land progress and financial retreat
Becky and I are still in the process of acquiring land to build on. I think that we should have an acceptance on an offer soon. We were not able to get the property near the landfill subdivided (at least not small enough to where it was in our price range). We did jump on a 3.5 acre piece of land pretty near the parcel we originally were after that was much less expensive - only $40,000. We've been going back and forth on the details, but I think we are pretty close to reaching an agreement. We learned yesterday that they forgot to stipulate no manufactured homes or modulars, but since we had no plans to use either of those, we are OK with that. Once the offer is accepted, we have to get soil and water tested and start working on getting a variance. We'll have 90 days to take care of that and then we get the joy of paying for vacant land for the next three years until Becky enters the workforce.I ordered the "whole enchilada" from ownerbuilderbook.com. I have already read the ownerbuilder book (OBB), most of the special reports and the Habitat for Humanity How to Build a House book. There is a lot of interesting material in all the books and I still have a lot of books to cover. One interesting topic of the OBB was the concept of OB'ing for profit. They included a table in the book that showed how you could use the tax law of 1997 to your advantage to build some wealth. I am in the process of putting together a financial retreat for Nathaniel and I have put together a couple of spreadsheets for the retreat including one that covers the table found in the book (although mine is a lot more detailed and allows a lot more playing with the figures). The spreadsheet is found at http://www.blawblawblog.com/stepupscheduleplus.xls. It's pretty interesting to see the wealth that you can build using a couple different strategies.
I am also putting together a spreadsheet to demonstrate how money grows through compound interest and how starting early is more critical than investing more later. The spreadsheet is called FVnGrowth.xls, so the path once I get it uploaded should be http://www.blawblawblog.com/FVnGrowth.xls. They are fun to play with (a lot more fun than putting them together), but it's neat to see how different variables impact the outcome. Feel free to use the spreadsheets if you want and if you note any problems with the formulas, contact me and let me know, and I will update the spreadsheet accordingly.
I have a small window of time where Becky is out of school to take Nathaniel on a retreat and as I have already mentioned the retreat this year is covering finances. My plan for retreats is to take each child when they are nine on an individual retreat - just Dad and the boy. The retreat is to some place fun and we'll talk about a lot of things that I feel it is important for a child turning nine to know. I chose nine, because I read in Rich Dad, Poor Dad about a study that concluded that children start to form their own self-identity about that age. I figure that it is a good time for Dad to share with the child a few lessons that will help guide them going forward. At age ten and up (I don't know if I will set an upper limit or not), I will have a retreat for all children that are ten or older. These retreats will target specific topics (which I will probably rotate) and again they will be to someplace fun. This year, we will probably go to King's Island, but I am still trying to find someplace with PC and internet access for the teaching part of the retreat. It would be nice to get away from the house for this part, but the house is looking like the best alternative given how tight our budget has been recently. We might see if we can go to the grandparent's place instead.
posted by bylaw @ 4:34 PM
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