Bragging - Great Wife

This post is only intended to serve one purpose, to brag on my wonderful bride. We've been married almost 17 years and this latest move has by far been the roughest one. We moved 10 days ago and our property currently does not have water or septic so during the day my family is relegated to using water bottles and a simple composting toilet and my wife has been doing it without complaint. Since my work requires high speed internet we do have a hotel room that I use as my office during the day so they can take showers at night but I know very few women who would do that with 4 kids and not make much noise about it.

This post is dedicated to you babe!

Electric Service

As we've made the move to our property there are a few items that I'll be blogging about to hopefully save everyone else time, headaches and money. These items were not provided in one place so unfortunately it ended up costing us significant money (in the thousands) and probably over 50-100 extra hours of driving, calling and doing additional work. Each state, county and utility is different but make sure to ask these questions on the front end, especially if you're moving a mobile home on the property.

1. What is the base installation cost, including Membership Fees, Transfer/Connect Fees?

2. Are a certain number of feet included in the installation and how much is the cost per foot after that amount?

3. Are there restrictions before service can be installed or do certain items void the 'free' feet?

4. What easements and paperwork are necessary prior to allowing service installation to be scheduled?

5. Where are you planning on tapping into to feed the service to my property?

To describe the reasoning a little further let me provide examples to each number above.

1. This was described on the up-front as well as being outlined on the Membership Application that we received so this should be an easy one.

2. In our case 300 feet was free of charge and after that it was $5/ft (as of March 2008).

3. We found out right before they went to install that because our mobile home still had the tow hitch on it they usually would not give any free footage but instead would charge us for every foot they had to connect. We did have the axles removed and had spent the money getting the home moved however we were not aware of this until they did the site survey right before installing. Even though the axles were removed as originally discussed this hitch almost created a real cost problem for us.

4. & 5. When we originally looked at the property prior to the end of the period where we could rescind the offer and only loose $100 I personally called the electric company I was told that it wasn't any problem getting electric as our neighbors to the north and east had electricity so no problem. Once we scheduled and said we were ready to go we were told we needed to get an easement from the neighbors to get the hookup done. After talking with our neighbors to the north told us no but they would allow us to tap into the pole by the street, no problem except the electric company said we would have to cut off all trees along the property lines to 12' or less if we wanted to tap into the north. So that would be approx. 600 feet of trees to trim. So we switched to plan B and tracked down our neighbors to the east and after a week of waiting said no problem however we couldn't get them to call the electric company and give their okay as well as helping us get the easement. I told them I would carry all the paperwork around and pay all fees I just needed them to sign. All combined this took 2 weeks off just to the point of getting permission and we're still waiting for them to follow up with helping us get the easement.

The good news is with a few calls and just treating others with respect we were able to get things done and hooked into the north property because another neighbor made the call. It pays to be nice and respectful to your neighbors.

Farming Benefits

Was doing reading recently about agrarianism and stumbled across one of those 'duh' statements but for some reason it seemed more profound than I normally would have thought. The same principle also applies to being self employed in many cases so do with the quote what you will :)

A farmer does not sell his labor but the fruits of his labor, and as such is able to retain many of the benefits of his labor for himself—land he has improved, tools he has made, skills he has developed, along with the fruits he chooses not to sell. But a wage laborer can only sell his labor, which is mixed with materials he does not own to create fruits which he does not own; the benefits of his labor accrue to his employer, not to him.

This quote is from a series of blog posts discussing how far Christians have moved from their agrarian roots, it is a good read.

Texas Veterans Land Board (TVLB) Program

This post is to help individuals considering using the TVLB for purchasing their rural property. To give a little background our journey started with wanting to buy some property for our primary residence. We were looking at 15+ acres in most cases and finding a company to finance that amount of property is difficult. We have decent credit (750+ FICO without any derogs) and our biggest limitation was a significant down payment since we wanted to pay cash to get everything set up on the property. We have purchased a home before and this was our first rural process but I did enough reading on the front end to get an understanding at a macro level what was necessary to get into a piece of property.

The TVLB website will provide a lot of information to get you started but one area where the website is explaining the post closing process. After some discussions with a manager within the TVLB it became obvious they are there to close the deal on the property, not assist you after closing except in approving easements. This is probably one of those things in life where you can only learn by experiencing however I'm hoping to help people in the future who wish to utilize the TVLB and live on their property.

We finally closed on the property within the 'Chronology of a Land Loan' discussed on their website. One thing to keep in mind if using the TVLB is that it can take a long time for the title company to get the paperwork to the TVLB to process. If you wish to expedite this process you, the landowner, needs to put pressure on the loan company to get it to the TVLB in a timely manner. It is my understanding the chronology page will be updated in the future but again, it is your responsibility to know when and where to put pressure on people in the process.

In conclusion we might use the TVLB again however my wife and I have both agreed that the we would use the TVLB again is if we have 6 months of lead time once we extended an offer or we're just buying the land for investment purposes and not to live on.

How To Build Your Own Home

My wife and I have been discussing for awhile the benefit of building our own home. Since a home purchase is one of the largest purchases you'll ever make saving money on the cost of building a home can have significant financial rewards in the future. We will be closing on our acreage soon and have been looking for a temporary structure while we build the home we've been wanting.

In the quest on the internet to find a good book covering all aspects of home building there were so many options I isolated the search using the following criteria:
1) I want someone who has done it from start to finish as an individual, not a builder who is writing it as he hired out most of the work as I want to see all the good and bad.
2) The books needs to be balanced, not some pump me up publication that side steps the pain and realities of doing it yourself.
3) It needs to provide plenty of pictures and I am a visual learner. I can read thousands of words of text but a picture helps me to reverse engineer some things that might be missing from the explanation.

With those basic criteria and more time than money I zeroed in on a couple of books but finally settled on Sweat Equity by Larry Angell. When the book arrived I devoured it in about 2 days and must say after finishing it I feel confident that I could handle the process and issue that come up along the way. The nice thing is Larry has provided a mini ebook to read that is really just the first few chapters of the book, it helps discuss the why more than the how and I think does a decent job of helping you understand the long term benefits of doing it yourself but also providing enough pain to help you realize you might want to walk away if you have a aversion to working hard.
Sweat Equity, Building a House at Half Cost

Visit Larry's site and look around, he provides a lot of good, free information as well as a mailing list although he doesn't send out things very often.