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The power of willpower
A few months ago I received an email from a woman named Laura who had a question, and we fell into an email conversation. She told me a bit about her and her husband’s story. They were living near Philadelphia and longed to move to north Idaho and start a homestead. As we chatted, I found myself deeply impressed — not only by their attitudes and hard work in starting a home business, but by Laura’s impeccable English (she immigrated from Romania when she was 18). They were working hard toward their goals — learning, saving money, paying off debt, living frugally… in short, doing everything right.
A couple days ago, Laura dropped me an update: she and her husband are now the proud owners of a piece of property in the area! As you can imagine, they’re thrilled to make the move and get started turning their new place into a small farm.
Laura gave me permission to post the following. I think you’ll agree that these folks are taking the right approach toward moving rural.
As she says in her email, their story should be encouraging for all those who want to make such a leap. I wish them every happiness in their new home!
This has been our dream for the past two years… in preparation for it we have learned to can and “garden” on our tiny balcony, started cooking everything from scratch and stopped eating out, we have gone out to yard sales every weekend for an entire summer in order to gather cheap tools and watched many eBay auctions to get what we needed to start our homestead at a price we could afford. We saved every extra penny we earned from our jobs and worked very hard to build our businesses so we could afford to work from home when we would start our homestead.
We are now at the point where we will be able to sustain ourselves between our businesses and our savings and are confident that we can make it work. It’ll still be a stretch but we now have confidence in our ability to be frugal. It is incredible to see all of our hard work finally paying off. We are beyond excited to begin this new stage in our lives.
If you’d like to share these last paragraphs with your readers, you are more than welcome to. If you do, I hope this will act as an encouragement to anyone who has a big dream of homesteading or living differently from the mainstream. We have gotten plenty of strange looks when people hear of our dream but we pushed through no matter what and now we are so glad we did. There were moments when we weren’t sure if we were ever going to make it happen but it was all worth it in the end.
Thank you, also, for your wonderful advice and for conversing with me over e-mail for so long. It helped us narrow down where we would like to rent, and it also convinced us of just how nice and friendly North Idahoans are. I am very excited to be meeting more people there and making new like-minded friends in the area.
Congratulations to Laura and her husband!
Source: http://www.rural-revolution.com/2014/08/the-power-of-willpower.html
