Jacob from FL asks,
Bill, I am about half way through your blog series about how you bought your farm. It is very interesting. You took a bunch of risks! From walking away from a steady engineering career to maxing out your debt to income ratio and then some to buy hunting land. How did you talk your wife into all this? Did she ever put the brakes on?
Bill responds,
Topic: Risks of Buying Hunting Land
I never felt that buying hunting land was risky. I never lost money at it and I wish I could say the same thing about the stock market.
Jacob,
She never really did. I had put some money in the stock market prior to the time when I really started investing in land and the stocks I selected were some recommended by a friend of her family. When that tanked to near zero, it wasn’t hard to convince her that risky as it might appear, buying land was a much safer investment for me (since I understood it pretty well) than any other way of investing.
Also, with land, there is almost always a market for it so if you do get in a bind financially along the way, you can find someone to buy the land and bail yourself out. I guess I never felt it was risky. I always made sure there was enough for everything our family needed and enough for some fun stuff so it wasn’t like the land investing totally crimped our lifestyle.
It did require a ton of work from me, but that’s what dreams do – they motivate us to do more than we thought was possible. And as I mentioned in that series, the hand of God was in it the whole way. Too many things worked out for it be otherwise. Have a great day. (5/8/21)
