So, we could definitely use some advice on how to proceed here. There's a bit of a back story, so I guess I should explain that first.
I'm 35, I've been gardening, farming (small-scale, on occasion) and landscaping for going on 20 years. I got my Permaculture Design Cert in 2009 studying with Dave Jacke, and have been doing edible landscaping and permaculture design professionally (though the income is really not very much) pretty much ever since (I also have a degree in horticulture and landscape design). A few years back, I went through a divorce. We ended up selling the house - we had bought in 2009 when the market was really low - and made a bunch of money when we sold it. After paying bills, settling divorce stuff, I ended up debt-free with about $35K in cash. I used that toward the purchase of a 10-acre lot down in Spotsylvania, VA which cost $42K - I have one payment left and then I own it outright. I got remarried in 2013. Our plan was to build a house on that lot and start our homestead. My wife retired after 20 years in the Air Force right around the time we got married, and was hoping to get a good contractor job which fell through - and now she's working a crap job for $30K less a year than when she was in the military. She had a significant amount of credit card debt, which we are trying to pay off, but it's difficult since the income has dropped quite a bit. We've been trying for over a year to get her a better-paying job, but with government spending/hiring freezes, it hasn't worked out quite yet. We are really just scraping by at this point.
We are in the process of trying to sell our home, which SUCKS - she bought it in 2010 while she was stationed in England and didn't even see the house, but bought it because her mother lived 2 houses down at the time. The house is in a neighborhood with a crappy HOA, it's built into the side of a steep north-facing hill, and seems to develop new problems every time the wind changes direction - the roof sucks, there's no light to grow anything but ferns and moss, we are in the process of spending $20K to replace a rotted-out retaining wall in the back yard, and in the last crazy storm we got, part of the asphalt driveway collapsed because the culvert system underneath it was designed and built like crap 30 years ago - no idea how we can afford to fix that one yet.
So basically the situation is this: We have about $22K in credit card debt, a house that is a sucking chest wound of disappearing finances, barely enough income to get by.... we also have a townhouse that is rented out, and a 10-acre rural lot that is virtually paid for. Hopefully we can sell the house. We could stay in the townhouse for a while, which would be much less per month, until we can figure out what else to do. Now, at this point we have two options: Keep the 10 acres, save up money & eliminate debt, and hopefully be able to build down there at some point. Or, we could sell the land, use that money to pay off debt, put some into savings for an eventual down payment on an already-built house with some acreage, and have some cash for emergencies or capital to get homestead projects going. I'm not sure what the better way forward is. The idea is to, as the thread states, build our homestead and prepare as a retirement plan - we want our place (wherever it is) to provide for us through retirement and later, for our kids. Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated.
