Putting the annex on hold
The auction
we visited yesterday was one possibility for the Walden Effect
annex. It's the land that's within easy
walking distance and
had an oil and gas lease
that had expired.
Since the property was a
foreclosure, we thought the tracts might sell
for much less than they did. I'd read that 75% of market value is
average for foreclosure auctions, which would have put the cheaper
tracts just barely into our price range ($15,525 for the cheapest one,
which is 35 acres). In fact, they went for 103% to 167% of market
value.
But we didn't even put
up the 10% to allow us to bid. After a
month spent cogitating on the repurcussions, we decided it just
wouldn't be worth it to have the annex if it meant we'd clean out all
of our emergency reserves and go slightly into debt. (Plus, we'd
heard through the grapevine that a lot of folks were interested in the
land, which made us doubt that the property would sell low.)
Yes, we probably could
have buckled down and paid off the loan in a
year or two (or three or four at the prices the land actually sold at),
but only if we focused a lot more on making money and lot less on
building relationships with folks like Bradley (and on our random
experiments). I think Mark and I both felt relieved when we
decided to put the annex off for a few more years until we'd saved
enough cash to buy another piece of land outright.
Instead, we'll be
focusing on building local community with our
meetup group.
Time to think of another fun get-together for local permaculture nuts
like me. Mark says a kill mulch party is crazy. Ideas?
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Come on over... I will host this one!
Building community is so important... Kudos on all your efforts in that regard. We need lots more of just good neighboring!