the daydream fund challenge thread

rhiwfield

rosie, as we havent gone the whole hog I defer to those who have in terms of advice. But over the last 10 years we've done a major downshift and gone a way down the path of self sufficiency so, fwiw, here's a few thoughts:

Budgeting: be honest! Saw an escape to the country last night where the guy had to sell up his precious bike so that the wife could have an extra horse. Seems to me that everyone involved has to buy into the dream and the realities of strained finances. That guy's body language spoke volumes! The wife seemed oblivious.

We've run a detailed budget of income and expenditure for years now and keep it up to date and accurate. It includes "essential" treats, like that bike , and some serious allowances for contingencies and overruns. The budget looks forward so that we can cope with changes to circumstances.

Another thing to remember is that people get ill and injured and cant look after the house/smallholding etc.

One thing thats essential to us is to stay debt free. I doubt its feasible to run a successful smallholding and pay back any meaningful borrowings, though I'd love to be proved wrong

rozeepozee

lostinrates wrote: »

IMO the best and only way to get a picture is to start monitoring comprehensively the market in the area you are interested in and check every sale price. We did this for around three years!

My family have something on the market in SW and have been told that as summer progressed into auntum its the over £3 million ish properties that are really doing well in their area, late spring summer it was the £1.5 millionish properties that did well, with other more traditional smallholding/country properties languishing a bit. That is obviously very specific to their area. Its also worth noting that some of the small holdings round there have languished on the market since before Credit crunch. Our considerably humbler purchase had dallied for over a year, in fact it had been UO or exchanged a few times, but fell through everytime.

We changed our offer twice, going up and down, and feel we got something with wriggle room in the current market for drops.

In my very humble opinion I would be surprised if largish smallholdings shot up, and expect smaller smallholdings to do OK as some people downsize to stabilise outgoings. But who knows what the pattern is where you a looking

Cash is always good, and I have seen a lot of forced sales of smallholdings and some types of farm in the last couple of years. But yes, there are other cash buyers.

At times monitoring prices etc seemed like a huge job. This sort of sale is often outside of the normal indices for checking ''house prices'', so you need to phone up the auction houses etc. There is no one pattern across the market It changes in tiny areas across regions (at one point it seemed we were looking across most of southern England and it was weirdly erratic).

Being ready to move quickly (having surveyors etc to contact in the area, having a lawyer ready to go) was key for us. We ending up in a situation we had 2 weeks ...9 working days, to exchange, then 28 days to complete. For us it was more complicated as there was financing involved, but still, its a bit of a head long rush and our sellers tried to use the panic to move our offer upwards. Being confident in the background I had done on the area, the specific area and finally the property itself made me stay strong, (before the final offer we had negotiated somewhat over parcel of land and price) and resist the urge to be caught up in a panic and run with them.

All good advice. I have rather haphazardly monitored the market so far but know it makes good sense to be organized about it. Back to the old excel spread sheet it is then....

COOLTRIKERCHICK

Rosee,

I personally think cash is king... and it is still very much a buyers market.

If i was in a position to buy a smallholding, and seen something i liked, i would find out how long it had been on the market, try and find out how much the current owners paid for it:rotfl: and then put a cheeky offer in:D worst thing they can say is no, and you just up your offer..

JayneC

http://s1185.photobucket.com/home/jayne_coyne/recentuploads?view=slideshow

Quick hello to say more piccies added of my other garden. Can't stop, bath running...

Be back later x

Davesnave

Rozee, as Lostinrates has explained about searching, I just need to add that being a cash buyer is very useful and, indeed, sometimes essential. We wouldn't have had a sniff at this place, had we not moved into a rented house first and been ready to go at the drop of a hat. The best bargains are those where the sellers need to move quickly, which happens for all sort of reasons, and not always sad ones.

Now that the market is flat, could you not rent for a while in your chosen area? This would show you what living there is like, especially in the greyer months, and you might even find someone local to advise you. Renting in West Wales was our next objective when this place came up, forcing a radical re-think. We had the advantage of considerable flexibility regarding the places we were prepared to consider, whereas you have quite a tightly defined target area. Some people (agents) told us we were spreading ourselves too thinly, but with the Rightmove throwing up 80 – 90% of what we were looking for on a daily basis, I thought that was tosh. Mopping up the other 10-20% was fairly easy, once organised.

As rhiwfield suggests, smallholdings aren’t likely to provide much income in the early years, so one needs a good idea of where the day to day money is coming from, and a contingency fund too. I’d say it is possible to succeed eventually with a specialist business, but it’s the early years and the steep learning curve that scuppers many. Even with our experience, the only way we could make a liveable income here would be for one of us to jump into the van 5 days a week and head off to markets while the other one did the work at home. That sounds very like the treadmill we were on when I had a full time job, so it isn’t going to happen!:rotfl:

We bought this smallholding for very hard-headed reasons, like the fact that we knew it would sell if we didn’t like being here. That might sound odd, but there is no guarantee that one will ‘bond’ with the land, the location or the neighbours. Also, personal health and fitness cannot be predicted. As it happens, we’re fine, but there’s someone in the village who feels otherwise and, coincidentally, wishes he’d gone to West Wales! I don’t think he’ll ever be settled until he does. Some people should follow their dream, but others, me perhaps, can live with a compromise.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

wise words Davesnave,

I should imagine its huge leap and culture shock moving to a toally different part of the country,

we all have ideas and images in our minds of how it is going to be etc, but allways in reality it never is..

Davesnave has made a very good suggestion about renting in the area that you want to move to, this way you can see if you really do 'feel at home'

Well its October, and i feel this year has just flown by, just dont know where the time has gone, i feel as though i have wasted alot of time this year..:o

We are doing a vintage fashion fair tomorrow, and i am just going to take my low end vintage stuff, just to get rid of it, and in the next week or so, i am going to start listing on ebay again.

I find this is the time where i get good sales, so fingers crossed....lol..

Butterflymind

Hello everyone

Sorry I've not been on for a while. I haven't had a chance to catch up with what you've all been doing. So I hope everyone is ok.

Various calamaties in the old homestead: first, the p.c. died after only having it for 8 months(bad D**l, very bad D**l), then the DVD player croaked & wheezed it's last, then yet another gizmo went wrong (the printer - bad D**l: sends D**l into the corner with a dunce's cap on). Then, I was finally sorting all that out, it was me being wheeled off to see a consultant who has thoroughly had a go at my 'bits' with a camera in gory technicolour & I am awaiting biopsy results with crossed fingers....

Sheesh. It all comes at once.... Am hoping that that's all to go T~#s up this year, although the car is making strange noises and I am hoping that by turning up the volume on the radio it will all go away....:( (wafts moths out of empty purse)

Finally made it out into the garden to discover massive marrows, some of them having been mysteriously munched from inside leaving only the skins left (WTH?), 4 foot cabbages looking more like green lace after the caterpillars had their fill, 2 foot chard, and well, you get the picture.

I will keep on taking the tablets. It will get better. I am thinking positive. All the bad stuff is out the way now....nearly (mutters to herself). I've managed to make a tomato glut into a tomatoe base sauce & frozen for at least 4 meals, same amount of stews, also, frozen blackberries and gooseberries, and will consign green stuff to the compost, what's left of it. Are there any growing things out there that caterpillars and slugs don't like?

troglodyte

Morning all,

Lots of useful tips there Dave, LiR, Rhiwfield and Alfie, thanks. Research and more research is the way forward - finding the time for it of course is the hard part.

Jayne thanks for the pics, you have certainly got your work cut out but it has plenty of potential!

CTC so sorry about your horrible 'visitors', hope someone does the same to them while they're out!

And Butterfly, I hope things get better from now on - surely they must? I don't have much to contribute but I would recommend perpetual spinach as something that seems to do well in spite of everything, I have more slugs than you could shake a stick at in more colours than I knew existed but although they do hide among the leaves they don't eat them! Caterpillars also ignore it, although they have eaten the kale, cabbages, sprouts and even watercress! And it's much easier to grow than genuine spinach (which seems to go straight to seed for me) and lasts over winter and will grow new leaves again in spring before finally flowering.

Davesnave

Jayne, that's an amazing plot you have there, but a lot of work too, particularly with the slope, which seems almost alpine. :eek: I can see now how the rock based and keyhole gardens at the permaculture demonstration fit in. Glad you're younger than me, anyway!;)

Butterflymind, I know how it is with bad things all happening at once, but hope the exploratory surgery turns out to be a good thing in the end.:) Cars and computers are easily fixed compared with humans, but I suppose sometimes humans can fix themselves with a change of lifestyle etc. Don't worry about the garden too much - there's another season coming.....

I remind myself of the above, because on a trip to put curtains up at daughter's new uni flat yesterday, we had the car roll away and bash backwards into the house. It took half an hour after unloading to do it, and the handbrake was on properly, so I'm suspicious of the new brakes that were fitted with the MoT. Guess it was just the difference between them being hot and cold, but anyway, it's not right. Luckily, as I had tools and a Halfords in walking distance, I could cobble the bits together so that the rear lights still worked and the sticking-out bits no longer stuck out. We then drove in the pelting rain, avoiding the law, the 100 miles back to our favourite fish & chippy, only to find they'd had to close early due to some emergency. :mad: That was almost as annoying as having to decide whether to scrap the car or have it fixed! I expect there's someone locally who does a bit of bodywork on the side....there usually is!

In other news, we now have one side of the lower paddock fenced, but the poor chaps who did it were soaked through on Friday and had to retire early. It was lucky we did the groundwork on Thursday, when the soil was still dry under the hedge, or it would have been well-nigh impossible. Timing is so crucial with some jobs, but by heck, that was cutting it fine. The whole area there will be a bit of a bog now and the stream will run for the next 6 months, but I can get a bit of grass seed down. I reckon we have gained at least 1/8 acre by cutting back rubbish and re-grading the banked-up soil with the digger.

lostinrates

alfie_1 wrote: »

http://www.mouseprice.com/ this site , if you know post code will tell you what price was paid for recent/past sold houses. hope this helps!! [ im a mind of useless information ,until someone needs it anyway!!]

Does everything show on mouseprice? Lots of small holding don't show as ''domestic''sales, and so don't show on normal indices.

Anyway also seconding this:

''
One thing thats essential to us is to stay debt free. I doubt its feasible to run a successful smallholding and pay back any meaningful borrowings, though I'd love to be proved wrong''
and this
''smallholdings aren’t likely to provide much income in the early years, so one needs a good idea of where the day to day money is coming from, and a contingency fund too.''

we simply couldn't do it without DH's income. We have a sizeable mortgage and considerable expenses too and having been cash rich for a long time its a huge shift both financially and emotionally. Before sacrifices were for saving for the dream, now its for trying to stay afloat! Choice is certainly psychologically easier! Although I have no more animals (except the feral cats) than I had before the move, the demands of trying to sort out other stuff...the house, the garden, the buildings the land, the fencing.....my day is longer now trying to fit it all in. We still have no veg/productive land ready which is a pain now and will have repercussions through the next few eating/growing seasons..not least in expense. And I haven't managed to preserve very much of what we do have...because other things happened urgently. Right as the plums were ready I got flu, the apples are still coming, but, for example now, my feet and back and arms are killing me, the idea of standing over the cooker, or even sitting and peeling to tray freeze is just too much. I do have an old freezer to store some in, but.....

Fencing, a priority when we moved, is about to become an issue again on winter grazing. We've got lots of very dodgy barbed wire which needs replacing and patches through out the hedgerows. That's next weekend come rain or shine...It needs to be down and replaced on the same day. This year were planning on temporary measures of semi permanent electric. Temporary isn't up to the job, and we're not convinced of current fencelines so don't want to commit to stock wire and rail.

We've now dealt with over forty trees. Mostly laylandii (spelling?) gone mad. As well as being time consuming and back breaking its time expensive and I feel very exposed..not least because we don't have enough curtains and the ones we have are too heavy for the curtain rails here....and curtain rails are not a pressing enough expense over the new drainage...and tbh, we're not sure the walls can cope ATM!:eek: