Growing up in a poor family with very little expendable income I began mowing lawns at the age of 10 in order to afford some of the luxuries in life I saw my other friends have. At the age of 10 that was video games, books, music or movies. Later it warped into motorsports and “big boy toys.” Mowing lawns at the age of 10 consisted of me pushing my lawnmower, weed eater, and gas around town until I was able to drive at the age of 16. This was no small order for a young kid growing up in a very small mountain town where everything seemed to be uphill. When I was able to drive myself and my equipment around in the back of my old Jeep Cherokee it opened a whole new market and I began to work at numerous rural properties. It was then that my love of land and real estate began. Until graduating high school I always had numerous jobs while still mowing lawns and I made good money for my age which allowed me to have expendable income and be able to help take some of the burden off my family. I dreamed of someday owning a piece of land all my own.
At the age of 18 I left for the Army with no selected duty station and was listed as ‘needs of the army’. I was blessed enough that the Army needed people in Alaska. In all my spare time between training deployments and overseas deployments I would explore the state and was immediately impressed with the sturdiness of the residents and how so many people lived off-grid in such harsh conditions. My obsession with land and real estate grew as I dreamed of owning my own chunk and building a homestead of my own.
I left the active army of 4 years and transitioned to the national guard of my home mountain state and attempted to try my hand at full-time college. I quickly learned a 22-year-old that had seen many training deployments throughout the US and a combat deployment overseas did not fit in very well with 18-year-old freshman. I began looking for fulltime work and was blessed to earn employment with one of the larger metro law enforcement agencies. This was the start of the 2008 financial collapse and I was blessed to have a well-paying job. This allowed me to purchase my first property as I saw property values crash. A small house that needed a lot of work in a small town close enough to commute to the city I worked in. While it was not my dream rural property, I saw the value in fixing the place up and being able to make some money when the market recovered.
During the financial crisis of 2008 and on I was largely protected. I had a good well-paying job that would not be eliminating positions anytime soon. It was during this time and the recovery I realized how terrible city living was and the dangerous underbelly many people never see minus the few “big” stories that made the news. I discovered preparedness and voraciously read all the preparedness fiction and nonfiction books I could get my hands on. By this time, I had a wife with a child on the way. Home values had improved and I had considerable equity in my home. I sold this home and rolled the profit into a lovely mountain house on one acre that I thought would be a good start for my homesteading dream. This mountain house was still close enough to continue working at my job and my commute was a stunning 45-minute drive through the mountains.
I quickly realized my once ideal mountain house was nothing more than another suburb despite the mountains and larger home lots. The area was quickly being flooded with other metro dwellers who still wanted to be close to work yet live in the mountains. Traffic was horrendous. The stores in the town were packed with people. My love of real estate of property remained and I was constantly looking at land. All land that met my homestead criteria (remoteness, water, land usability, etc..) was far outside of my budget, too far to realistically commute to work, and still had the same problem of just being too close to the massive urban area I worked in.Continue reading“Rural Land for an Urban Prepper, by J.D.”