Our Family Homestead-Our Adventure for More...What is your more???

Established September 2019

We started looking at our current property in the Fall of 2018 when it was bare land and there was just one home being built on an adjacent piece of land. We had been looking for a long time for a property in our area with a decent amount of land. However, the demand in our area for land is high and costly and most homes are being built on very tiny lots. Our dream has always been to have some land where we could live more sustainably and provide more for ourselves. We have also wanted to have a little privacy between us and our neighbors. The concept of homesteading or a life-style of self-sufficiency, is really what we were after. We aren’t completely there yet, but each day we are working towards this goal and learning more and more. This is our Adventure for More.

How Did We Get Here

After living in a very tight quartered neighborhood on 1/4 of an acre for over 15 years, we put our house on the market at the end of December of 2018. The day we listed our house we had multiple showings and by the end of the day we had an offer and were under contract. We had already put down a deposit on our nearly 1 1/2 acre plot to build our current home less than 2 miles from our old home. By February 2019, we had moved into a 2 bedroom apartment temporarily while our current home was being built. Our home was completed over the next 8 months and we moved in during the middle of September 2019.

Since then we have started to make our homesteading dream a reality with the addition of our chickens as well as a garden. However our story starts well before this…

Our Journey to Become Debt Free

We are Chris and Amanda and together we have two daughters. We met in 1999 and were married in July 2003. We wanted to share our story to encourage and inspire others around us to dream big and create the life that you really want and not settle for the life that you think you have to have. Our whole marriage has been filled with struggles and obstacles. However we have used those struggles and obstacles to push us and drive us to achieve and succeed instead of giving up and settling.

When we married you could say we were “young and dumb and in love” as the saying goes, especially in regards to our financial health. As an engaged couple, we saw all of our friends getting married and buying their first homes. We thought our friends are doing it, so should we. We did not have a down payment and we had no emergency fund in case something terrible happened. But, we both had jobs (me as a Laboratory Technician in a Research Lab and Chris as an entry level hardware IT worker with no degree who had worked his way up in his company from a yarn loader at a manufacturing company) and that is all the bank cared about. The bank gave us the loan as first time home buyers with no down payment and we had our first home.

So in March 2003, we bought our first home together (4 months before we married in fact and the one we sold in February 2019). We justified the purchase by telling ourselves “we are just starting out in our careers and we are only going to make more money from here.” We even told this to the home builder’s sellers agent who was probably laughing in her head. We believed we could do it because everyone else around us was doing it. There was a drive to keep up with everyone else.

And then BAM!!!….Chris lost his job. Just 8 months after our wedding. So here we were with a mortgage payment, no emergency fund, a car payment (yeah we didn’t even mention the new Ford Mustang we just had to have; she was beautiful and a 40th anniversary edition at that!!), some credit card debt and we were relying on the income of a biology research Laboratory Technician. I can’t even remember how much I made back then but it wasn’t much. We couldn’t even afford to go out to eat back then. We had a brand new house and we were literally “house poor.”

It was during this time that we learned that money could control us. Or we could learn to control our money. So this is what we set out to do. We found Dave Ramsey during this time and started on the baby steps to become debt free. We did not just want to work all the time and worry about owing others money all the time. The journey has not always been easy. We have also faced some struggles along the way as everyone does in life. These struggles have set us back at times on our journey to become completely debt free. But despite these things we have persisted.

We fought infertility to have our first daughter in 2009. We then faced another infertility battle along with recurrent miscarriages and sadly did not have the outcome we hoped for. However, it did lead us down another beautiful journey of adoption to have our second daughter in 2017. We both pursued higher education as well (Chris obtained his Associate’s degree and then his Bachelor’s degree; Amanda obtained her Master’s degree). But we made it with a lot of support from friends and family. We finally were able to become completely debt free in 2019 (except for our current home; although we are challenging ourselves to pay this off early).

Adventure for More

Our debt free journey is what allows us to pursue our current dream to homestead. Being more self-sufficient will continue to allow us to live a debt free life style. It has opened so many doors that we did not know was possible. Every day is new and exciting as each day is different than the day before.

We set out on this journey so that we could spend more of our time doing the things that we want to do. For example, as a family we love to travel and explore the world around us. We love hiking and exploring the beautiful state of North Carolina where we live. We also love traveling and exploring the world around us. One of our personal favorites as a family is visiting Walt Disney World in Florida. Ultimately, we knew we did not want to work our entire lives always trapped in the rat race of 9-5 pm. We have found that when you don’t owe others money, there is a sense of peace and security in that and a huge sense of freedom. We are able to choose how we spend our time now. We hope our story encourages you to Adventure for More…your More!