Life Transplanet

Well I guess it’s as sure as it’s going to get so here is the scoop:  We signed a contract to buy a place in Rincon!

A few weeks ago while I was sleeping Jack  (Cassie’s Dad who recently passed) came to me in a dream.  We were in Puerto Rico on a sunny day on top of a hill.  It was on the west side of the island and I could see the ocean from where we were.  I don’t remember all the details about it but a few things stood out. 

1. Jack was waiting for us in Puerto Rico or already had a place.
2. The house reminded me of playground equipment for some reason.
3. The place had an ocean view.

When I woke up I told Cassie about the dream.  I had been waiting for Jack to visit me in my dreams and he finally did!  I remember telling him something like: “Well if you already had a place in Puerto Rico why didn’t you tell us!!! This would have been so much easier!”

Fast forward a week…Maybe a week and a half.  A Realitor calls me while I am at work.  I met him in PR when I was down there last time and we looked at a property.  He said that the sellers of the property wanted to extend an offer/price.  They knocked $270,000 off of their inital asking price!   Well I told him that I’d have to ask Cassie, but I am pretty sure we would make a deal. 

Here are a few pictures of the place.  I have some video to upload later on too.  There is a main wood house, a small studio concrete guesthouse and 4 acres of land.

This place meets nearly all of Cassie and my criteria.  It is a perfect compromise really.  It has some land to move around/build on, it’s located in Rincon and it’s affordable.   We really like Rincon because it will be an easier transition to move to, there is the possibility of making our own rental/vacation home business there, and there is a lot of great events and things going on. When I looked at this place before I didn’t take it too seriously because they were asking so much.

The house is a wood treated place which is good and bad.  It’s good because we will have a place to stay while we are down there.  It’s bad becasue we are planning to eventually take it down and put up a concrete house of our choosing.  I like this though because it is more of a ‘pay as you go’ option.  We don’t have to take out a major loan, we can design it how we want it and it has something we can use now.

Both of us are SUPER excited about it, and even more certain that it is the right decision.  The down side is that we have a contract on the other place near Isabela.  We are going to break the news to that realitor soon that we had something totally unexpected come up that will prevent us from purchasing that property.   There isn’t much money on the line so it is something that Cassie and I are willing to let go and chalk up to the cost of the other place.

This place in Rincon is going to require a lot of work and improvements to make it what we want.  That’s fine though.  We are looking forward to the challenge (as we’ve done before with our rentals)! And in the mean time, we can enjoy the sunset over the ocean from our literal dream home in the tropics- which will make it all the more worthwhile.

I hope everyone had a great 4th of July and Happy Anniversary to my parents!

Sparklers were the extent of our fire works

Speaking of anniversaries, I was just reviewing some of the old posts from this blog and realized that we just passed another anniversary of blogging! Our very first post was on June 28, 2008! It’s funny reading it now, because I remember that I had no idea what hosting and writing a blog would be like, let alone all the technical aspects of it (thanks to Britton for working most of those out…). The content of the post is basic and used mainly as a test, but it still reflects many of the summer posts here we’ve written about life in Greeley -messing around in the greenhouse, spending time outside, enjoying the hot weather.

However, we had no idea what would happen between then and now. I figured we would be living in PR by now, but a few twists and turns in life and here we still are. And actually we have had some great opportunities pop up that we just couldn’t turn down. The cost benefit analysis of some of the investment and work opportunities here outweighed our immediate and strong desire to move. And while the date has been pushed out and out, we are getting more and more ready to be able to move without too much of a worry once we arrive. These last two years have been creating a great launching pad for us whereby we might not even HAVE to work in the traditional sense of wages for hours of our life.

It looks like my job will be saved and I will continue working past August 1 which is overall definitely good news in the sense that losing a job is always really stressful and it will give us more time to save money and invest. On the other hand, it also keeps us here. Britton says we have to know when to get out. Kind of like in poker -know when to hold them, fold them or walk away.

We are definitely emotionally and mentally ready, but financially I think we want to be prepared for the worst -no job, no income generated there, not understanding fully the system and also dealing with isolation away from our family and friends support network.

We have another investment in the works right now, and when it goes through I’ll blog a little more about it. Another step. That’s all you can do, just keep moving forward. Having goals (like for us moving to Puerto Rico) helps you to know which way to go, but you just have to keep moving forward.