And at what point in your life will you be ready to try to realize your dream? OMG. Check out this incredible offering near Lompoc, a rural burg in Santa Barbara County, California.
Ogodogodogod, run your eyeballs over those enticing photos. Imagine living in a place like that, making wine to support your habits, traveling around the world to sell your wine and learn more about wine-making…oooogod!
They only want $950,000 for this property. Although there are no vines planted yet, it has 6 1/3 acres that could be cultivated as one desired…smack in the heart of wine country. Or, failing that, it calls out to host a B&B.
Forwarded this to M’hijito, who says, “Too bad I’m not a millionaire.”
Heh. Little does he know. 😉 Oh well. What he doesn’t know could harm him, I suppose.
But that’s not the issue at all. What else he doesn’t know that could harm him is that if something like this were carried on his books as a business enterprise — say, he incorporated an entity to buy it and the entity did all the borrowing and the spending — he wouldn’t need to be a millionaire to live in it and work for it.
Some years ago, a friend offered to sell me his very successful bed-and-breakfast in Flagstaff. He and his wife had built it into a profit-making enterprise and now were looking to retire — although you can live nicely on a b&b and funnel virtually all of your living expenses through the business (it’s astonishing!!), it nevertheless is a work-intensive business. He wanted a million dollars for the property, the business, and all its accouterments.
Welp. I was younger then and a great deal less bold and certainly every bit as averse to work as I am today…so I declined.
But in retrospect…hm.
If I were 30 or 40 years younger, knowing now what I know about how S-corps and C-corps work and how people wangle a living out of them, I would look at this property altogether differently than I looked at the Flagstaff opportunity lo! these many years ago.
Work? Holeee shit! The amount of work beggars the imagination. But if you’re in your 30s or even your 40s, you can do it. And working that hard for yourself is far less onerous than working half that hard for The Man. Learning curve? Argha! You’d have to pick up the equivalent of a master’s degree in viniculture or the hospitality industry in a year — preferably less. But you could do it. If you wanted to.
How much work would you do — how much risk would you take — to devote your life to doing something that looks like what you’d really want to do?
The heck with grapes and making wine….Buy the place and plant almonds…DD2 spent time in California and met some kids in school out there whose folks are involved in “A-MONDS” (how they pronounce it). It seems the almonds are so valuable they now have to hire security when harvested and taking them to market. Just price a container of almonds and if you listen to health folks …they are a “super food”. Aaaaand the guys over at TIAA-CREF are now one of the largest growers of almonds in the Country. These guys are pretty smart and seem to know when to jump on a trend…. I can see it now “Almonds from …the Funny Farm”….
I like it!!!!
hmmmmm…pecans grow handsomely here…i wonder if almonds would grow in the backyard…
LOL! My family ended up in California when my great-grandfather bought some citrus orchards in southern CA, figuring his workin’ days were behind him. He expected he’d be able to just kick back and watch the money grow on the trees.
That was a slight misapprehension, of course. After losing his shirt in that enterprise, he moved to the Bay Area.
Today, the ill-fated citrus orchards are replaced by oil wells. They guy had bought — and lost — freaking Signal Hill!
Almonds would be worth a shot….They are $8.50 a pound here at the grocery store…
Cost of limes has gone through the roof, too, although it’s settled down a bit. My lime tree is covered with the things…I wouldn’t even have to move to California.
Running a bed/breakfast or a vineyard would be about at the bottom of my dream list–both 24 hr jobs. Lompoc, btw, is noted for its prisons, probably a large employer in that area.
Yeah, I’m with frugalscholar: that’s not my dream. Now, living on property like that with an equally enterprising partner and growing food, raising dairy goats and horses, yeah, that sounds good to be. However, that’s not really a business so I couldn’t leverage the 1 mil for that dream.