Gratitude

I’m BACK !

I woke up this morning, a drizzly Sunday morning, the morning after watching a wonderful play by Shakespeare, performed by local talents including my stepson Gabe, and I thought, ‘it’s time to take up blogging again’. This morning, I have fire in my belly (and in my wood stove)  and I’m “sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad” . So dramatic ….but the life I’m living now is so changed, so different, I hardly recognise my dreams, my skin, or my lover and life companion. (more on all that in the next entry)

 

So I found this, my long lost blog site,  and lo and behold!,  there was a saved draft from December 2013 !!! As follows…..

 

 

Today, I made a vow.

I thought that it is about time to think about how little gratitude I have been feeling. So I’m jolting my memory- remembering the great things in my life. And I’m vowing to be grateful for at least one thing a day !

For a start, all I need to look at is my financial position. Compared to even two years ago, I’m blessed with access to a lot more financial resources, and I’m grateful for that. It’s a great feeling when you actually realise, that you are getting closer to some big goals in life ! What a wonderful mind we have- we have the amazing ability to choose what we want to be, how we want to live, and BANG, as long as we have passion for it, we can make it happen. Well, it doesn’t happen overnight (mostly), but we all know how fast a year or two go by and so while we are working passionately towards a goal, feeling fulfilled in the process, we get to savour what we’ve been aiming for. Two times lucky !

Of course there are set-backs, sometimes a few too many. Sometimes we need to change direction, slightly or dramatically, and we need to listen to the signs all around us. Another blessing !

But the more I look at the magical side of life, consciousness, the brilliant people around me, the adoration of my sweet lil dogs, the massive 4 cm growth  (in one day) that my baby tomato plants in the garden achieved, music, humour, – the list is endless, the more I feel that life is a magical forest in which I get to be a unicorn. If I want to.

Blessings all around !   🙂

Subdivision Heaven

Hi,

Might as well keep on telling the rest of the story 🙂

Thank you for those who actually visited my blog, I feel honoured. Of course I welcome any feed back or questions .

About our new project- 10 000 sqm with a 3 bed house and massive storage shed :

Plans to subdivide into 3 lots as a Stage 1 are being assessed by council as we speak. We are going to sell the existing house with a minor renovation and also sell one of the building blocks (500 sqm) . We are keeping the shed and about 9000 sqm.

Stage 2 may never happen, as sewerage connections could amount to over $100 000 and take more than 12 months, because of the discontinued railway track, which is in between our back block and the sewer point. Of course none of that is a surprise to us -we had all that checked out before we signed up to buy it. That’s called DUE DILIGENCE ! Stage 1 however makes enough profit to warrant the purchase ! (over $60 000 plus mortgage free shed and 9000 sqm)

The house and large land next door is for sale, and if we bought it, we could share/halve subdivision costs for Stage 2 – and that would make it even more attractive. We have not yet decided on that.

That would mean we could have up to 10 blocks for sale, given that we want to keep up the good old country tradition of quarter acre blocks.  (The start of an eco village???) The road, which would be the access to all those blocks, would have to be upgraded at our cost, to cope with the increased traffic.

So far, we have planted over 40  fruit trees and many more other trees, put extensive vegie gardens and also ornamentals in. The big paddock was deep ripped, using a Yeoman’s plough to counteract the compacting of the soil by horses from the previous owner. That was ONE way of renovating the land. A soil test revealed that it was suitable for extensive cropping, especially fruit and nut varieties after applying the right amount of gypsum.

We are only 5 mins walk away from a  primary school, post office, shop and pub, and sports facilities. What a great place to live! Blocks will sell like hot cakes ! Orders taken now 🙂

The Good Things !

Today, as promised, I’m going to go into the positives about my last project ( which I classified as a ‘big learning curve’). I also see it as one of the ways I have managed to sabotage myself along the long way, but once you’ve read the list below, you’ll think “…what is she talking about….???”!

We (my partner and I) both realized  that a very ‘normal’, straight suburban house built from brick veneer could actually provide a very energy efficient, green living experience. Of course the added benefit came from having windows in the north that let light and sun into the house in the winter, so that

• No heating would be needed during the day. A massive saving !
• We had a solar hot water service with a gas booster, but during November through to April or so, we never used any gas to boost our hot water needs.
• We had solar panels installed and used only about a quarter of what we generated over a period of 9 months.
• We had beautiful rain water from our tank so that we never needed any of the town’s water.
• Two seasons of apples from the extensive orchard down the back, and apricots, plums, a few nectarines
• Being only 2 km out of  the town centre, we could  and would cycle often
• We inherited a vegie garden with quite a bit of food to eat
• We had fun having chooks for a while and feeding the donkey next door
• at one stage we had an outside bathtub with a fire pit under for hours of soaking in the hot rainwater, decorated with homegrown rose petals
• my darling dogs had almost 4000 sqm to run around in all day long

Also, we lined the 6 x 6 m tin shed with 40ml straw board and added a huge window to the north. We put a bathroom and kitchenette in it and so created a great living space for myself away from the boys in the house ! I called it the Boudoir. I sewed bright red curtains for it. The wood stove was also a big bonus in my shelter for the cold nights.

Finally, we created out of all that 2  building blocks and a very livable, energy efficient house to live in that was fully renovated and had small orchards in the front and back yards. We sold all 3 items to people we know in the community and so created a micro-community !

All in all, it was a great experience in regards to approaching a sustainable way of living. The main driver for the direction of this project was my partner Ian, to whom this article is dedicated  with much gratitude.

From an investor’s point of view…well, I’ll talk about the figures another time.

(I have been trying to upload 2 photos but to no avail…..Ok I give up. It might let me tomorrow..)

Motivation

I thought I might mention that magical word.

It’s a great motivator when you think that in 2.5 years you could be, like me, living of investing in property full time ! And it’s not even a full time job, if you don’t want it to be- so you’re not replacing one slavery ( the slavery of working for the MAN) with another (the enslaving of oneself by oneself).

Yes, I am proud to say that I could afford to drop my other business as soon as our next property settlement happens (only weeks away)!!!!! It’s a wonderful feeling and I got to tell someone in the supermarket today that I’m about to be FREE.

Not that I don’t love my other job, I just don’t like the business… I’ll explain in a later post.

To think that I can choose when to work and how long for and that the only deadlines I have are the ones I set myself is just heavenly.

Not only that, I’m actually on the brink of making some serious money ! Or if I want to, I can just potter and do one per year or so, and laugh all the way home. There’s always about $50 000 to make on a property, and I can easily live on that. And give heaps to charity. And have holidays.

I like to think that abundance happens, and like everything, we have to let it. I have worked very hard trying to change my “poverty consciousness”, which was , as I see it now, just a reaction to my parents. I felt as a child that money and social standing (in the village life) was more important to my parents than people.  Don’t get me wrong, I think they did the best they could and felt that providing us kids with more material security than necessary was the right thing to do. So I took a long time to understand that money wasn’t the evil, heartless thing some people make it out to be- when they have experienced people close to them being too focused on financing life rather than living it- but that money is just a means and we can choose to use it to do good things or not so good things.
And also don’t get me wrong- I’m not blaming my parents for not having time for me or always trying to buy me clothes when I wanted some love- that is in the past and I have only myself to blame for not learning the lessons faster here: Whatever you focus on is what happens. And bringing up children in extreme poverty but with lots of love is still not a balanced way of living. And a butterfly is not a recovering caterpillar.

So my motivation has changed and grown over the years. I started off just wanting to change the fact that I could never afford anything and therefore kept myself from dreaming or thinking BIG (as if I was not worth anything). Then I wanted to create wealth to move it from the first world to the third (feeling guilty for having a better life than many). After that I lost hope for a while, because by then, I had done a lot of financial education in the property section, but could not get started on my dreams( for many reasons).

Now, I feel that I must look after myself first and create myself a home that I haven’t had for almost forever. (I must have moved house 20+ times in the last 20 years). Because I’m worth it and because I’m not going to get ‘drunk’ on having too much money and wasting it. In the meantime, I’m already giving to charity, and when I have given myself enough back for all the hard work, I will do even more charity. One of my huge motivators is to provide energy efficient, cheap to run homes with beautiful edible gardens all around for people to rent and enjoy. Because I’ve never had that good fortune myself, I want to give that to others.

I’m almost there 🙂

Correction

Correction:
“The first few months living in my renovators are usually very uncomfortable”
It’s definitely more than the first few months : first, the places are smelly, ugly, and in great need of TLC (and that is of course why you buy a renovation project- buy an ugly duckling, preferably one that no one wants, but that you have checked out very diligently).
After a while, you’ll be living in a non –kitchen, or have no bathroom (just for a week, which turns out to be two or three) or you can’t walk on the floors or touch the walls and have to breathe in toxic fumes, move your stuff from room to room to room, alienate the neighbors by loud noises and their curiosity not being satisfied, loose your children to live with their girl friends because there’s no kitchen wall in the middle of winter, your friends never come to visit anymore and you somehow feel like you are perpetually camping and/or homeless, etc etc…
And even when all the works are done it usually goes straight on the real estate market to sell- and you have lots of strangers looking at your home, everything is hiding in all cupboards, and it has to be kept meticulously clean.
All three phases are definitely very uncomfortable, but did I listen to my Mentors? (don’t live in your renovator!!!) NO, I did not….
Of course it also slows down the works if there are people actually inhabiting the building site and in this business Time is Money.

But it’s all a growing phase for me and my big plan is that this is definitely the last time I’m sleeping in the rubble. We always buy places that need reno and sub-division, and are going to develop the land we chop off. It will be big enough (500 sqm) to build my 50 sqm 2 bedroom dream home: a passive solar kit home made from strawboards and steel, locally produced, with solar panels, wood heating, water tanks and edible gardens and fruit trees all around. The smart plan is to put another one of them on the block as well and rent it out, resulting in a very good passive income !
Here we have arrived at the next big topic: the figures!!!
Never leave out the most important step : doing the numbers prior to buying a project. Virtually every single project is slightly or very different from the previous one or the next one. And the numbers vary very surprisingly! Some deals look like they are going to be excellent money makers but when tested on a calculator, they may not end up so flash. How bad would it feel to do the figures half way into it, and realize that they are not stacking up so well, when you’ve already invested thousands of dollars and lots of time ! Investors have to take this very seriously, because we are talking thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Taking the incredibly big risk of not calculating all the costs versus the incoming funds would be detrimental and that’s probably one of the main reasons why so many people try this only once! Because they take the rest of their lives paying off the debts they created by carelessly doing an investment project without doing the numbers.
Oh I feel nauseous thinking about that !