City Dwellers to Country Living #1

twelvehounds (25)in #life • 7 years ago (edited)

This is our first post. My name is Brad and my wife's name is Leslie.

We are going to be writing a series with photos and videos of our lives as we left our city life in a county with almost 1,000,000 people, to rural Tennessee country life in a county of just 16,000. We will be showing our struggles, our wins, and everything in between as much as possible. Please follow along and enjoy our ride. We will start from our past and work our way to the present. Eventually, giving people a glimpse of our future and where we plan to be.

Part 1

Background:

Brad

Grew up in Michigan; some city life, some country life. Experienced hunter and farming. Can fix almost anything given enough time. He was an ASE certified mechanic for many years. He's somewhat of a jack of all trades, but not necessarily a master of any. He has a couple degrees in business and banking/finance. He is very opinionated and is generally somewhat of an "ass" to people. He's not very self driven. He has worked in many fields from insurance to fiberglass lamination. Currently, he designs and prints things with a couple of 3D printers and modeling software from home, as well as helping Leslie with her eBay business.

Leslie

She was born in Hawaii, but grew up in Florida. She lived mostly in the city, with not much experience in rural America. She is very intelligent and very self driven. She has a degree in Business. She is the "boss" of the household and handles the finances as well as her end of their home based business. She is also very opinionated. She has also been dubbed "literal Leslie", you cannot make up numbers around her or guess, facts only. She is definitely Brad's driving force, without her; he would end up with a 9-5 job somewhere instead of living their home based lifestyle. She has worked previous retail management positions and has pretty much stayed within that realm of business. She sells on eBay, other online sites, and locally; Basically flipping things for quick cash where she can. She gets every last dollar out of anything.

Our business logo:

Main Story:

About 2 years ago we were living in Tampa Bay Florida in our small home that we bought 3 years prior. We finally decided we wanted a change of pace. We had thought about it for 5 or 6 years. We were tired of the traffic, the Florida heat, the danger of big city life and decided we wanted to move to rural America. Where though?

I took a trip with Leslie to northern Michigan in the winter, to let her experience regular winter and see how far North she wanted to go since she had never experienced winter life. We made snow men, went to my uncles junkyard and had a decent time. After two days though, she had enough snow and was in full on cabin fever. We agreed that Michigan was too far north and had far too much winter. We wanted somewhere with some of all seasons but not really an extreme of any of them.

After a lot of deliberation we narrowed it down to Tennessee or Kentucky. We liked the idea of no state income tax and low government interference into property (in some counties). Our first benchmark was to get our current house sold. We bought the house on the low market and had a little equity in it. We decided that whatever equity we got after the sale, we would use to purchase our country life.

We had a few things to figure out.

Questions:

Where would we, our 2 dogs, and 2 cats stay after we sold the house, but before we bought our land; and how would we get there?

Since we have a home based business, ALL of our income is tied up inside of our home since all of our inventory is stored there; It's hard to sell a home with a bunch of shelves and retail inventory stacked to the ceiling. It's also hard to sell inventory if it's in a storage unit. Where were we going to store the inventory while we moved? How are we going to make money in between living situations?

Answers:

I traded my old 1981 Ford Bronco for a 1990 32' Gulfstream Sunclipper motorhome that needed some work.
We opted on selling to a wholesale buyer through a cash purchase for a lower than retail amount, so we didn't have to prepare the house for sale and spend a lot of money in the process. We opted on moving all of our inventory into a large air conditioned storage unit.