Part 11 - Resource Management

I was originally going to post about something else in Part 11, but instead I have to respond to an e-mail I received from a friend.

"Dude, am I to believe you bought a chunk of land in Northern [deleted] and now have a farm and a frickin' compound up there? How the [edit] can you afford that?!" - name and address withheld.

The answer to the first question is: Yes.

The answer to the second question is: Some bad news followed by some good luck.

Not long before I started this blog, and the preparation, a family member passed away and we received a decent inheritance. It wasn't enough to retire on, by any means, but it was enough to kick-start our plans. We took a large chunk of it, $50k, and started buying stocks. The economy was bad, stock prices were down (Dec. 2008), so what better time to start buying?

We chose ten stocks, put $5k into each of them, and got out in May of this year. We lost everything on three of the stocks, broke even on another three, but did fairly well on four of them (GMAC, Nvidia, Apple, and Ford). Our $50k become a little under $80k.

The land we purchased was listed at just under $200k, but it had been on the market for some time, so we managed to get it for a little under $180k (including fees). Our stock bonanza mostly went towards the down payment on the land. The balance was paid off by getting $10k from each couple. Another $10k was received from everybody in order to get the land ready.

Instead of building a settlement on the land, first, we decided to isolate the land. As we're looking at about 40 acres, we wanted to make sure we had a very well defined border; a big, strong, fence was required. The fence also went deep into the earth to avoid tunneling (by people, not zombies). We also had to make sure we had buffer zones and good sightlines from within the property. It also all had to be camouflaged for outsiders looking in. This is not an inexpensive endeavor.

All told, we now have a well-protected, somewhat hidden (except by air) compound that would take an army to break into. We're well funded, because everybody pitches in.