Living Off the Land

This is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down when we bought vacant land

New Me, Who Dis?

I’ve always liked the idea of reinventing myself. Each transition from middle school to high school to college seemed like a chance to be someone new. I dreamed about what my life would be like when I grew up. Reading BMX magazines about life in California, and later listening to Jimmy Buffett sing about tropical locations, fueled my Illinois childhood dreams. This shaped me so much that in my senior year of college, I exclusively interviewed with companies located on the West Coast.

After graduating from the University of Illinois (UIUC), I moved to Northern California. In the Folsom area (yeah, the one with the prison), a great job afforded me the time and funds to try new adventures. I left behind the version of myself that played soccer and swimming for a new mountain-man version of myself into whitewater rafting and kayaking. This was like my ideal combination of danger, adventure, athletics, and skills in a single activity. How had I never done this before?

I was in a weeklong guide training camp as soon as humanly possible. Just like that, I was guiding professional rafting trips on weekends. I like to think this was my side hustle before side hustling had a name. Every weekend was a new adventure–arriving before dawn, paying (and tipping) customers, and floating down beautiful canyons. There was a real man-versus-nature feel to running the class III and IV rapids of the South and Middle forks of the American River. It was the first real new me.

The opportunities to reinvent myself continued as a young adult working and traveling solo. My first international trip was to Israel. A year or two later I began a new role that had me traveling to more far flung places I had never even dreamed of visiting. For over a year I was traveling every other month for a month at a time to Malaysia, India, South Korea, China, New Zealand, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

Travel was so heavy that when by chance I met my bride-to-be, Levy, I easily pivoted to living abroad. After spending just two weeks getting to know each other, I moved to the Philippines in 2002 on an extended business trip. It was actually cheaper for my company to fly me from that home base than to fly me from the U.S. to Asia so frequently. So, I made a quick trip back home to put some stuff in storage and three weeks later I arrived to start my new life in Manila. That was the third new me. That whirlwind is a story for another time.

In hindsight, I don’t think I ever reinvented myself so much as made incremental improvements. A manager of mine and an important figure in my life once remarked that I had kept my values while embracing new cultures. I was proud of that. I felt like I was becoming more of my true self. Each evolution felt just like a new me to me.

Looking back, I lived and learned and was never bored or fell into a tedious work life. Not every step was as much progress as the others and some transitions were slow, but each was an adventure and a chance to be something different. So, after a decade in the same place, I guess a big change was somewhat predictable.

Moving to the Country, Gonna Eat a Lot of Peaches

For those older than me, it was probably predictable how my tastes would mature with time. Riding a motorcycle and going to the beach was great when I was younger, but I feel drawn to rural areas now as I approach 50. The COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine might have also played a role. We were fortunate to have a comfortable home with outdoor living space and hiking trails nearby, but it was time for a change after the vaccines were available. The kids have all moved out for school or to start their lives as adults now, making us empty nesters.

I never thought I would willingly move away from the San Diego coastal area, but our place was never really close enough to the beach. The suburbs were very nice and many young families were clamoring to move into our home in a great neighborhood in the North County when we listed it for rent. For me, though, it had just outlived it’s charm. It was empty without the kids…and if I was going to reinvent myself, it wasn’t going to happen there.

Somehow in all our dreaming of #vanlife and brainstorming passive income ideas, we landed on buying vacant land. We needed to stay in California for in-state tuition and wanted to stay close to our youngest attending UCLA. We love the idea of being on the road, but we have cats and need reliable Internet to work from home. Plus, we’re total newbies and gas is expensive. We wanted a home base first. My rationale was that we could travel frequently, without guilt if our home base paid for itself.

Though home prices were the highest they’d ever been in the Spring and Summer of 2022, we decided not to sell our house. Our area is still developing and prices will no doubt grow with great schools and San Diego’s famous weather. Even if there were to be an economic reset, we were confident that prices would recover within a few years, well before we needed to sell for retirement cash, if ever. Plus, we could always move back if we wanted. Living there for the last two years before we sell it would reduce our taxes too. We’ll probably just keep it forever and pass it down to the kids in our trust. (My latest idea, though, is to create a family empire that retains ownership so that assets don’t get sliced up and distributed into less-valuable pieces.)

A small home for the two of us with some land would be easy, but those deals were still above our budget. So, we started looking into lower-cost vacant land. This was based on an assessment of our advantages:

• Refinance our current home to get cash, making purchases faster and more attractive to sellers
• Rent our current home for more than the mortgage to generate a small monthly income
• Buy something cheaper than our current mortgage to further free up cash
• Move into our trailer quickly, even on vacant land without utilities
• Handy enough to build small sheds to use as offices to expand usable space beyond the trailer

You Got Lucky, Babe, When I Found You

Our property search was narrowed by our desired location, budget, and several other criteria we decided after looking at many properties. Although I recently had success installing solar power in the trailer, we prioritized land that already had grid power, among other things that we felt were too expensive, difficult, time-consuming, or risky with vacant land.

• Budget: less than current mortgage, ideally much less
• Location: safe and close-enough to a city that potential overnight guests could make the drive
• Power: grid power wasn’t mandatory, but it was a strong plus; solar was always the backup plan, but a generator was a short-term safety net
• Water: a working well with safe, tested water at a decent flow rate
• Septic: permitted septic comes with a filed home design or land use plan and usually has an address assigned which would make our life easier all around
• Grade: level enough to be usable, but not boringly flat without any interesting topography
• Size: I got hooked on the idea of larger and large plots until I wouldn’t accept less than 20 acres

All of these criteria raised the value because they were previous investments a new buyer could avoid. It also made the property accessible to more buyers, increasing our competition. For us, having these things in place reduced the risk as first time land buyers and would-be developers.

After bouncing back and forth between inaction and total commitment, we finally put our house on the rental market in May. Within minutes, a dozen interested renters had submitted their application through the Zillow Rentals app. It was so easy to list the property to a wide audience, create a contract, perform background checks, and receive monthly payments unlike the previous times we advertised in the newspaper or hired a property management company. The demand was high, too. We had over 100 applications to rent our place.

In hindsight, our home had a lot of amenities being in San Diego–a great school district, a cul de sac location, larger square footage, outdoor living space, and a balcony overlooking the green space backyard, etc. Before listing, we thought the rental price was unbelievably high, but now we knew we had actually set the price too low. Still, we thought a fair price would help us find tenants who would treat our family home well. The trade-off seemed fair for a good, long-term tenant.

After an open house and struggling through the selection process, we finally had tenants moving in on July 1st. At this point in my life, I had moved homes something like 17 times. All this experience and more than a month of knowing the deadline didn’t prevent us from scrambling on the last day. All the big stuff had been loaded for weeks into a 10 by 20 foot, $275/mo storage area or a dilapidated mobile home (aka The Crack House) on our new property. The last couple of weeks were spent stuffing boxes of clothing and odd-shaped objects higher and higher onto the Jenga game we were playing in our storage garage. We invited the tenants over for a walk-through at 5pm, but we didn’t leave until nearly 9pm.

We arrived in the dead of night to our 20 acres of untended terrain. We didn’t even have a basic driveway. We had to overcome the high edge of an easement road to a makeshift driveway Levy and I had shoveled flatter ourselves days earlier. The high clearance of both the F-250 and the toy hauler trailer ascended the transition easily and we dragged the trailer up the front of our property under a starlit sky.

Exhausted, we shuttled the cats from truck to trailer and slept among piles of disorganized clothes, boxes, and odds and ends.

It’s a Thin Line Between Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

We saw a frog. Of all the wild animals I thought we might see around our new home, a frog was not in the top 20. Rattlesnakes, for sure. Rabbits, squirrels, coyotes, and off-leash dogs, definitely. Lizards and ants are everywhere. There has even been talk of bears in the area coming down off the mountains to check us out in the foothills.

Seeing a frog hop under the dilapidated mobile home we affectionately call the Crack House was totally unexpected. I mean, it’s been 90 – 95 degrees during the day with very little shade and nothing but dry dirt. It’s like a desert here. Where did a frog come from?

Obviously frogs can survive somewhere here. We are at 3800 feet elevation and get cool evenings, but the days were sunny, shadeless, hot, and dry in the summer. They aren’t the first surprise we found since moving here a month ago. Maybe they live in the bathtub I found hidden amongst the shrubs. I bet getting the well running again brought him out.

The summers in Anza are 10-15 degrees warmer than our home in north county San Diego. There, less than 10 miles from the coast, we didn’t have air conditioning and still had single pane windows. Here, we are in the middle of 20 acres of vacant land living in an 18 foot trailer. It’s been a big adjustment. We left behind a lot of comfort and convenience to downsize.

The kids are all moved out yet college tuition costs aren’t getting any cheaper while retirement is supposed to be getting closer. Our sacrifice is saving us nearly $1600 a month in living expenses, maybe more from lower utility bills and the excess rental income. We plan to roll that difference into capital projects to develop the land.

Development Dreams

A small house, of course. We need a small home for shade as soon as possible. Despite the searing summer sunlight, it’s actually quite nice in the shade. There is a breeze all day and the nights are cool even on the warmest days. Snow is a real possibility in the winter, so a proper home will be a respite then too. Smaller houses have cheaper taxes, insurance, and utilities. You can afford to put in upgrades, like nicer floors and counter tops when you have less square footage.

Separate, small buildings will be good enough for our work-from-home offices. We don’t need much space to work in peace. A few He Sheds or She Sheds can easily be solar powered and positioned in any of the many spectacular viewpoints around the property. Moving among them every few weeks sounds like a nice way to introduce a little variety and perspective into the workday.

There’s plenty of space for a hot tub, a pond with a fountain, nature trails, and any other things we want to do or comforts we might want to build in time. I’ve created a list of ideas a mile long.

• Kite flying
• Golf driving range
• Disc (frisbee) golf course
• RC cars and planes
• Drone racing course
• ATV and dirtbike riding
• Mountain biking
• Stargazing
• Running and hiking
• Geocaching
• Archery and shooting
• Camping
• Ninja warrior course

There’s even some good spots for renting living areas. That’s our dream: to have enough income from the property to offset our own living costs. Or, maybe even more than enough. 20 acres is big enough to offer us space and privacy while still hosting 2, 3, or more temporary or permanent guests. A relatively simple RV rental space could fetch more than $500/mo. Just a few spaces could completely pay for the cost of borrowing the money and start to fund our living expenses or development cost.

Dreaming is easy, but building it all is the hard part. We know that. Our first few months here have clearly reinforced that. Many who know us can’t believe we made it this far. At least not without divorcing each other.

Levy is handy and has pulled me along over the years in various home remodeling projects. She was usually the general contractor and foreman while I was the hired help. YouTube sure helped a lot too. I’m less apprehensive now when thinking of tearing down a potentially toxic marijuana grow house or a rusty pile of a burned down double-wide trailer. Just for example.

Levy has an eye for things too. She taught me to see the potential in a run-down house and can turn a pile of broken boards into a backyard bar or a couch. I got the bug and together we egged each other on when looking for property. Bigger property was just calling my name. Perhaps it was an escape from the years of fatherhood living in a neighborhood with great schools and neighbor kids. It could have just been an overcompensation from COVID-19 quarantine.

The Ability to Pivot

Choosing a property, and developing a plan to downsize for that matter, was informed by the tools in our toolbox. Our goals, on the other hand, were pretty vague and there were many paths to achieve them. So, we assessed what we could do with what we have. We aren’t rich with unlimited resources or ability, but we had advantages over other land buyers.

• An ability to build things and a willingness to figure out what we don’t know
• An RV in which to sleep, live, and work — an instant solution to a variety of inhabitable situations
• Money or the ability to raise capital at least
• Health and time — time after work or on weekends and an ability to proceed at our own pace
• A willingness to sacrifice our standard of living, at least for a while

Ultimately, I think it came down to our willingness to actually do something. We were able to find inspiration in others who shared their stories on social media. Everyone, it seemed, could explore the world and make more of limited means. Still, taking action and making a go of it was far from mainstream. Our willingness to take a leap of faith with some calculated risk was our real differentiator.

So, we bought vacant land and moved into our trailer. It’s not possible to anticipate every issue, so we are going into this knowing there will be a bit of trial and error. As we encounter setbacks, we’ll iterate. If it all goes bust, we can always move back into a traditional home.

Look for updates here as we develop our new property. We’ve got lots of work ahead of us cleaning, building, planting, and living in the country. Saddle up–let’s go for a ride!

This story about the decision to downsize, buy vacant land, and move out was written in July, 2022 and published in January, 2023.