Planning For The Future

Both Hubby and I are goal setters and there is generally always one or two (sometimes more) things that we are working towards at any one time.  We are both very determined to achieve the goals we set and hubby in particular will work 7 days a week if he has to to make things happen.  Luckily he is very self aware and recognises the signs of over work and being burnt out.  He likes to take a day to recharge and do nothing and I have to be very conscious of not asking to do jobs around the farm.  I find this challenging as there are some things that need 2 people and when he finally is home he needs to rest.  But we negotiate this and it all works out in the end

Over the past 2 years our goal was to eliminate all debt from our lives with the exception of our mortgage which have only had for 3 years so we are not yet in the position to have paid it off.  We also wanted to save some money to give us options of what we might want to do in the future.  All the money we saved was kept in our mortgage off set account so it also helped to reduce the amount of interest we were paying.

We have been talking about our living arrangements for sometime and what we want to do.  We have considered knocking down/moving the old house we live in and building again, buying a new house and also moving out of the area entirely.  We like to get away camping every month or so and we find this is a great time to talk about what we want with out the distractions of all the jobs that we could, should and need to be doing on the farm.

Over the last six months we have talked in depth about what it was that both of us wanted.  We had an idea about what it was we thought we might do but it was going to be a BIG change.  So we wanted to really take the time to look at all the pros and cons, consider all of the alternatives and then come up with some sort of a plan about how we would make it happen. We have weighed everything up we have made a decision.  A decision that is still open to change if we change our minds or circumstances dictate we have to.
But as it stands at the moment we will be packing up our lives and moving to New Zealand.

We have purchased a 5.5 acre bare block of land and intend to move there within the next few years.  We have been looking online for the past 12 months and while we were back in NZ in August we inspected about 20 properties.  We knew that we wanted to buy vacant land so August was the perfect time to be looking since it is one of the wettest month of the year which allowed us to see exactly what drainage issues existed on each property.

In the end we settled on a property about 20 minutes from my parents on the western side of the north island.  We will be about 6 km from Marton and about the same from Bulls.  We are within 30 minutes of both Feilding and Palmerston North and 2 hours from the capital Wellington.

The plan is to pay off the land while we are still living here as the exchange rate works in our favour.  So for now we are staying where we are saving every cent we can and will just be doing a few cosmetic things over the next year to get our place ready for sale.  Which reminds me that I need to get back to work.  The first job I am doing is repainting the ceiling in the lounge and at the moment all of our furniture is on the veranda while I get it done.  I have washed the ceiling, filled the holes and taped around all the edges ready to start painting.  So now I am on the home straight so I better get back to it.