The Journey to a Homestead

In the fall of my last year coaching women's basketball (2008) I took a step back and began to take inventory of my life. I had a dozen nice suits, a Honda Del Sol, and a sweet Jeep Rubicon (that I owed roughly $15,000 on) and no real assets to speak of other than a few thousand dollars in my retirement account. All told I was right at $60,000 in debt.

I'd been exsposed to enough successful people by this time that I knew I had to make a change in my life, but I had no idea how or where to start, so I do what I always do when I have a question, I turned to Google and begun to research how to get out of debt. I found Dave Ramsey's plan which can be boiled down to this:

1. Pay cash, if you can't pay cash you can't afford it, whatever it may be.

2. If you have a bank loan on the car sell it and drive a beater. (I stupidly fought this for a year.)

3. Attack the smallest debt with all your money, and progressively, ruthlessly, and unwaveringly start paying off from one to the next.

4. Get a second job and be even more heartless in killing the cancer that is debt. I was already a drilling guardsman, so I had another avenue, GI Bill cashola.

5. Get a savings fund of $1000

6. 6 months expenses

7. Start putting away 15% of your monthly income, and then pay off your house as fast as you can.

It really is that simple. It's a matter of how much do you want to be free?

I was a motivated young man. I had a plan, and I worked that plan. I decided that I was going to give being an assistant one more year, and if I didn't get a head coaching job it was time for me to find a job with real earning potential. Knowing what young coaches are supposed to look like I got up at 5:00 three times a week and lifted my guts out. I messed up a ton, ate out too much, cared about not wearing the same shirt twice in a month at work, but I was still searching.

My mom had always kept a garden when I was growing up, I knew how much better I could eat if I was raising it myself, but I didn't have the skills. In the Spring of 2009 in the midst of my search for gardening knowledge I found Jack Spirko and The Survival Podcast. He was Dave Ramsey with a country twang, a healthy bit of profanity that I could appreciate, and a man working a plan. I was hooked. For what it's worth and for the faint of heart, he's not leaving in a bunker (nor his mother's basement) wearing a tin foil cap, he's good ol' boy who was in the rat race, and decided he was going to get out.