a land contract, but rather than pass it up we felt it wouldn't hurt to ask, so I emailed the realtor handling the place and he said he'd ask, and we continued our search for a place to live. About a month later we met with him at the property for a tour. We said we had $8000 down and could handle about $300/month. I figured if we nailed down a flat figure the seller would be more accepting.

We had managed to save a few thousand over 4 years. Once we had that, we borrowed $1000 from 2 other people and $2000 from family, paying each back 10% of the loan per month with interest. We did this before we actually purchased land because we wanted to have a good down payment to entice owners to agree to a land contract - even if they hadn't planned on it originally. Those personal loans are now almost half paid off as we move forward to purchase this land.

We went through a few versions of the contract with the realtor - reading everything carefully. They first wanted a balloon payment after 3 years. We declined. They came back with a balloon payment after 6 years. After calculating and allowing for income tax returns for the next 6 years, we realized we could meet that and accepted. We also realized if we used those tax returns to pay more up front we'd save on the interest and pay it off sooner. So that's now the plan.

Next - I asked a couple questions about our ability to build on the land before the land was paid for. We swapped contract versions back and forth. The seller wrote that we could build so long as it met building code in regards to standard building practices and materials. I explained that tires and aluminum cans and wine bottles weren't standard building materials and if we couldn't build, we couldn't buy. Realizing the seller wasn't familiar with these building methods, I wrote out the following contract myself, taking into consideration her rights and what we wanted to do, and sent it to her through our realtor.


The seller agreed to the terms and at closing signed the agreement.

We were able to find this land by constantly and relentlessly searching Craigslist, Zillow, LandandFarm.com and other land websites. At one point we had even found a 16 acre lot with some old trailers on it for less than we're paying for this one, but we waited too long and the seller's relatives talked him out of selling it. Land is out there, you just need to look, and be patient.

But first you have to save.

We live a frugal lifestyle and this blog will try to organize and describe that lifestyle (that we'll cover in other blog posts) and you can do the same. Saving money is better than making money because it's tax free.

So fall's here. We have a lot of planning to do. We'll want to plant some fruit and nut trees in the spring and maybe do a little swale-digging to build up the water table. But first we'll need to observe, plan some camping trips, get a feel for the place before we make concrete plans.