We have a lot of options and decisions right now. That is both good and bad. The good is that it is usually better to have many options than few, the bad is that we kind of have a deadline to make some decisions on them. The funding for 3/4 of my job at the county will end on July 30, 2010. We had hoped that during this last trip to Puerto Rico we would have found something that “spoke” to us.

Another house we saw

We saw some properties that we liked but were either too expensive, weren’t situated on the lot very well, were too far from the west coast, were just land with no house, or had virtually no land (the Goldilocks story without the “just right”).  We also didn’t see as many properties as I would have liked to. You would think a week is enough, but it really wasn’t. So now we are back and we are trying to figure out our best course of action given some assumptions:

A) Britton hasn’t been cleared to work remote yet, so we would have to plan on moving with very little income

B) I won’t have a full-time job come August 1. I need to either start looking for another job now, or plan for our move, or ??

With these basic assumptions, we have a variety of options:

1) Buy one of the larger places in PR and create a guesthouse. With this option, Britton would probably have to stay in Colorado while I got the place up and going, but if it works, we would have income. But because of Britton not being able to be there with me, it is not ideal. We are kind of a package deal. It would be hard to be apart for very long.

2) Buy a smaller property, but low-ball it so that we would be able to move there more quickly without much income. None of the smaller properties were exactly our “dream house” so this is not ideal either.

3) Buy another rental here in Colorado to provide more income potential for when we are in PR. We are comfortable with this as we have done it before, but it will take a chunk of our savings that we were hoping to use in PR to do it.

4) Buy a house here in Colorado that has a little bit of land (around an acre or so) and rent out our house. Then we could have a hobby farm here in the spring/summer/fall without much grief from the city and we could spend our winters in PR renting a house and looking for our ideal. I could do some part-time work as an instructor or possibly work on starting up an Internet or consulting business that could be done in PR as well. So, far, this sounds the most promising, but it puts our PR plans on hold which sucks.

So this is where we are at: a crossroads. I feel like I am in limbo and it is driving me nuts. I am a planner and right now I don’t feel like we have a solid one. And I hate pushing our dreams back farther. These life decisions are tough! But I am thankful for the options!