"Keeping the Homestead Dream Alive" by Sheri Dixon page 2

This is the danger zone - and you must remember three key words - Do Not Settle. No matter what, wait 'til you step onto the piece of land that whispers to your soul that you will make a happy home and farm there, regardless of any apparent limitations it may have. Of course this is taking for granted that you will automatically pass on any land that includes a toxic waste dump, has no source of water, or that swarms with werewolves every full moon. Once you’ve found your land, you must make it yours, which usually involves jumping through hoops for men in suits and:

Dream Endangerment Scenario Three - Banks Only Lend Money to Those Who Don’t Need It.

A lot of us are credit challenged, and most of us are not, despite what our Credit Score screams, deadbeats. Job loss, sickness, divorce - any number of things can launch the most conscientious person straight out of the mainstream financial institutions for a mortgage. Several factors make this worse. For instance, if you are relocating across country there will be no local references for employment or residence. This makes bankers nervous. And if the land in question is no-barn-no-house nekkid, they will really start twitching.

Historically, they have a point. If something in your life gets tough and you need to pick and choose what and who gets paid, you will keep your house that you live in current. You will keep your vehicle that you need to get to work current. Banks assume that if the going gets tough, you will start skipping your land note, and they are usually right. Even though bankers enjoy being right, they dislike foreclosing on properties - a lot of paperwork and court orders and sheriffs involved there and they’d just as soon avoid it, so they don’t make the loans to begin with.

The options are to either cough up enough of a down payment to make it worth their while (and simultaneously gag on a killer interest rate), or find someone to owner-carry, at least till you can get some stability established. Once the bank has a record of a year or so of timely made payments, and knows you are not going to leave them holding a partially improved farm, they will generally consider re-writing your note at a more attractive rate. If you do go owner-carry, make sure ANY owner-carry note is drawn up by a lawyer to avoid "misunderstandings" down the line.

When you have closed on the land and have moved out yonder, a lot of folks are faced with:

Dream Endangerment Scenario Four - Well, Here We Are, But Now We Can’t Afford to Do a Dang Thing.

Start small.

Use caution.

Resist the temptations of mental, physical, or financial over-extension.

Or sure as shootin’ you will find yourself smack dab in the middle of:

Dream Endangerment Scenario Five: How Did We Manage To Lose The Farm?

Of course there are many routes to this unfortunate spot, and most of them do not have anything to do with your intelligence, money management, or farming savvy. There are many times the excrement contacts the oscillator and you either get angry, or you get over it. If you know in your heart that you have done the best you know how, and in the cases where there WERE misjudgments, you learned from them and are determined not to repeat them. This is not a terminal scenario.

Let’s talk about me for a minute (and I promise Antonio Banderas is not part of this, but I make no such vow about the Dove bars).

I was born and raised up in a mid sized town in Wisconsin.

Got married.

Learned everything I could about country life while my first child was a toddler.

Moved out to 3 acres when I was pregnant with my second child.

Got a big garden going, got some dairy goats and horses.

Divorced 7 years later and lost the farm.

Married again.

Packed the U-Haul and drove to Texas.

Did several years time in the Worst Trailer Park in Texas.

Got divorced, again.

Moved into a "fixer upper" on 3 acres.

Got a garden going, dairy goats, horses, and poultry.

Married again and had another child.

Decided 3 acres was too small, so looked and looked and finally found 12 acres.

Jumped through roughly 10,000 hoops before securing financing.

Started planning a new family farm that centered around building our own home, ourselves.

Family encountered serious health issues.

Farm plan re-worked to include local contractor as a principal character to achieve building goals.

Everyone enjoys a Dove bar.

My story is not that unusual, and certainly does not include insurmountable problems. I can think of at least half a dozen of my friends who have done so much more with seemingly so much less. At some point all of us have wrestled with:

Dream Endangerment Scenario Six - Am I Too Danged Old to Do This?

If this question enters your mind the answer is "YES" - you ARE too old to do this the same way you planned it in your teens, twenties, and thirties. But if you re-work the labor parts, and lessen the day-to-day workload, you’ll find that homesteading is not out of reach, you just have to shift your definition of a successful farm.

The common thread among us is the bullheadedness to not give up when most sane folks would. Whether that makes us sensible is up for debate. But that really matters not.

Because no matter where we are physically or financially, our hearts and our minds are on the farm, and nothing can take that away from us.

Whether we are growing beans behind the petunias, or canning veggies in a high rise, you can take the homesteader out of the country,

But you can never take the country out of the homesteader.

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