Where have we been?

It’s been a while. Since I could hold my head up high… Sorry about the Staind reference…

It’s been a busy summer for us and we’ve failed with our blog writing duties. Oh well, onward!

Here’s an update to what we’ve been up to lately

We are planning to sell our city home and move to the country and build a cabin that will be our new home. We might be crazy but we’re just tired of paying a huge mortgage. We got trapped by the glitz and glamour of buying a home that was larger than we needed and more than we could afford. But that’s America, right?

We love the convience of the city and enjoy our current home but we feel burdened with the financial size of our mortgage and the physical size of our home. We use the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom. The rest of the house is barely used and we feel like it’s wasted space. Why did we buy a large home with a huge mortgage? We thought we could afford it and were assured by friends and family that this is what we needed to make the next step in the great American dream.

We had just started learning about FI and we felt we were making a wise financial decision by purchasing a home. It was supposed to be a good investment. We kick ourselves for puchasing this home but we’ve learned valuable lessons and know it will be a small blip in the big picture.

We’ve been looking at different options for building a smaller home (not quite tiny) and we’ve settled on purchasing a cabin shell and finishing it out ourselves with the help of our friends and family. We figure with our back-of-the-envelope math that the cabin itself will cost around $30k total. There is the land price as well but that’s a huge difference from the price of our city home.

Currently, I work about 30 minutes from my job and this would tack on another 20-30 minutes by looking for land outside the city. That’s hard for a lot of people to comprehend but I get to work from home quite a bit and eventually I will try to work from home full-time. Even though it’s a long drive, we both believe it will be worth it as it will catapolt us closer to our FI goals. We figure we can pay the land (depending on our budget) and cabin build off within 5 years and be mortgage free!

We plan to buy land, sell our home by spring, move in with family, and build our new cabin! That’s a lot to take in and we know it will be a challenge but we have discovered this is what we’ve been wanting. The city is great, and it’s very convenient, but it will be a huge financial boost for us to move out and have the freedom to build a smaller home.