How We Got a Mortgage Free Home
Part Two
Buying a home during a pandemic sounds like a really dumb idea. But the pandemic was actually the main impetus for our home buying decision. I sometimes wonder if we would have made another decision had the entire world not shut down. Anytime we make a big change in our life, it is wrought with doubt because we have no idea what we're getting ourselves into. But as I tell my daughter (and hopefully model too), it's not worth staying in a situation that keeps you small and makes you unhappy just to avoid the fear of the unknown; you have to take those big leaps. In my experience, the big leaps of change always make life better in one way or another. The energetics behind change open up new doors, creating new pathways that you would never otherwise know. Life is like a good book; it's boring if you don't raise the stakes.
How did a pandemic inspire us to buy a house? Well, to understand you'd have to get pretty deep into my psyche. As I mentioned in Part 1 of How We Got a Mortgage Free Home, for the last six years we've been living in a rental in town. Everything about this rental has been great except for the frustration of being on town utilities. I hate being dependent on the government or companies to supply my basic needs for survival. Ever since I can remember, I have always had in the back of my mind the need for self-sufficiency, subsistence, independence. Maybe because I'm an Aquarian or because in my childhood my parents enacted a back-to-the-land hippie lifestyle that was popular in the 70s--canning, gardening, raising rabbits, fixing up old VWs, living in the country and such. I don't know what it is, honestly, I just know it has always been important to me.
My husband, Eric, and I moved to New Mexico from Alaska where we met in a small fly-in fly-out Athabaskan village on the Yukon River called Galena. Originally from the New York suburbs, I moved to Alaska in the first place because of my deep desire to live off-grid. In my first couple of years in Alaska, I lived alone in the sweet town of Talkeetna without plumbing or electricity and sometimes with no more than a stack of wood to keep me warm in the subarctic temperatures.
In this time, plus my time in Galena, I learned everything I needed to know about my ability to take care of myself and my tolerance for discomfort. Alaska took me to my edge and I survived. In fact, I thrived. After spending most of my twenties in Alaska, I am confident that I can handle most rustic situations. (As long as they don't trigger my vertigo, then I'm a little baby.) After backpacking around Asia together for six months in the early naughts, Eric and I decided to move back to the lower 48 to make future travels more inexpensive and convenient.
We landed in Taos because it had some of the same characteristics that we loved about Alaska--a rugged lifestyle, a diverse community, independent creative folks and beautiful scenery. That's an oversimplification but our intention was to stay here for two years and we've been here so far for 15 (including our six years in the mountain town of Penasco, see previous newsletter). We got married here and raised our daughter here.
In Alaska, most people I knew lived without running water because the permafrost made it too expensive to drill, and without electricity because they were far from any utility lines. Here, there is water in the mountains and river valleys, but we are still in the high desert and drought is common and must always be taken into consideration.
In the community west of the beautiful Rio Grande gorge, where we bought our home, there is no water because it is prohibitively expensive to drill deep enough. That's one of the reasons the land is so cheap out here even though it's only fifteen miles or so from town. Electric and phone lines do not extend out beyond the gorge. Most people don't have building permits. If you need the police or fire department to arrive quickly, you're most likely out of luck. You're on your own out here on the west mesa. Because of this, a rugged community of outliers has sprung up, willing to live off grid. Think Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome meets a hippie commune crossed with a libertarian militia.
As I mentioned in the last blog newsletter, we have become jaded about mortgages. But when we were thinking we wanted to buy land, we knew we didn't have enough money to do it without getting a bank loan. I was struggling quite a bit with my integrity versus my reality. This is a struggle most of us have everyday, especially environmentalist. Every time we get in our car or buy plastic products produced in China, we are choosing between integrity and reality. I was ready to give up and get a bank loan.
We were on the way home from our Spring Break road trip in southern New Mexico when we learned that the first cases of the Corona Virus had made it to our state and a shelter-in-place order would be quickly enacted by our governor. Listening to the news on the radio, I turned to Eric and said, "If the apocalypse happens while we're living in our current house in town, I'm going to be so pissed." All the years I had been homesteading and living in fairly independent conditions up until most recently, and this would be the moment when everything collapses? Fortunately, nothing collapsed, but it made me realize how truly important it was for me to make a change.
That's when our future home popped onto my radar on Craigslist, where I had been actively looking for cheap land. Keep in mind, even if we found cheap land that could be owner financed, we would still need to figure out a way to put a home on it and we couldn't afford both. The owner of our new home was asking $47K for the 750 sq. ft. straw bale house with a quarter acre of land. That was the cost of an acre of land without utilities closer to Town! We just had to go and check it out.
You know when something just kind of works out so easily that it feels meant to be? The owner, a builder by trade, had originally built the home for himself and added on a room for his son, but never finished it. It had been sitting empty for years. Everything was done except that it had no utilities. We would have to put in the solar electric power, the gas, the heat, the cisterns, plumb everything and finish some interior carpentry. We figured all of it would cost us about $5K (It cost closer to $15K). We could afford to put down $20K and still have money left to get it move in ready.
The owner was easy going. He was willing to finance for two or three years with no interest. We negotiated the price, he was willing to sell it for $37K if we had it paid off by the end of the year. We decided to jump on the deal. Good thing he reduced the price because the cost of getting it move-in ready was triple what we thought it would be. Fortunately, we didn't have to pay last month's rent on our old place since we paid it when we moved in. I had a few payments on jobs come through. Most importantly, neither of us lost our jobs, despite the economic fall out our country is currently experiencing.
We moved in last June and camped on the land for a while. We're figuring things out as we go along. Neither of us have experience with putting in plumbing or electricity, though Eric has way more of a clue than I do and is learning a lot along the way. We even got our daughter involved with the work, putting in flooring for her room. My hope is that by the time the house is completely paid off, it will be in a place where we don't feel like we need to work on it anymore. And then, we're home free, literally.