WE WILL BE LAND OWNERS SOON!!  The owner accepted our offer!  No counter offer, no having to figure out new numbers, he accepted our offer right off the bat!

For those of you who are planning on becoming self sufficient yet have limited immediate resources or bad credit or both here is my advice to you:

1) find an area where you would like to live and land is fairly inexpensive.  We chose an area that was about 20 minutes out from our ideal area (where a 5 acre lot goes for $60-$100,000), and ended up spending $43,000 for almost 11 acres of land.

2) find a piece of land that is the closest to what you want and ask about owner financing.  Many times the owner will be willing to do a 5 year financing plan because banks tend to not want to give loans to people just buying land, especially not if you are planning on building your own home.  So you must be creative on how you can buy the land without having the money up front and without having to go through a bank.

3) Don’t insult the owner.  Don’t get me wrong, you want to make sure your offer is within your budget, and allows for some wiggle room if they don’t accept your offer and you must come back with a second offer.  ie: don’t give them your top numbers first, but don’t low ball them either.  Here is what we did, we knew the seller wanted a large down payment which we couldn’t offer, so we offered a down payment that was within our budget but offered a high monthly payment with a high interest rate.  we figured out what a 10 year loan would be with 7% interest, which ended up being $50 below what we wanted our monthly payment to be.  We aren’t too concerned about this because we will be paying off the loan in less than 5 years.  Once a property is built on the land a bank is far more likely to give a loan.  Also once the property is built the funds we were using to pay the rent on where we will be staying and what we are budgeting towards building the house will be able to go towards paying off the land as well.

Now that our offer has been accepted we have a race to complete before papers are signed.  We need to research what permits we need in order to build.  We need to go out and start measuring and blocking off where we plan on building.  We also need to start putting money aside and fundraising for the build (we have a lot of money to drop very quickly in order to excavate and put in the foundation).  Above all we need to find a place to live and start packing.  We aren’t going to stay in our current rental property.  It’s too expensive and too far away.  We are looking for something small and no more than $350 a month, and much closer tot he property.  This will easily fit into our budget and we wont have to dread the drive to work on the house.

As of right now we have to finish Feb with $3000 as a down payment.  right now we have $700.  Our major goal is to finish january with $1500, Which means we need $800 to finish this month.  That’s totally doable, hopefully, it does make me feel a bit ill to think about, but we can do it!

Also I am looking into doing a fundraising project to raise money to build the house.  Any thoughts on which fundraisers are best would be much appreciated!

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