Today we have nothing left to do, before we leave, except to clean the house. Almost ready to go and we haven’t explained The Plan yet. This probably should have come a lot sooner, but here we are.

We have talked about aspects of the plan, but let’s talk about it in real detail.

Jobs

We are not in this to make money, but for our lives to become richer. For our lives to become richer in the way we call wealthy. To do this we need a slower lifestyle, we do not need to be spending 60 hours a week apart from one another; if we are going to spend 60 hours a week working, let it be together.

As we have decided we do not need scads of money, we have decided to take on smaller jobs, and probably more than one each.

The Wife would like to spend time teaching art, making paintings, or creating mosaics. Kavius can tutor, teach basic computing, or bag groceries at the local grocer (when your day is done, its done). Together we can offer online services, such as web hosting and graphic design and software development, that will bring in a small but steady income.

Nothing big, nothing awe inspiring; just something to sustain us and help us pay our property taxes.

Agriculture

The reason we do not want any one big job is we would like to become somewhat self-sustaining. We do not want to have to rely on others to keep us fed; we do not want to worry about a pipe that supplies our water breaking; and we do not want to have to stress about our jobs becoming obsolete, or the company failing. The only way to achieve this is to supply these things ourselves.

This means some agriculture. We are going to have to grow our own food and raise our own livestock. We are going to start small, just a garden, but hopefully an impressive garden. From there we would like to get some chickens and maybe some goats.

Property

The Plan focussed around our want for a self-sufficient lifestyle; we do not want to need anyone else. This requires land to grow food, raise animals, and layout for the long-term. In short, we need a homestead.

We both have different ideas of what this land requires. For The Wife, fruit and nut trees are important; for Kavius, it must have its own water, and be at least 10 acres.

As we have discussed it, several requirements have been raised that we both agree on:

We are not master gardeners, therefore the climate must be very garden friendly. If the land is currently growing grapes, that is good because that means it will grow anything we want to throw at it.

While Kavius wants 10 acres, most of that should be covered in trees. We do not want more land than we can handle. 2-3 cleared acres would be about right. Plus it’s own wood supply would be handy.