Pulling the ripcord. Major life change

Thanks for the kind words everyone.

No more cars, no more rusty old junk, no more solving other people's problems for them. I'm done with that.

We're going to be running a market garden business so more than just vegetables. We've got plans for fruit, bees, etc. The wife is quite the artist so selling her glass art and my woodworking stuff out of the farm store will help too.

Yes, I've seen Clarkson's Farm, there's not nearly the level of micromanagment and government interference in Saskatchewan. If they made it hard for farmers, the province would shut down.

We've spoken to the people from the municipality and they're just glad to have new people moving in who want to contribute to the community, they're happy for a new business to be starting up. There's a couple farmer's markets close by as well as a good local artists collective and a small resort town 20 minutes away that gets a bit of tourism.

We're both really looking forward the change.

There's a guest room and lots of parking if anyone wants to visit but you might get put to work building fences.

In reply to ShawnG :

Or wrenching on a tractor or manure spreader.

Rons said:

In reply to ShawnG :

Or wrenching on a tractor or manure spreader.

Tractor I can handle if it's mine.

Farm equipment is easy to deal with. I don't have to worry about scratches. 

I don't really know you, and you don't really know me, but know I am sincerely happy for you. The fact that you stepped out of your comfort zone to pull the rip cord is impressive. From what I know of you on the forum, you'll do well in whatever you do. And if you're happy doing it, you'll be the richest man on earth. Please, do a 'build thread' for this new venture. It's amazing. 

I admire your courage.  I wish I had had it at your age.  

spitfirebill said:

I admire your courage.  I wish I had had it at your age.  

It's more like fear that if we don't do this now, we never will and we will regret it.

The area where I live right now has changed so much that we don't feel like we fit in any more. We moved here because it was a quiet, semi rural area but the development has been crazy over the last ten years and it's just gotten so busy.

My wife keeps her horses on another property at a really low price but if the elderly owners decide to move, there's no way we could afford to keep them anywhere else.

Our lifestyle is going to be changed for us if we don't go soon and I'd rather make the change on our terms.

It's certainly none of my business, but I presume you sold your place in B.C. for enough dough that your Saskatchewan farm was a pittance.  

The farm I grew up on was sold in about 1990 or so to a dairy farmer from Chilliwac, I think.  They got very tired of people moving in beside them and then bitching about the smell if the cattle...  Sold their little place to a developer for enough to buy a half section with two houses, an operating welding business, and several other outbuildings, and had all sorts of cash left over.

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

We haven't sold yet, we were able to borrow enough to buy our new place outright. 

At current values, we should be able to sell our place, pay off the mortgage and the loan and still come out ahead enough that, if I invest it properly, we won't have to work extremely hard.

In reply to ShawnG :

There’s a whole lot in your last two posts that sound like my move from North Van to Qualicum Beach.

In reply to Rons :

We know a lot of people who are making the same move right now.

As far as the smell of the country goes, we actually had to sign a clause that said we are aware that we are moving to an agricultural area and that there will be farm smells and farm noises around us. I have no problems with that. The neighbors property is his livelihood, just like mine is going to be.

OK, if you guys want a farm build thread.

Should I make a separate thread or just keep this one going?

Keep it going.

Ok then, here goes:

In January my cousin and I were talking and I found out that my uncle had been thinking of selling what was left of the family farm in Lloydminster, Alberta. It was originally 1000 acres but was left to the four siblings when my grandparents died so it was split up and sold off. My uncle kept 25 acres of the home section for himself.

My wife has always loved the place so we talked about it and thought it would be a good idea to have a chat with him and see about making an offer. The idea of keeping the farm in the family is something we like too. It will be 100 years in our family next year.

We talked to the bank to see about how much they would lend us and then started looking at property values in the area to see what a fair offer might be. We were shocked when we saw what we could buy back there. I'd never thought this was something we could actually pull off.

I called my uncle and set up a time to come and visit, we were going to pack the trailer and the dogs and make a vacation out of it in May. We set up a time with him and talked back and forth. He was kind of wishy-washy about selling and seemed like it was going to take him a long time to decide. The loan would be funded by the time we went to see him so we knew how much we could offer and having cash in hand might motivate him. 

Unfortunately the place has gotten a bit run down over the years and would take a ton of work to put back together. We would need to bring in a mobile home or live in our trailer while I got the 100 year old farm house livable again. It was going to be a ton of work and money.

One night my wife was surfing the real estate listings and found a place that was well within our budget and looked amazing. It was farther out than we wanted to go but we had looked as far north as Prince Albert and not found anything that would really work. This placed looked absolutely perfect.

We called the selling realtor to book an appointment, bought some plane tickets for the next weekend and flew to Sakatoon.

During the week, I called one of my clients  who happens to be a big real estate investor whom I have a good relationship with. He buys and sells office towers. We had a long discussion about dual-agency because the idea of dealing with only one realtor made me a bit nervous. 

As luck would have it, I caught some sort of stomach bug the night before we flew up and was awake, praying at the porcelain altar until 3am. Motivated by expensive, non-refundable tickets and Gravol, I boarded the plane the next morning.

We met up with my cousin who wanted to visit and met the realtor that day to look at a couple other properties he suggested which turned out to be awful and I had the bonus of running on about 3 hours of sleep to look at them.

The next day we went to the property we wanted to see and this is what we found:

We went back to our hotel, got in our rental car, drove all over Saskatoon to see if it had everything we needed and we wrote an offer the next morning.

Corn Lund even wrote a theme song for you https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c3tzAKcAn5M

Grassroots Tractor Sports.

So are you going to be driving back and forth to Lloydminster, or will that plan be off the table?

Young looks very flat.

In reply to ShawnG :

That barn is awesome, the kitchen looks super homey, and the sunroom is great. I bet the sunroom is uninhabitable in the winter unless a fire is going in that stove, but it would be my favorite room six months out of the year.

In reply to pheller :

Saskatchewan is very flat (with exceptions to a few places around the province)

How is internet service in rural Canada?  It still can be a problem in a lot of rural US. 

I know in the past, Canada notoriously had some of the highest rates for cell service. I seem to remember this was much because so many "small population" areas needed to be built out. 

Amazon go out there?....kidding

You can watch your dog run away for two days.

Well congratulations. Living just down the road from you in BC I know exactly the mixed feeling about the placexX. I remember driving through Abbotsford on highway one with my parents as a kid and we came on a traffic accident. It was ages before another car came along and stopped to help. Now I have to brace myself to run a short errand and a drive into Vancouver or even Surrey is no longer in the cards unless it is completely unavoidable. We plan to move as well in the next couple of years. Lots of beautiful areas with a slower pace of life to choose from. I wish you all the best on your great adventure.

If you picked your new place up and dropped it in Langley it would go for what... 5 to 7 million?

https://realestate.mitula.ca/detalle/102982/2250094622897880842/12/23/houses-hobby-farms-langley?search_terms=houses+hobby+farms+langley&page=1&pos=12&t_sec=206&t_or=2&t_pvid=ab3e10a6-8f16-4edc-9ee2-8f5a258d20c6&connection=wifi&req_sgmt=TU9CSUxFO1NFTztTRVJQOw==

You mentioned Grandpa's place has 25 acre. How many acre does this place have instead. 

At that 4 way dirt road intersection, do you own more than one side of the road? 

We have 44 acres here, it's flat but the house is on a hill about 30ft higher than the rest so flooding isn't an issue.

Everything is on one side of the road so no problems there.

Internet is available by direct wifi or satellite. 

Amazon delivers to the town post office.

There are no plans to drive to Lloyd other than an occasional visit.

The barn is going to become the farm store with a woodshop upstairs. The 60 X 40 quonset will be garage and shop and the 60 X 100 building is an indoor riding arena.

I couldn't even put up the buildings for what we paid.

In reply to John Welsh :

If I’m not mistaken everything is laid out on a grid and the roads surround a section (640 acres) and each section is one square mile. 

Each section is a square mile.

Sections commonly get divided into quarters. 

Our place is a quarter of a quarter-section.