The Coop Ep. #06: The Truth About Buying Your Homestead Property, with Tim and Sophia Eng

Introduction:

We believe food looks and tastes better when it comes from a mason jar and that every home should have a well used cast iron skillet. We believe in starting where you are in being a good steward, and that homesteading is a mindset. First, we believe that our great grandmothers were right about almost everything and that the best conversations happen around the coop.

Anna Sakawsky:

All right, well welcome everybody to episode six of the Coop, where we have real and honest conversations with the writers that bring you Homestead Living Magazine each month. So my name is Anna Sikowski and I am the very proud editor in chief of Homestead Living Magazine, where we’re dedicated to bringing you content that helps and inspires you to live a healthy, sustainable life. And I am super excited to introduce our guests today, both of whom have been featured in and contribute regularly to the magazine and who I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know online and in person at the modern Home Setting conference, which is coming up later this month. Hopefully I’ll see some of you guys there. But before we begin, I do want to just take a moment to thank our sponsor. So the Coop is brought to you in part by the Homestead documentary, your ticket to Modern Home Setting inspiration.

With 20 episodes across two incredible seasons, you’ll meet 50 real life homesteaders who are turning their dreams into reality from growing your own food to raising livestock and starting profitable homestead businesses. This series covers it all. You can instantly binge seasons one and two for just $59 and start your homestead journey today. So you can head over to homestead documentary.com right now to start watching. Again, that’s homestead documentary.com. So as I mentioned, I’m really excited to introduce today’s guests to you because they’re not just homesteaders. They also specialize in helping people find the perfect property to homestead on and realize their own homesteading dreams. And they also have expertise around homestead security and forging a feasible path toward greater sustainability and self-sufficiency. So Tim and Sophia Ang are a husband and wife team who run the call to Farms podcast, as well as the realestate business homesteading agent.com.

And among the many hats they wear as homesteaders business owners and dedicated members of the home sitting community, both close to their own home and nationwide, they do a lot of conferences. So if you’re ever at any of the home sitting conferences, they may well be there. So go say hi. But Tim and Sophia make a dynamite real estate duo who help their clients find the perfect property to achieve their home setting dreams. But so many of us who found home sitting later in life, neither of them grew up home setting. Their story begins in March of 2020 at the onset of the pandemic. So I won’t give away too much, I’ll let them tell their own story, but suffice it to say that their story begins with panic, buying some backyard laying hens for $300 a piece. From there, they made much more rational moves towards securing their homestead in eastern Tennessee where they are today and today they help others find their own homestead properties, which is mostly what we’re going to be talking about today.

However, if you are on a property that you’re home sitting on, you’re not really planning on going anywhere, we will also talk about things that you can do to improve and secure your own property and make it more sustainable and resilient. So before I do bring them on, I would love to know, I’ve seen a bunch of people come into the comments from all over the place, as per usual, I’d love to just know really quickly, where are you at in your home setting journey? So do you currently own a property that you’re homesteading on? Are you looking actively right now or are you just kind of dreaming of getting a property to homestead on one day? So maybe pop that in the comments, just say, looking, dreaming, or own right? Let me know where you’re at and then keep in mind that we are going to take questions from the audience as well.

So feel free to pop any questions that you have that come up throughout this interview into the comments, and we’ll do our best to get to as many as possible at the end. So if you’re looking too or you are thinking about moving someday or you’ve been looking, think about what challenges you have or you’ve been facing, feel free to pop that in the chat, any questions you have. And then also, I already seen a comment come in about will there be a replay? So yes, there will be a replay. The link will be sent out shortly after the show, so hopefully you can stick with us to the end. We usually run for about an hour, but if you can’t make it all the way, then there will be a replay link available as well. Alright, so let’s just see. Dreaming, looking own, but need more land, too many goats own, but looking to move to a better location own but dreaming bigger, looking own dreaming of a larger one.

Dreaming, both looking, dreaming and own. Okay, so we’ve got people kind of all over the place. I’m in the same situation. We own a property that we’re home sitting on right now, but we’re just on a quarter acre. And I was just telling Tim and Sophia before we began, it’s amazing what you can do on a quarter acre, and we’re going to talk a little bit about that too, because we’ve been on a journey the past few years of really maximizing every square inch our property and making it really functional for how we use it as homesteaders. So even if you feel like you’re kind of stuck where you are, we’re going to talk about some things that you can be doing to maybe upgrade or improve your property for the purpose of home setting. But then also obviously we’ll talk a lot about what to look for if you’re looking at upgrade or you’re dreaming of finding some land for yourself, waiting for your offer to be accepted. Oh, awesome. Great. Awesome. Okay, perfect. Okay, well without further ado, I would love to welcome our guests. So welcome to Tim and Sophia Eng. I Hi guys. Hey Anna.

Speaker 3:

Hey,

Anna Sakawsky:

Thanks for having us.

Tim and Sophia Eng:

Thank you so much in order to be

Anna Sakawsky:

Here. Thanks for being here. Perfect. Okay. Alright, well we’ll get right into it because I have a ton of questions and I’m sure that our audience is going to have a ton of questions as we go to. So let’s start off, before we get into your story, if you could just take a moment, each of you maybe, and just kind of introduce yourself rather than as a couple, who you are, Tim and who you are, Sophia, and your background and what each of you brings to the table.

Tim Eng:

Go ahead.

Sophia Eng:

Alright, well, my name is Sophia Ing. I’m the author of the Nourishing Asian Kitchen Cookbook, and I started my career in Silicon Valley and we’ve moved out here into what are 40 acres now, but we started also on a quarter acre. And I really started questioning when I had my first daughter, the quality of our food. And that’s really what spurred the cookbook and looking into how do we start growing our own food, especially as technology companies, such as when Amazon and Jeff Bezos acquired Whole Foods, it started making me question if organic was truly organic anymore. And so that just led us on a journey when we were what, 2017 and started growing our own herbs on our quarter acre. And it’s just kind of started from there and took off and we haven’t been able to look back. But yeah, it’s been a really interesting journey that we’ve been on.

Tim Eng:

And my name is Tim Ing, I’m a West Point Army combat veteran. I thought I was going to make military a career and we just been on a wild ride with Sophie and she’s an entrepreneur. We’ve had small businesses, got out of the army, did that, I didn’t think I would ever get into real estate really. I was more interested in real estate investing. And through that I was a project manager by trade and got into investing real estate and it really took off because I’m an introvert and I didn’t really have a good, I guess, what is it, good opinion of salespeople. And I thought, well, I don’t want to be one of those salespeople, salesy and all that. But what I did discover was that it’s more of a one-on-one. I’m helping people solve a problem and it’s typically within a certain budget and they have to be in a certain area and I like to solve problems.

So it’s been really rewarding. I love doing real estate. I did real estate in the Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, which is like a bubble where market prices were really high. I represented veterans. I wanted to help them achieve the American dream of home ownership. And we were competing and I was standing up for them and representing them, and Sophie does lending and she did VA loans for them, and we like to stick up for the underdogs. And we were going up against people who had cash offers and those who were cashing out on their stock options working in tech companies. And we would win. We would actually really win on multiple bid opportunities. Fast forward, our eyes awakened. I think I’m kind of jumping into the story a little bit there, Anna. Yeah, go

Anna Sakawsky:

For it.

Tim Eng:

We ended up in east Tennessee. I’m doing a fast forward here. We ended up in East Tennessee and rebranded as a homesteading agent. And I’m homesteading and I’m living it. I understand the challenges that everyone has to go through. And I’m coming from the city, so I didn’t have a father or grandfather who did farming. I was very intimidated about walking into a Home Depot or a Lowe’s because I didn’t know what I was doing in the city. I would go on the what Angie’s list and Yelp and hire out. But when you’re living in the country, those don’t exist. And you’re actually having to, through word of mouth, ask around for referrals, but learning to do it yourself. And there’s only so much I can learn from YouTube. A lot of it is through hands-on and through our story. We’ve met mentors along the way, especially out here in Tennessee, who have taken us under their wing and through that we’ve learned how to milk dairy cows and raise them.

We definitely did not plan on doing that in our wildest dreams. So now we’re doing raw dairy and one of the only ones here in our county, and I’m selling real estate, but more so on homesteading side. I also do residential, but I’m really helping a lot of people escape from the busy cities, from suburbia, because I was right there. We were right there where you were at. We understand how intimidating it may seem to make that leap. And realistically, you’re going to have to have one leg into the real world and the other leg into the homestead world, and you’re going to have to take that time and learn the skills and ramp up as quickly as possible as we did. And usually one or both partners are going to still be full-time working. And a lot of my clients right now, they work full-time remote.

And even though we’re out here in the boonies, I call it the boonies, but I have fiber optic internet and it’s even faster than I had it back in the Bay Area, which is fascinating. But we understand the challenges. We have kids and we’re homeschooling, we’re teaching them how they can create businesses and how to be well, going through COVID and everything, just how to be producers. Producers, yeah, exactly. Producers instead of consumers. And with everything going on, and Sophie can talk a little bit more. And the whole thing with AI taking off, it’s like the formal education system is not really there to help the kids. And we’re trying to figure out, and we’re doing it right now with project-based learning and everything, but all of that in a nutshell, we understand the challenges being a young family, but we’re also taking care of our parents as well. So we’re in a sandwich generation.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, wow. A lot going on. And that you just spoke to a lot of things that I think are on everybody’s minds, but yes, as homesteaders, there are additional things we need to think about location, what sort of resources are going to be available, how you’re going to learn some of those skills. And then of course when we get into talking about properties, like specific things that you want to look for in a property if you’re home setting versus just looking to purchase a house. And I think that’s where your expertise really comes in because if you just go to any realtor and

Speaker 6:

They

Anna Sakawsky:

Have no idea about this lifestyle, they then also don’t really know what to look for. So I think that this will be a really valuable conversation for people that are specifically looking to homestead on property. So before we get into it, let’s go back to March, 2020 quickly. So what did life look like for you at that point and what could have possibly happened in March, 2020 that spurred this? We’re going full on, and what did that journey look like for you?

Sophia Eng:

It was specifically March 16th to the day 2020. That day was the day that California shut down completely. We had lockdowns, we had curfews. And growing up, my parents were from Vietnam. They fled the fall of Saigon in 1975, actually the night before the fall of Saigon. And so I was born and raised in the Bay Area in San Jose, California. And I grew up with my parents telling me all sorts of stories about how there were lockdowns in curfews during the fall and that people would get shot if they left their home. So immediately, the first thing I said was, well, if we cannot leave our home, then we were on our quarter acre at that point, we had four raised garden beds that we just started growing our broccoli, our cauliflower, it was already starting to sprout and everything. But then I realized we don’t have a protein source.

And when you live in the city, we would go to the grocery store every couple of days, or I would have Whole Foods delivered to me. Instacart is a service where you could get your groceries delivered to you. So I timed it at five o’clock after work, and then I could make my food. But when everything shut down, there was no food delivery services. We’re even talking restaurants too. So because of that, it was March 16th, and I had already contacted a woman in Mill Valley, which is north of San Francisco in the Bay Area, and she sold heritage egg laying hens. And so what you were talking about, yes, it is a story that I don’t, it’s embarrassing to hear, but it is to show you there is hope. Because that day we went up there and I reached out to her, it was seven 30 at night.

We drove there and picked up our three egg laying hens because we didn’t know how long the lockdown was going to be for. And I figured if we are going to, everybody quarantined with us. So my parents, our children, my sister came and we had a small three bed, one bath on a quarter acre. And I said, well, if we have to feed everybody, then we need a regenerative protein source. And the first thing I thought of was chickens, but we didn’t have a chicken coop, we had a cardboard box. And so that’s how we brought three egg egg laying hens back. And because of supply and demand, we bought each egg laying hen for $300 each. And I remember driving past through the Bay Bridge, and I remember telling Tim, I never ever want our family to have to worry about feeding seven mouths with three eggs a day.

And that was just a moment that hit me so hard that we were not prepared. We lived in the city, we were having fun. We have your play garden, which is fine, but I mean if we just didn’t have a timeframe on when things were going to end. And so fast forward, it took us three years and we went from quarter acre to five acres to now 40 acres. But in the three years we ended up trading those three egg laying hens to three dairy cows, to the point where now those dairy cows were feeding our family, we’re feeding our community and feeding the animals on our homestead to be more regenerative. So yeah, it’s a story that is embarrassing to hear where we came from, but all the learnings that we’ve had along the way to get us to where we are today, because I don’t think we could have gone from a quarter acre to 40 acres to where we are today. You have to take little movement, little moves, and even when you’re on a quarter acre, even if you’re in a condo, there are skills that you can learn today without having your homestead yet. And it starts in the kitchen and it starts from cooking from scratch, just one meal at a time. And that’s where I believe, and starting there with the kids, it’s something that it’s easy and totally accessible.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, you’re so right. And that’s what I always tell people as well, that start wherever you’re at. I think a lot of people have dreams of one day I want this property and these are all the things I’m going to do, but they kind of hold off on doing any of that stuff because they don’t have that property yet. But then if you are suddenly in the position where you can get that property and you don’t have any of the skills, now you’ve got a lot to manage and learn all at once. And that can be really overwhelming as well. So no, I don’t think it’s an embarrassing story at all. I think it was, it almost meant to be part of your story. And this is how we learn too, by making some of these mistakes. And I wouldn’t even say mistakes. I was actually watching a video the other day, Jess Sowards, roots and Refuge, and she was talking about the importance of skills too, and how there are things that we might panic buy or do or whatever, that we might go, oh, that was stupid. Why did I do that? Maybe going out and buying a bunch of emergency MREs or something like that that maybe you’re never going to eat. She goes, but you’ll never regret investing in skills. You’re always going to have those, they’re always transferable no matter where you go.

Sophia Eng:

Right, exactly. And I had to buy that moment. And we call that in the tech world, we call that the aha moment where you wake up to everything and you realize, okay, things have to change, things have to be better. And actually the next day we contacted the lady, we had some friends who were like, Hey, if you’re wanting to get into chickens, can we have you take care of them for us? Reached out to her, and she had sold out and she had at least, I don’t know, a hundred pins. So I mean, that’s just to illustrate how crazy things were in the Bay Area

Tim Eng:

That time. And then it’s so embarrassing. We brought ’em home with a cardboard box and we’re like, how are we going to feed ’em water? Where are they going to live? And hurry up, let’s go out. And we went to a local co-op, essentially it was a co-op, our pet store, and we bought a chicken coop, and I’m sure we overpaid for that chicken coop. We brought it home and then we’re like, no, we need a chicken run as well. And just had no idea about, now we’ve got Premier one fencing, but it’s like, okay, back then it’s like, oh, we need to build a chicken run. We need to get a handyman, not handy. And so going through these, you kind of have to go through these experiences and it was like a school of hard knocks for us. But you know what? That’s from a lot of people coming from the city.

It’s like, well just throw money at it. Well, there’s only so much money. And you know what? You can’t just buy a bug out spot because you need to have the skills because once you move out to the country, they don’t care. People out here don’t care what it says on your LinkedIn profile. They care about what skills you bring. And very quickly we knew we need to ramp up because otherwise we’re not going to be any different from anyone else coming from the city thinking that, oh, you can just bring money to it. And so all about building community, it’s all about gaining as much skills as possible. And that’s why we went out to Polyface right away, and we learned from Joel and Daniel when they put on their workshops, and we just knew we had to, I mean, there’s so many things you can do to learn. You can read all the books, you can watch YouTube videos, but for me, I’m more of a hands-on and I need to learn by doing

Sophia Eng:

Well. I think that’s just maybe uniquely us just because we like to ask questions. But

I do want to add to that, the next morning when we woke up and we had the three hens in the cardboard box, we opened up the box and they were already pecking their way through. We collected our first three eggs, and that was the most freeing moment for us. That provided us with so much that feeling of security and that we’re going to be okay. I took a picture of that, and that’s the article that we wrote in Homestead Living with that picture. And it brought back so much because it seems so silly that three Eggs could really make you feel so much at peace and that relief. But there’s something with that and that we were after and we had no idea how to do it. We just are kind of chasing how do we secure that feeling again? And that’s something that I would encourage everybody to go after, whether it’s in the kitchen, outside with your chickens, anything. Right.

Anna Sakawsky:

Well, that’s why they say it’s a slippery slope, right? Because it usually does start, it’s like the sourdough starter, oh my God, I can make bread with no commercial use. What else can I, now I’m producing eggs, what else could I produce? And so I think this is why one thing just leads to another all the time with this. Okay, so let’s get into properties. What were you guys looking for at first? So when you first, I know you made a couple moves, you moved from that quarter acre to a larger property in I think, was it still

Sophia Eng:

Lincoln? Yep.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay.

Sophia Eng:

Lincoln, California, north of Sacramento.

Anna Sakawsky:

Right. And then eventually you ended up making the move to Tennessee. So what were you looking for at first? Was it just more land? And then what prompted the decision to actually move out of state for you guys?

Tim Eng:

Well, initially, and I hear this from a lot of my clients as well, we wanted to stay in California because we had family. We had friends from church. And so you want to still be somewhat nearby, but still have some land and be able to grow, raise some chickens. And we brought on some ruminants by that point. And when we moved to the five, six acres, but we were looking for water, we wanted to have, I mean, because there’s droughts all the time in California,

Sophia Eng:

Or they would shut off your water too. And not only that, then before we left, governor Newsom was starting to threaten us to put a meter on our private wells. So there became more increasing restrictions with the way that we didn’t even want to be real farmers. We just wanted a homestead and be self-sufficient. But even then, having access to water was such a huge challenge. And where we were when we moved to the six acres, we moved to the six acres because we wanted to bring in ruminant animals. So as we had the chickens and the eggs we’re like, that’s great, but now we need more protein. And our family loves, we love beef, we love beef,

Tim Eng:

But we were too intimidated for cows.

Sophia Eng:

We did not jump to cows, so

Tim Eng:

They’re huge.

Sophia Eng:

When we bought the six acres, we just wanted more land. So we got six to bring in goats and sheep. So those were the larger animals for us. And then we had the garden, but it would hit almost 120 degrees in northern California. And especially there were fire seasons as well where they would just shut off. Not just your power, but your water would gets shut off too. So we had to think about all of these things,

Tim Eng:

And we did, but the home that we purchased, it already had solar, so that was great. And then we put in a whole house generator. So we had redundancy, we had backup systems, but eventually it was because of the community. We wanted to be surrounded by others who were doing what we’re doing as well, so that even if it’s just one other person, but more than just one so that we can learn, borrow a couple of sugar from each other, actually exchange skills. So that’s something we started looking at. And you want to tell ’em about the interest rates?

Sophia Eng:

Well, I think it became really clear when we were on our six acres, and now we’re more isolated. We don’t have our neighbors. Well, it’s interesting because I’d say we were very isolated in the city too, because when you’re in the city, you have everything. You don’t really need to talk to your neighbors. We actually didn’t talk to our neighbors until we moved out, and then everybody saw that we were moving. Right?

Tim Eng:

That’s a good point. We actually felt more isolated. We built this up and it was almost like we’re an island. We had this compound, but then all our family and friends thought we were weird and say, well, okay, well, if something happens, we’ll just go to your place,

Sophia Eng:

Right? I’m

Tim Eng:

Like, well,

Sophia Eng:

Yeah. But it wasn’t until we moved to the six acres that we were starting to realize, oh, we need to do this with more people. It’s hard to do this by yourself. We need someone with a tractor. We need someone who has different attachment to tractors because we had all these things to solve on the six acres.

So then in 2021, I started hearing rumors, because I’ve been in lending, I’ve been doing lending since 2006. And so because of all the things that I monitor for our clients, I started to hear rumors that rates were going to rise. And that was back in December, 2021, January, 2022. I said, we’ve got to start looking. If we’re going to think about leaving California, we’ve got to do it now. And of course, at this time, we’d already built the metal perimeter fencing to go all around the property. We had already established the garden, the chickens, everything was already in place at that point. We moved really quickly. Everything was really gnarly for us. But then we took our rv. We had toured different farms around with through harvest hosts, but we also took a trip out to Texas, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, and looked at, we worked with many different realtors actually. And many of the realtors were just residential realtors that we got referred to by them moving from California out to Texas, Californians moving out to Oklahoma. So that was their niche and their specialty because there was no one who was specializing in homesteading as a realtor.

And they would show us property. And I remember looking at Tim going, but they’re not growing their food. Thanks for showing us five, 10 acres worth of property, but nobody here is growing their food. And to us, you can’t tell a lot of these things when you’re searching on Zillow, on realtor.com, you can’t tell the community that you’re moving into. And not only that, we started to look at the grass too. And in the January February timeframe in 2022, everything was really dry. But when we got to East Tennessee, all I was looking for, and Tim was in charge of Texas and Oklahoma, so he found the realtors and the homes, and he scheduled those meetings. But then when we got to East Tennessee, I was in charge of east Tennessee because I really pushed for it, but I couldn’t find any homes. And the realtors that we worked with, they showed us property that were like 40 to 80 acres, but very mountainous and not conducive to farming. I think someone showed me that you could section this area and build a terrace garden, but it was literally on a mountain. And I was thinking, this is not exactly what we’re looking for because we want it to be sustainable even in our older age, because we’ve got mom and dad to worry about. And so I don’t want them to trip on anything. Plus I want things to be easy in the sense that we can live this life sustainably.

Tim Eng:

Lemme chime in here. We went to Texas and Oklahoma. Now, I want to say that when I work with couples, when I work with partners, usually one of ’em likes to do all the research and the other one’s going for the ride. Now I’ll admit I was the one going for the ride, and I love Sophie, and I’m like, okay, whatever you want to do, I’ll come along for it. But the things that we were looking for, back to your original question, Anna, we were looking for no 5G towers. We’re looking to be away from those high electrical towers and want to water source. That’s why Tennessee came up because of all the water, abundance of water, natural springs,

Sophia Eng:

Specifically east Tennessee.

Tim Eng:

Yes. Obviously coming from California, we were attracted to Middle Tennessee. We love Nashville area going down south of SpringHill, but we also don’t want to deal with tornadoes. And coming from earthquake, going to tornadoes, no. And from Texas, Oklahoma, I wanted those places to work because it was near larger cities. And being a realtor, I wanted to think about my career, like, okay, have an anchor city and then I can restart my business right there and we’ll make it work. But there was either a lack of water or the community was in growing their own food or it was the homeschooling. There were different things that we’re looking at, but we were spending time in the local communities and Sophie’s way more outgoing than I am, and she’d want to go to all the local coffee shops. So we weren’t going to Starbucks, we were going to local coffee shops. We’re just sitting there talking to the locals, what’s going on? And that’s exactly what we did in East Tennessee.

I was not on board with East Tennessee. I said, I don’t even know where Tennessee is on the map, but we’ll go out there. I’ll see a beautiful part of the country. But she had arranged it, met with local community leaders, and we did a speed date essentially with all the transplants who came in from the past two years from Washington and also out from the northeast as well. And we asked them the hard questions, why? Why’d you choose this location? What are their stances on certain issues? And actually, I got to meet with the sheriff and got to ask him questions, do you respond to the people? Or hey, if the federal government came down and said, you’re going to start going to do door to door, they threatened us in California. Are you going to do that? I also got to meet the local congresswoman out here.

It was actually a weekend. She was a freshman congresswoman. And so she was doing kind of like a meet and greet, and I was able to ask the questions that I wanted to ask coming from the government, coming from the military side. And there was just a lot more support where we were at located and we knew that we didn’t have, let me back up here. The most important thing is to know what you don’t know and identifying where the subject matter experts are and getting plugged into the community. And here in East Tennessee, we’re able to identify those who were specializing in and raising cattle or in carpentry, and even a quick vignette right there, we’ve met friends and we actually took our rv. I took the RV and went down in Gatlinburg and helped them build a local coffee shop because I wanted to learn how to do carpentry and do drywall, things like that.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay, so many questions spur off of this now. So first of all, let’s talk a little bit about your realty business now. So obviously you saw a market within this that wasn’t being served the homestead community, and you wanted to specifically help people that are looking for properties to homestead on. So you obviously went and did a lot of the groundwork yourselves, like going in, talking to people, talking to mayors, counselors, like community members and everything. That’s fantastic, but that’s not always realistic for people that they can go to each of these places and visit and spend time. And is that something that you help people with? Is it with your businesses that you’re looking at the properties themselves and the infrastructure and that sort of thing, but are you also looking at the communities and helping people find the right community to end up in?

Tim Eng:

Exactly. Anna, I was intimidated jumping into a whole new territory, but I was able to ramp up my business really quickly because in essence, I’m a consultant for my clients with me. You’re not just buying property, but I’m also introducing you to the community when they say, Hey, Tim, we’re, can I get some raw milk right over here? What can I do certain things? I will introduce ’em to the community. And even, I’ll show this real quick too. We were even giving away our LGD dogs too as a housewarming gift because we understand what it was like coming from the city. And I want to be able to help my clients ramp up as quickly as possible to learn from the mistakes we went through because that saves them time and money through this process.

Sophia Eng:

Process. We definitely advise our clients to spend the time with the locals. Like I said, you can’t tell from one MLS listing on realtor.com on Zillow where you’re moving into. And that’s why for me, it was important that we sat down into these coffee shops and watch the people and ask them questions. These are the areas that you’re moving into. Where are you buying your food? Where do you shop? And it’s just who are the people that you’re connected to? If you ran into this problem, and I know Tim is more concerned because of what we went through in California and how the officials were really pushing in California, those were things that were important to him. Whereas for me, I really wanted to meet the people.

Speaker 6:

And

Sophia Eng:

That’s something that in California we didn’t have, I tried to put together a bulk packing event. So this is something that I was like, how do I get to find my people as quickly as possible? So Azure Standard, I’m sure many of you are familiar with it. I set up a bulk packing event and had people buy certain things. So like 50 pound bag of rice, 50 pound bag of beans, and we would all split it together. So we had this all planned, and then the weather changed when it was the delivery and pickup day and everybody canceled. And I remember thinking, okay, things aren’t even that bad yet, and people aren’t willing to show up, so this is not where we need to be. And that was when I realized, okay, well then we need to go find the people. And that is the most important thing for me because you can have the most, let’s say you have the perfect homestead property. If you don’t have it surrounded by people that you can trust and watch after one another to help one another in one way or another, it’s not sustainable. It’s not self-sufficient because it’s not about self-sufficiency, it’s about being resilient.

Tim Eng:

I wanted to address that question that Gina asked the question or made a statement saying that it’s easy if you have a lot of money. Of course, it’s going to be easier if you have more capital to start with. But I work with clients with a wide range of budgets starting from 50 grand, just buying raw land and starting from square one to those that are spending over a million dollars. But you can start step by step. And I want to share this quick vignette for you, Gina, because once you get in here, we’re bartering. We’re not having to spend all this money anymore. I mean, learn a trade, learn a skill. We kind of stumbled upon dairy cows and now I am bartering a pound of butter for one round hay bale that’s going to feed my livestock for a week. I mean, that’s an exchange.

That’s awesome. You don’t have to put a monetary value to these things. And that’s something that it really opened up my eyes and the way that I think now coming from the city, but I wanted to just put that out there to provide hope because yes, I will acknowledge that that is a huge barrier to entry is the economics, the which is why a lot of younger people can’t just jump into it and why we’re finding more people who are retiring, they have the capital, but they don’t have the strength nor the endurance to be able to take this on, which is why you oftentimes have to marry the two together and kind of team up in a way. And that’s what we did when we found out. I mean, that’s how we helped out and learned about dairy cattle. They’re an older couple. They needed some help on their farm, and we just wanted to help and learn and just soak it all up as a sponge. We didn’t know it was going to be on dairy cattle, but through the process, we learned a valuable skill.

Sophia Eng:

So we actually know, sell our pound of butter for $30 because we’d rather share, and it’s our older folks, someone will actually buy. We have two because of redundancy. Tim’s always thinking about we have, what is it? Two is one and one is non,

Anna Sakawsky:

One is none.

Sophia Eng:

And so after 2020, getting access to nons sprayed hay has been extremely challenging. And we obviously don’t have acres and acres, hundreds of acres of land to hay, but guess who does? It’s the older folks who’ve been here for a long time and their family don’t want to get into it. And so they have all this hay that they’re not spraying, but they are hanging and they aren’t making the butter, they aren’t making the yogurt, they aren’t milking the dairy cow. And that’s where surprisingly, it just came up. And that’s how we’re actually, we don’t say barter because the US government now considers that taxable income, but we say we share. But I think that’s goodness we share.

Tim Eng:

I think that’s one of the hardest things for me coming from the city, was changing that mentality of, you know what? I have to buy everything. I need to own everything. I don’t want to trouble my neighbor or ask for help. And just that has been something that I have had to learn over the past few years is being willing, being open to asking for help and striking up a conversation with my neighbors and learning what they do and hearing their stories. But

Anna Sakawsky:

By

Tim Eng:

Doing that, you can save a whole lot of money doing that and actually be connected with the community.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, no kidding. Okay, so let’s talk about that a bit. I agree with you. I think community is so important. That’s actually part of what prompted our decision to move where we are. So we’re on Vancouver Island in a place called the Comox Valley, and it’s a big farming community, but more small, regenerative farming, that sort of thing. And so we had kind of looked when we were looking at where we wanted to move out of the city, we came from Vancouver about 10 years ago, and from online research, we were able to see that this was somewhere where there were a lot of people within the kind of farming and local food production community. There’s a really big farmer’s market here. So that’s kind of what tipped us off. And then we did actually for our honeymoon, we came out here and spent 10 days or whatever out here so that we could get to know, is this really where we want to go?

And then we’re able to go out to do a farm tour, go to the farmer’s market, see some of these things, and then we decided that yes, this is where we want to put down Ruth. And now even where we are. And I think just this speaks to anybody who’s here watching today, no matter where you are, you can be doing some of these things to build community regardless of what community you’re in. We’re in from the front. It just looks like a little cul-de-sac, right? We are not on some big rural land yet, but we have our gardener. We know our neighbors. We’ve made efforts to actually get to know people, and they know we’ve got all of our lettuces coming on now. We’ve been giving it all away. Sometimes I look at it and I’m like, oh, maybe we should save some more back for us.

I’m like, but this is just as important of an investment. I want to give that and baking sourdough bread and giving it to the neighbors and everything and not expecting or asking for anything in return, but just so that they know that we’re here to support you, and I know that then they’re also here to support us and we give them eggs, and then that means that when we do have a rooster, for example, when we’re not supposed to have one on a quarter acre, everybody’s pretty cool about it. So establishing those relationships I think is really important. No matter where you are now, I think it is great to get there and get on the ground as you guys did, as we did as much as we could. But again, that’s tough to do. Maybe off the bat for some people, what kind of research, where would you say people should even start if they’re just like, I want to find somewhere, I don’t even know. Where should I begin? What should I be looking for? If they’re just at the stage of online research, what’s maybe a checklist of things they should look for or how do they begin that?

Speaker 6:

You were about say something.

Sophia Eng:

I was going to say, well, we do have a checklist, but one, if you want to dig real deep into it, I had a bunch of spreadsheets that I worked off of. There’s this book that was written a long time ago by Joel s scen called Strategic Relocation, and it determines, now this is us where it could go through. He goes through all states and then things like the politics and the rainfall, natural disasters, as well as things like nuclear fallout even. And so those are things that we were like, okay, so taking all of this into consideration, what are some areas that we feel like we could get the maximized amount of growing time for us? It also, when you start bringing in ruminants, we started looking into grass and quality of grass. So when we were doing our tour, we did Texas and Oklahoma. The grass was dead and brown in February, but when we came out here to East Tennessee in February, same timeframe, everything was green. The cows were fat. And to me that screamed freedom. It means that we don’t have to worry about the water, the grass is there for the animals. And yeah, I know you’ve got other things

Tim Eng:

On your list. Well, I wanted to just reinforce what you just said, Anna, about community and the power of, because Donna made a comment there about some communities are just simply opposed to people moving in. That’s absolutely true, but you know what? It’s because of how you come in. And so one thing is that I always recommend my clients to come and recon and actually come out, never buy a property site unseen, actually go visit the communities. Yes, a lot of communities, and especially the smaller towns, may be more resistant to outsiders. But if you’re a giver and just like what you’re saying, Anna, and you come and you provide things, whether it’s just knowledge, whether it’s skillset, what’s there not to with that if you’re actually giving, and also be more open and receiving how they live their life here. Because coming from California, I didn’t want to be perceived as a stereotypical California. And this is something I also learned going in the army, coming from West Point and West Point officers have a bad reputation because we’re being ring knockers. So I go in and to my new unit, I zip my mouth. I want to listen. I want to learn and observe how things are being run. And the same thing that when you come into a new community, just observe what’s going on because you want to learn before you give advice or bring with you some of whatever your state is.

And that goes a long way. But

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, I mean I even think of that in terms of the land, right? Often the advice is to let it go through an entire yearly cycle so you can observe all of the seasons and where shade hits at a certain point and all these different things before imposing your will upon it, listen to what it needs, and then work with that. And I think that that is very true with communities, and we’re seeing that here. I think since COVID, we came pre COVID and we came and moved out of the city because we didn’t want the city, so we didn’t bring the city, but a lot of people do, right? And that’s always kind of the issue, I think, is that the people that are maybe opposed to it are like, well, you can’t just come here and bring that culture and those values with you. You have to adapt to the place that you’re in and be willing to do that, right? Right.

Tim Eng:

And I want to answer your question now about what to look for

Anna Sakawsky:

In the problem.

Tim Eng:

Simply put, need to write down what your goals are because it comes down to a lot of it is like residential property. Do you need to be close to a certain city for work or can you work remotely in terms of, A lot of my clients are homeschooling, right? So what kind of homeschooling you doing Charlotte Mason, classical conversations. What are you doing? And do you need to look for a co-op? And that’s very important to my clients natural resources. What are you looking to raise on your homestead? How are you defining homestead? Because there’s a wide variety of definitions. For me, I define it as being self-sufficient and however you want to define that. You want to grow a little bit of your food, but you don’t have to feel compelled or feel, what’s the word, pressured into growing all of your food. Okay.

It’s okay to just grow some of that. You don’t have to have hundreds of acres. So what does homesteading look like? And by defining these things, what you’re looking for in terms of what you’re going to grow, what you’re going to raise, what are you doing to make money? Because let’s face it, you’re not just going to quit your job and start farming. What does that transition plan look like? Having this and having real conversations so that your partner, your spouse, whoever’s doing it with you, or if you’re doing it on your own, that’s fine as well. But having a plan set out that’s going to help set the budget because, and that’s where Sophie always comes in, because that’s literally going to limit where you’re going to look, what states you’re going to look at, and then refining that to the local communities as well.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay. So let’s talk about budget a little bit because obviously we’re in a tough economy right now and an overinflated housing market and all those lovely things that we’re dealing with. I think we’re worse off here in Canada than you guys are yet, so you should be thankful for that at least. But what advice do you have for someone who is looking now or dreaming of buying land, but is just feeling like that dream is getting farther out of reach or that it is becoming increasingly just hard to actually turn into a reality? So are there creative strategies or financing options that people should know about? I know that there was actually a question earlier on about how to buy with no money down, people that are living paycheck to paycheck and just trying to make the dream happen, but also just trying to get by. Let’s start there and then we can talk a little bit more about if there’s certain areas or certain types of properties that are more viable than others.

Sophia Eng:

Absolutely. Okay. So there are options if you want to purchase with 0% down. If you’re a veteran, that’s, that’s actually one of the best loan programs that we have for va. It’s a VA loan, 0% down. Now, you won’t be able to buy raw land with it. You’ll have to still buy it with a property in place. Same thing with U-S-D-A-U-S-D-A. So if you are not a veteran, but you’re looking for a rural property with a home on there, you can qualify for 0% down. Now, there are restrictions to it. The home has to be qualified under the USDA eligibility and then your income, there are some income guidelines that you have to meet as well, and debt to income as well. So those are the two programs that are available, at least in the US that I’m familiar with. And then there are down payment assistance programs, DPAs, where there are some where you do have to pay back or there’s some that you can take advantage of the down payment assistance.

So there are some that will come match you. There are some that if you’re in it for three years, you don’t have to worry about paying it back. Those are great programs to take advantage of. If there’s some creative strategies, we have clients that pool their money in together and then purchase, you do have to have a strong contract in place purchase together where you can refinance out of that, and then kind of do the same thing for the next several other families that are in that community that are working together. That’s what we’ve seen that has worked well. If you have a certain sum of amount of money that you can leverage for your down payment. But in a competitive market right now, it might be softening up a little bit, but for homestead properties, we’re not making more land. We are taking land and turning them into subdivisions at this point.

And so that’s how people are getting in there. But there are loan programs available. If you have limited funds, you can even, I closed the home, I think almost 500 k, and they had $15,000 in their bank account and still able to do as low as 3% down. Those are conventional loans. Then there’s the first time home buyer programs that is 3.5% down. So there are programs in place that if you have little to no funds, you can still make it work. And there’s also what we call one time close loan deals where you purchase the raw land and then you roll in the cost of the construction into that loan. So let’s say you find something for a hundred thousand or less for the land and you want to pay for the construction and roll that in. That’s what we’re seeing between 250, 500,000 now just because the cost of labor materials has gone up.

Tim Eng:

My advice would be start small. I mean, oftentimes we get it in our minds and a lot of my clients will say, I need to have at least five acres. Well, why do you need at least five acres? Get to the point or get to the reason as to what are you planning on growing? What are you planning on raising? And then is that going to be five acres? But most of it might be uphill, might be wooded. And so it really depends on what they want to do. And to start small and not be afraid to, this can be a leap pad for something larger because that’s something that we did as well. I know it’s more work you’re going to be doing a little bit, but you know what? Think of it as an opportunity to refine your skills by working on this rather than think, I just want my dream property and just invest all my time and effort into this one.

Ideally, yeah, that’d be great, but maybe we don’t know, and maybe you might change your mind in a few years, but as long as you’re buying in the right location where there’s abundance of the natural resources, and you’ll be able to, and that’s how I would advise my clients. I want to make sure that this may be your forever property. It may not, but if it’s not, we want to make sure it’s in a really good location and we don’t have a crystal ball. We don’t know what the market’s going to look like in the next few years, but right now it’s a buyer’s market, but the prices are not that great either. So interest rates are not that great, but it is a buyer’s market in that you’re going to get a lot of seller concessions. Sellers need to sell, and they’ll come in.

They might help out and pay for the buyer broker’s fee. They may come in and chip in for other things as well, but don’t wait. That’s my advice. It’s like, don’t wait. If you start looking now, seriously looking, start making those vacation trips or start making those intentional trips out to recon the area. That way you can just dial it in and know what community in particular you want to be in. And if you can’t own yet, then lease or be a wolfer in these programs and just get plugged into those communities or get an RV and come out and travel to that area. I mean, there are so many options of what you can do. If you’re really your heart desires to do it, do it now. Because we were one of the people that felt like we should have been doing it five years ago.

We wish we did five years ago. Do it now with all the intensity you have. And if you’re not there yet, that’s fine. Some of my clients may want to do it in phases like, Hey, I’ll just buy land right now and then we’ll just, when I save up some more money, then we’ll start building and that’s great. Another question, I’m just going to also mention this, whether to use cash. If you have cash and you say, look, I want to be debt free, but do I use the cash on the land or use it on construction? I always say, get the loan on the land. It’s a lot easier to get the loan on that raw land and saving that cash to get contractors or to build, because if not, there’s a lot more restrictions in getting that loan, a construction loan.

Anna Sakawsky:

Right. Okay. Well, I’ll just pop this question up quickly. This relates to that. So Daba or Dava had asked, would you recommend purchasing a larger piece of raw land and eventually building a house or buying a smaller piece of property with a house already on it? I’m sure there’s pros and cons to each. What’s your opinion on that? What’s the better route to go? Or is it just depend on your personal goals and

Tim Eng:

You

Anna Sakawsky:

Get this question all the time?

Tim Eng:

I do. And thank you. How to pronounce your name? Dava. I saw you mentioned us on the pioneering community, so thank you for being a PTA member. But for this question, we would hands down, go for smaller piece of property with a house already on it just to get started. The utility already there, that’s going to save you a lot of money from the get go.

Sophia Eng:

And specifically utilities, we’re talking septic, we’re talking water and we’re talking electricity, right? Your well can sometimes, right now we’re talking upwards of like 20 to $40,000 potentially to get a well dug

Tim Eng:

That, and it’s no guarantee that it’s going be clean water either.

Sophia Eng:

That’s no guarantee that it’s going to be clean water. It’s no guarantee how far they’re going to have to dig down to find water and what the flow is going to be like. Right. So that’s one. Two is the electricity, getting electricity is going to be at least what up

Tim Eng:

To? Well, you’re going to spend at least 20,000 depending on how far you’re going to pull the line, because oftentimes when you look on Zillow and you’re checking on raw land, it says, well, there’s electricity and water at the road. Well, no one’s going to want to build their house by the road. That doesn’t make any security logic at all. You’re going to want to have enough setback from the road. Well, how much is that going to cost per foot? And oftentimes

You can find out by calling your local utility company because you’ll get a discount for a certain amount of feet, and then after that, they charge you a lot more. So utilities is a big part of your budget that people often overlook that. And infrastructure too. You’re not just going to build a house, you’re going to want to do fencing, you want to build a shed, you want to build a barn. All these things are taken into consideration, even if it’s a dilapidated barn or I always look at the outside of the property at all the exterior features first because I’m thinking, how much can my client save instead of looking at the property itself instead of looking at the house,

Anna Sakawsky:

Right? Yeah. Those are all costs that you would have to incur then if you’re building from scratch. Whereas, yeah,

Sophia Eng:

But bringing in infrastructure may help you with building equity, however, bringing in utilities will not. Right. So let’s say you pay all this money, you buy the raw land, you pay the money to dig a well, and you find out there’s no water down there. If you go and resell this land, you are not going to be able to recoup the money that you just put in for that. Well, so that’s why we recommend it’s easier to buy a property with a small home on it, something that you can either fix up or rebuild, or maybe we actually have a client that they’re going in with their family as well. They purchased this land, and then there’s, I think a single wide on it that they’re demolishing so that they can build where that modular home is.

Tim Eng:

Because something that we were looking at and a lot of my clients are looking at now is that they’re very sensitive to mold toxicity. So you want to start it off fresh. You might want to rebuild because oftentimes, especially out in east Tennessee where it’s, and in the south it’s very humid, and if you are not maintaining the home, that’s going to be an issue.

Anna Sakawsky:

Right. Okay. I’m just looking through some of the questions, some more questions about on this topic and financing and affordability and that sort of thing. So before I get into some of these questions, I had another couple of questions come up too. So first of all, you had mentioned the Wolff program, which for anybody who doesn’t know is, I can’t remember what the acronym stands for, but it’s working on organic Farms. Farms. Yeah. It’s like where you can go and actually volunteer and get real experience on these farms. Right. And I think that that sometimes can be helpful too. You can actually then start to make connections with people who own some of this land. And this made me think of another, I can’t remember what the program is called off the top of my head. I think it was called the SKIP program, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about this, but it was like, I can’t remember again what it stands for, but it’s connecting older farmers with younger up and coming farmers or homesteaders who basically would like to purchase their land and continue to produce food on it.

So you have these older farmers who want to pass that on, but maybe they don’t have anybody in their own family who wants to carry that on and they would like to pass it on to somebody who’s actually going to continue to produce food on that land and rather than develop it. And so it actually helps to connect those people with people that are looking to purchase that kind of land. Do you do any of that or do you have any insight into how people could connect maybe with older generations of farmers and homesteaders who maybe need to downsize but want to see their property end up in good hands?

Sophia Eng:

I think Skip is a program. I think that it’s good for inheriting properties for the older folks. I see. We have another client that works for perm.com, and I saw that as well. That’s where I got that from. Yeah, okay. I was going to say yes, he’s sweet. I’ve just only seen that just because I was taking a peek and to what kind of work he did, and I was like, oh, this is really neat. But we haven’t personally been, now we do have one of several of our community members, but one in particular where he does have wolfers come to the property and it’s just because they’re getting older. I think they’re, yeah,

Tim Eng:

They’re older.

Sophia Eng:

It’s funny, they’re 72, but we also have the other people that we work with and they’re 80 and he is like 72 so young, so I don’t know what old is anymore. But yes, they are reaching that age where their families don’t want to take part of it.

Speaker 6:

That’s right.

Sophia Eng:

And actually that’s one of the reasons why I told Tim, let’s not just jump in and buy the large property yet. Maybe we just spend a couple of years, and that’s exactly what we did when we moved from the six acres from California, we moved to five here in East Tennessee. We didn’t want to take on more because one, it’s a different climate. We didn’t know. We didn’t know how farming was going to be different, all the water. I knew that there was going to be lot more pests here. Everybody says that there’s large bugs here, and it’s true, but we farm organically, so there’s ways that we can mitigate and navigate around that. But all that to say that we were here because we were trying to wait to see if there were older folks in the area that wanted to sell, and knowing that a lot of their children have moved out to the cities.

And that’s not just happening here. I was in Oaxaca for a speaking event, and the same thing’s happening. We went to go visit a Apache farm. The same thing’s happening over in Mexico too, where the children are just not wanting to be a part of this and what we consider cool, or you would think that the children would want to be a part of it, but I think in this way, that’s where we were able to come into the community and say, Hey, how can we help you? It was easier to come in with that mentality to say, how can we provide help? But yeah, absolutely. There are programs online that you can sign up for. We’re familiar with at least two that we know others have used in this area.

Tim Eng:

Bottom line, you have to come, you have to come.

Sophia Eng:

You got to make

Tim Eng:

Those connections. And by doing that, you will have opportunities of seller financing, owner financing. I know no one asked that question, but I get that often. Where are all these opportunities for seller financing? Like, well, you have to come and either be a wooer or come into the community, bring your trailer and just get plugged in and just be to work, be willing to learn. That’s the quickest way,

Anna Sakawsky:

Right? Yeah. Well, and is that step by step, because even thinking back to our journey, we knew where we wanted to be once we made that decision, we came and we rented and then we bought, but we’re still in a property that’s smaller than we would like at some point. But then now that next step is to get the larger property. So sometimes it’s just maybe you go and try out a place maybe that is just renting at first. Maybe it doesn’t even need to be that you’re purchasing. You just want to get into the community first and see if that’s where you want to lay down roots.

Sophia Eng:

Exactly. So actually that’s something that we have started organically because we have so many folks who are, so many people come with an rv, and we were one of them too. We took our RV all around through Harvest hosts. And so we actually have a platform that we’ve kind of organically built only because of the necessity of people wanting to come here. Our clients have wanted to come here, they have their RVs or we have families that prematurely sell their property, and then they want to land here first and rent for a couple of months. And instead of Airbnb, they do midterm rentals. And so we have Rent East tennessee.com is where we have a list of properties that we’re organically gathering together for our clients who are interested in moving into the area or they’re traveling, just curious to spend some time and land for a little bit, see if it’s right. You’re not committing to anything, you’re not going to waste too much time. But for us, we moved fast. We had 48 hours. We didn’t have a lot of time because clear across the country and we were already farming at that time. But if you do have the time, that would be our biggest advice is to spend time in the areas that you’re looking for.

Tim Eng:

Yeah, just do it. I mean, come on out. Whether it’s renting or spending time or just purchasing a small piece of property or leasing a small piece of property. Honestly, we didn’t know if this was going to be the right place. That’s why we didn’t get hundreds of acres. We started off with just five acres. We wanted to make sure this was the right area for us.

Anna Sakawsky:

So we’re already at the hour mark, I swear. I think we need to just make these things an hour and a half because we always go over because there’s just so much good information being shared. But we have some more questions. So I do want to get to some of them because a lot of them are kind of on this topic related to this topic. So we’ll just go in order. So first of all, Amy Holman had asked, what is your opinion on bridge loans? So that’s not something that I’m familiar with, but it might be something that you are. Can you speak to that?

Sophia Eng:

Yes. Bridge loans are when you are still in your current loan with your property and you have a mortgage on there, but you’re making the transition, you’re getting your home ready to sell and then getting a loan. I mean, I think right now with the market the way that it is, we are getting a lot of contingency offers. In fact, we just had one that was a contingent deal on a contingent deal.

Speaker 3:

That’s a train.

Sophia Eng:

Maybe you can talk more about that. But that’s just the way the market is right now. People are not ready to buy yet until they sell their home. There are bridge loans. My only reservation with it is just making sure that people are accepting offers or that you’re able to close your home. And the way that the market is, we’re in a unique time period where the prices are as high as they’ve ever been and interest rates are as high as they’ve ever been.

We should be seeing rates drop, or we should have been seeing rates drop with the reports that have come in with a 10 year treasury bond with the unemployment numbers, with inflation numbers. But it is staying inflated. So I’m sure if you’re on here, you kind of know that things are manipulated in all markets. And so right now the housing affordability is the worst that it’s been, I think in 12 years from the last report I was taking a look at. So it is not a bad option if you can qualify for a bridge loan. I would just be cautious to make sure that your current home that you’re in is in a market that will still sell. Well,

Tim Eng:

Absolutely. Coming from being the realtor side, I love bridge loans because it makes sure that you’re, when you’re making that offer, if you’re contingent on selling your home, your offer is not competitive, especially out here in East Tennessee, which for my clients was really difficult. They’re moving from the northeast. And so their offer would, they were competing against cash offers that were coming in over asking. So it wasn’t cash offers like investors going low balling. It was over asking. And so their house had to sell, and the buyers for that house, for their house were contingent on their house for selling.

Anna Sakawsky:

Oh yeah, good point.

Tim Eng:

We’re not out of the woods yet. It’s next week when they close. But it’s like, okay, we want to make sure we got to monitor the situation. So at Bridge Loan, we’ve used them a lot for residential back in the Bay Area, but that’s when we knew guarantee that house is going to sell. So you’re going to take a bridge loan, it’s a higher interest rate, but it’s supposed to be used temporarily. Temporarily. And as long as your home that you’re selling is in a market that is doing pretty well, because across the board homes are sitting almost like a month now. At least 30 days is the average. Now even in a hot market or in a hotter area, then as long as your house is going to sell. And that’s fine because we want to make sure you want to get out of that payment as quickly as possible. But to be non-contingent and to make that offer onto wherever you’re going to be moving to, that’s a benefit. So yeah, that is a very good option.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay. Alright. Good to know. Alright, so Chris Lewis asked, am I right in thinking that there are programs for seniors to limit or freeze property taxes?

Tim Eng:

Do you know anything of that? California was even taken away

Sophia Eng:

There

Tim Eng:

Too about limiting it.

Sophia Eng:

Prop 13, was that the one that was in California where you could transfer your property tax,

Tim Eng:

Your existing

Sophia Eng:

Property tax? Let’s say you purchased a property in the 1980s,

Tim Eng:

20 years ago

Sophia Eng:

Or whatever. No, that’s like 40 years ago,

Tim Eng:

Four years ago.

Sophia Eng:

But you could then transfer that over to your new property

Tim Eng:

Because they were having trouble getting seniors to move out of their house because if they sold, they wouldn’t be able to afford a condo at that point. With the property taxes paid. With the property taxes. So I’m not aware of any Chris, of any special programs for seniors on limiting or freezing property taxes.

Sophia Eng:

Yeah, I’m not either.

Tim Eng:

We’d have to research that

Sophia Eng:

Even with va, a hundred percent VA disability, you’re not able to get, you get some relief on your property taxes, but not all

Tim Eng:

We understand that this is an obstacle, especially if you’re on a fixed income and you’re retired, which is why never push our clients to max out, but to stay comfortably within their limits or

Anna Sakawsky:

Right. So many. Okay. Yeah. Here, let’s go to Sylvia asked husband is a veteran, can we buy land and build at the same time to use their VA benefits or can we buy land and then build later with a VA loan? Is it true that you can’t use a VA loan to buy a house on a dirt

Sophia Eng:

Road? So this is the one-time close program that I was talking about. You can use your VA loan on a one-time close loan. We call that OTC. And you use that to purchase the raw land with rolling in the cost of the construction, but you will not be able to purchase the raw land and then finance a construction separately. There are lots of limitations to it. So you’re not going to be able to build a barn toin, you won’t be able, which a lot of people who are in the homestead world, we always get contacted for, I want to build a barn toin and get it financed.

Anna Sakawsky:

Is that a barn with a living space up top? Is that what that is?

Sophia Eng:

They’ve taken a barn and you can turn into a beautiful home.

Anna Sakawsky:

That was the whole thing. Yeah.

Sophia Eng:

And you have to have a list. It has to be a builder or a contractor within an approved list. So this could be a conventional loan too as well as a VA loan. So there are limitations and then there are, I think you have a year to build out. And that could be a limitation with the way that everything’s moving, especially with tariffs. Is it true that you can’t use a VA loan to buy a house on a dirt road? The VA loan, you’re able to purchase a home, but it has to be livable and I don’t know. I mean if it’s on a dirt road, it depends. It just has to be a livable, you have to pass the pest inspections as well as termite inspections. And that’s specific for VA loans.

Anna Sakawsky:

Okay. Interesting. I’m learning so much today too. Things that I didn’t even know to question. Okay. So here, isa, ISA, I hope I’m saying that right. ISA asks which states and counties are best for semi or full off-grid living. And I would just piggyback on that, just let’s talk about areas in general. Are there specific states, counties that you recommend looking at above others for homesteading type properties and then maybe also off grid type properties, that sort of thing?

Sophia Eng:

So I mean, number one is if you want to be off grid, how is the energy that you’re harvesting coming from? Is it water, is it solar? So the direction of the home, direction of the property, what you’re wanting to grow. But specifically with states and counties, we always say we are in an unrestricted county. And if you want to be off grid or even semi off-grid,

Speaker 6:

You

Sophia Eng:

Want to make sure that you can build the things that you want to build. If you want to have solar panels out in the middle of nowhere, if you want to harvest or rainwater in California, you cannot harvest or rainwater. So California might not be the one that we would recommend, but there are people who have found counties that are in California that are unrestricted that you can still do this. So it really just depends. If you’re looking to be fully off grid, you definitely want an unrestricted county.

Tim Eng:

And if you wanted to know states, I mean I only know of a few off the top of my head. You can go to northern Idaho, the Ozarks and Missouri or in Tennessee Northeast.

Anna Sakawsky:

So again, where can people start? Is there a database? How would you find unrestricted states or counties? How do you know where to start looking?

Tim Eng:

That’s all specific to the counties mean we don’t, I’m starting to keep track of the ones because I built a network where I’ve had agents that I’m vetting from across the US and from there they can give me feedback from their local counties as to what the restrictions are. So I’m building that database right now.

Anna Sakawsky:

Awesome. So for now though, you just start, make maybe a short list of some places that you are thinking of and then start looking into

What are the restrictions and regulations there? What are some of those types of things? So I think again, we look at like, oh, that looks like a great piece of land, but maybe we’re not considering some of the things like we talked about community, but some of the policies and regulations around that. What are some things that you would say are big red flags maybe, or things that you want to make sure are unrestricted in certain areas or that the regulations aren’t going to be coming down too heavy handed on you if you’re wanting to live this lifestyle?

Sophia Eng:

Yeah, I mean it definitely does require, to Tim’s point and what we’ve said throughout this entire call is to really get into the area that you’re looking for. Because though we are still in an unrestricted county where we are at, and that’s why we targeted this area. The town next over next to us literally tried to pass a bill to limit the amount of chickens that you have and no roosters.

Speaker 6:

And

Sophia Eng:

So our entire community actually went out to the meeting, the committee meeting and protested against it and pushed back. So there are areas that though you think that you can still build, there are limitations that have been put in place that have limited the number of livestock you can have. And so it just really depends on, I mean it does require a lot of time and research depending on if that is important to you.

Tim Eng:

Yeah, livestock restrictions are the main thing that I would focus in on because even if you don’t plan on raising animals, you just don’t want that. It’s a snowball effect.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah. Well, and I think that speaks again to the importance of community. If you find a strong community, at the end of the day, you could move to anywhere and down the line they could bring in these regulations, but having a strong community that’s going to stand up and protect those type of things, we’re facing that in our area with wood stoves wanting to ban wood stoves and there’s a lot of pushback on that in this community. So far we are good with the wood stoves. But yeah, I think that that again speaks to the importance of having a really strong community around you with similar values. So let’s look at, let’s see, got some more questions.

Okay, hold on. Let’s see. So Robin asked, my husband and I have been self-employed. Our entire marriage, we bought heavily wooded 15 acres years ago. We’re finally starting to build and develop the land. Well in septic are crazy expensive. We are early sixties. We’re going to try rain collection for a short time, then use as a backup, any suggestions, we plan to live off the land as much as possible. So yeah, let’s talk about that too. For people who are on land already and are wanting to put in infrastructure or upgrade it to suit their lifestyle and such, what sort of things should they be looking at? What are some big expenditures that are going to give them a lot of bang for their buck if they’re trying to do something on their current property? What sort of advice do you have for people that are on land right now?

Tim Eng:

Number one, get the survey done. I don’t know how much it costs depending on what state you’re in, find out what your borders are, get the fencing done because that’s critical and have a good barn or shed. So you can for that, whether it’s storage for hay, for animals, you’re going to find use for that, for outbuildings. And I think this is a really great, what he’s doing, what they’re doing right now with rain collection, that’s one of the cleanest forms of water to do it. I get this early sixties at age and everything, but I’m finding that those who’ve been doing it living off the land, they’re in such great health actually by living this lifestyle and just being constantly moving. So don’t think that way. It’s not a limitation. You guys are in your sixties or whatnot and home staying probably in better shape than those in the thirties and the cities. So for

Anna Sakawsky:

Real, I think sometimes there’s just a question because I know even on our small property, the amount of projects and it’s like, well, we got to do this and we got to get the green hose and we got to do that. And sometimes it can just feel really big. And then if you feel like you’re little limited on time, where do you put your energy? What are some of those big investments? What are the most important things to invest in upfront?

Tim Eng:

Yeah, so get that barn, get a greenhouse, that would be great. I wish we did a greenhouse upfront actually. So that’s something.

Sophia Eng:

And there are grants, I mean depending on how you feel about ’em all, but there are grants available. So if you’re wanting to fund a greenhouse and get that done, that’s a possibility.

Tim Eng:

I’ll give you a quick vignette about that. We just spent money doing fencing, but if we had known that the USDA loan, you can get the USDA loan or grant to build a fence for you if you have a creek like we do because they want to prevent your livestock from polluting the creek. Well, I’m not going to go and rip out my fence so that they can pay for it now. But if I had known that ahead of time, and that’s what I would’ve maybe because we have a healthy distrust of the government.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah, well and honestly, yeah, I was going to ask that. I sometimes wonder is it worth it, right? Because are there these strings attached to that then now that nothing’s ever free, so to speak. Right,

Sophia Eng:

Right.

Anna Sakawsky:

But it’s worth looking into, I guess to see if you can get some,

Sophia Eng:

The whole ostrich is where the 400 ostriches, were they in Canada?

Anna Sakawsky:

Canada. That’s up in bc and she’s still fighting for anybody who doesn’t know, I guess a bird flu hit the farm and they lost a bunch of ostriches, but they still have 400 that are totally healthy. They’re arguing that they probably have herd immunity now because it’s been months since there was any indications of bird flu there. And they’re still being ordered to CU the entire flock. So it’s there taking them to court. It’s a big legal battle right now. But yeah,

Tim Eng:

This question, three things like equipment wise I would buy would be buy yourself a tractor that’s like the Swiss army

Anna Sakawsky:

Knife.

Tim Eng:

The secondly I get a pluck. And then third, get a generator. So these are the three

Speaker 6:

Generator. Yeah,

Tim Eng:

Do four. I do a log splitter. But yeah, those are the top three things to just get the biggest bang for the buck because they’re continuing to go up in price

Anna Sakawsky:

All time. Right. Yeah. Well that is the other thing is that everything’s just becoming more and more expensive. And so it’s like, well, you want to try to get, if you’re in the position to get some of these things as soon as possible and you wonder, well again, where do I put my money? Where do I put my time and energy and all that stuff first, right? What’s most important,

Tim Eng:

The value of the dollars going down with inflation that you want to put your money into assets you can use.

Sophia Eng:

Well, but also with terrorists too, we had to sit down and have a conversation over, okay, if the tariffs are going to really be affected or affecting us, what are we going to do? And what was it? April 2nd was when we knew

Speaker 6:

It was

Sophia Eng:

Going to start taking in effect. And so yeah, you just have to have those conversations and budget like crazy and prioritize what’s going to have the biggest impact on your farm, whether that’s preserving your strength so that you’re not having to shovel a lot of wood chips.

Tim Eng:

Yes, that gets old. But to your point with the tariffs too, my tractor went down, it’s Korean made, it’s an LS tractor. It took forever to get that part, but even when I bought the tractor, it began, was it during COVID? I could get a tractor in California, but I couldn’t get tires because the tires were stuck at port or something. So I had to go to Oregon and go pick up these to the tractor. But the savings and tax probably was just evened out because of the cost of gas to bring it back.

Anna Sakawsky:

Right. Yeah, I mean so many things to consider. And there’s a few more questions here. I’ll try to get to a couple more before we wrap up. I do want to respect everybody’s time. So let’s just see. So somebody had asked with the grants is what is a good research for finding? So I know I’ve kind of asked this before and it just a lot of it depends, but for certain grants, is there somewhere that a database that somebody could go to

Tim Eng:

Your local extension office? So oftentimes for out in Tennessee, there’s a UT Extension office, but I know in other states too, they have an extension office where they often, they get grants just to have a rep there to help educate the local community for us. They’ll hold classes on preserving and canning and whatnot and right it next to them. They also have A-U-S-D-A office where we’re at.

Sophia Eng:

Yeah, I would say the USDA office and then you can visit for us in Tennessee, I was just looking up agritourism. And then on there they have a list of grants that you could apply for. So that’s something to say.

Tim Eng:

Yeah, you can get a greenhouse too. So

Sophia Eng:

I just

Tim Eng:

Have to research and find out what all the requirements are for that.

Anna Sakawsky:

And on that note of databases and that sort of thing, somebody else asked earlier you had mentioned that you were specifically looking for an area with no 5G, and I saw a lot of comments come up about that. And so somebody said, how do you find areas least affected by 5G? Is there a searchable data, I’m assuming? Is there? There is. Oh, I was going to say, I’m assuming not on that one. They probably don’t want you to know that, but

Sophia Eng:

Okay.

Anna Sakawsky:

Third

Sophia Eng:

Party, definitely. Yeah, it’s definitely a third party. A search, you go to antenna search.com and it antenna search.com, and it’ll tell you the closest distance to the cell tower, the radio tower and where we’re at.

Tim Eng:

There’s no reception we have to reception at all. No call for wifi. Yeah,

Sophia Eng:

I mean there’s positives and minuses to everything. We don’t want to be near it, but at the same time,

Tim Eng:

Safety wise, it’d be good to have cell

Anna Sakawsky:

Reception. Yeah. Okay. So this was from Colleen. She also asked, have you ever considered land outside the us? There was another question that came up about that, about any advice for people wanting to buy a home set and property internationally. I don’t know if you have any expertise on that at all or what you could say about that?

Tim Eng:

I dunno about international though. I mean, I would say what you’re looking for would be similar to what you would be looking for in the states. So the requirements wouldn’t be different, but if you’re looking at internationally

Sophia Eng:

For financing,

Tim Eng:

Especially in Europe, that might change financially as well as just logistically, are you going to be doing this? Of course,

Anna Sakawsky:

Yeah. Alright. And then let’s see here. So let’s talk just before we wrap up, Dina or Dina had said, do you serve other states or do you have colleagues in other states that do what you do? I live in Georgia. So you are building a network of realtors who specialize finding homestead properties, is that correct? That’s correct. Tell us a little bit about what Homestead agent does and what you guys do,

Tim Eng:

Who you serve. Yeah. Well I have a hero network, so it’s homesteading expert real estate organization. And I already have agents that I’ve already vetted in several estates, Georgia I’m still working on because I’m getting a lot of more inquiries on that, especially in northern Georgia. So I’m not sure where you’re located, Dina, but yes, to your point, I do vet the agents to make sure that they’ve either done some homesteading or done some of these things so they have healthier knowledge and knowing and understanding the challenges. But oftentimes I’ll partner up with that agent and work with them as well. So you’ll still be able to work with me, but work with that agent in terms of that agent can open the door and know the local laws.

Sophia Eng:

Most often it’s always been the ladder because unless you’re actually hands in dirt and knee deep in muck and homesteading yourself, most realtors don’t have the knowledge. We found that. And yes, Tim does his best in vetting, but most often it’s people that he can partner with. And so he’ll still be working alongside our clients and helping to advise and consulting essentially while working with their local agent in that particular town or city to open the doors and fill in the paperwork.

Anna Sakawsky:

Perfect. So if somebody is interested in maybe connecting with you guys, should they be kind of in the stage where they’re actively, they’re looking, do, what sort of consultations do you do with people?

Tim Eng:

Well, a wide range. I work with the Dreamers too. So those who are out one or two years out, no matter where you’re at in your homesteading journey, I’m more than happy to help you. If you have a few questions to get you on your way to start looking, that’s great. But my job I feel, is to provide you with options and to make sure that you just make the best possible option decision for your family or for your loved ones. Because my business and your business, it is just built off of referrals and that’s how we get the repeat business. But come check out our website, the homesteading agent.com, you’ll be able to book directly with me.

Anna Sakawsky:

Perfect. Okay. I’m going to take one more question before we go because Gina has chimed in a couple times, and I missed her question the first time, but she had asked, oh, I’ll put her original question on. She said, my husband is Native American. Is there any programs that work through the tribes? And we’ve talked about different groups and certain benefits and grants that might be available to them. Do you know anything about this?

Sophia Eng:

I haven’t in particular, but I have heard of some, so I can always get back on that question. I’m curious too. That’s a really great thing. And I think that I am pretty sure there’s got to be a program that there, the support, the Native Americans. Yeah, tribe.

Anna Sakawsky:

Awesome. Okay, perfect. Alright, well thank you so much. We’ve covered so much today. And again, we can keep talking. I have lots more questions. I’m sure there’s lots of people with a lot more questions, but they can get in touch with you home setting agent.com, right? If they want to connect and find out more. Let’s just wrap it up. If you could go back and tell yourself in March of 2020, in that moment where you were having that existential crisis that I think so many of us are familiar with at some point in our journey, we’ve had it, some of us, some people watching may be having it right now, right? Feeling like, ah, this world feels really uncertain, I got to make some moves. But feeling a little bit panicky about it. What advice would you give yourself or would you give somebody who’s in that state right now?

Tim Eng:

I would compare it to almost having a baby. You’re never going to be fully, not that I’ve had a baby, but just say the work that’s involved in terms of you’re never going to be fully ready to have that child. You’re never going to be fully ready to start that homestead. So don’t wait for everything to be perfect. And if I looked at myself today and I knew what I was going to be doing now and back then, yes, it would’ve gave me some peace of mind, but I may have been overwhelmed thinking, wow, I’m going to do all that stuff just to get to where I’m at because that’s a lot of work and a lot of trials and a lot of failure and just going through these things. But I had loved ones. I have support through it and the power of the community as well to get me through it. Because I’ll tell you what, when we came to Tennessee and we started with Dairy Cow and our first cow died that first winter from pneumonia, that felt like utter failure. But we had our mentors there to pick us right back up and tell us that and show us how we can get right back on that horse, so to speak. And if we didn’t have that community then and that support, we wouldn’t have been able to move on to the 40 acres that we have now and to help others.

Sophia Eng:

And I’ll just piggyback to say when it hit in March, 2020, we didn’t know that homesteading was a thing. We didn’t know that there was a term called Homestead. All we knew was that we needed to take that next step to self-sufficiency. And so fast forward, what, five years later to have a platform like this to be a writing a contributor or a guest on the coop for a homestead living like what a phenomenal experience. And we did not even think at that point when we were panicking through it all that one day it would lead to all of this. And so there’s hope. And for everyone out there you have mentors now with living with everybody who has kind of forged the path ahead, you have us to help guide you. And if you have any questions on finding land, securing land financing, we didn’t have that five years ago. That’s right. And there were a lot of things that we didn’t have access to that we have access to now. So take advantage of it. And to Tim’s point, yes, there’s going to be a lot of failure, but that’s how you succeed. And my mom, she has a saying that which means failure is a mother of success. So it’s not actually failure. You do learn from it and it will lead you to a path of success.

Tim Eng:

It’s a lot of work, but it’s really rewarding and this is just so much fun and we can’t wait to speak at the Modern Homesteading conference.

Anna Sakawsky:

Yes, absolutely. Well, I’m looking forward to seeing you there, Tim. You also have an article out this month actually in the June issue of Homestead Living. So often we’ll have whoever our guests are for the month are often featured in the next issue. You’ve actually got an article in this month’s issue. So hopefully a lot of you are subscribed already. That issue should be hitting your mailboxes probably if it hasn’t already sometime this week. And you actually talk all about homestead security, which we didn’t have a lot of time to get into today, but it’s about your experience in the military and how you took that and adapted it for homesteading and how to actually secure then what you have acquired, right? So once you get your property, how do you make sure that that is sustainable and secure and everything? So make sure that you check that out in the June issue of Homestead Living.

If you’re not yet subscribed, there should be a button below the video here that you can go ahead and subscribe now and hopefully we’ll see a lot of you at the Modern Homestead Conference, which is coming up at the end of June and get to meet you all in person as well. So thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be with us today. It was super valuable and we’d love to have you back at some point. Sophia’s also going to have an article coming up in a couple months. So both of you’re regular contributors, so keep an eye out for future articles from Tim and Sophia and make sure to connect with them ov**@***************nt.com and also the Call to Farms podcast, which they host. So thank you so much to everybody who made it to the end. We will see you back here next month. We’re going to have Ruth Ann Zimmerman on of home setting with the Zimmermans on episode seven of the coop. So we will see you all back here in July.

Tim Eng:

Thanks so much.

Anna Sakawsky:

Great. Thank you so much, Anna. Bye. Thank now, guys. Bye.