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December 2, 2007 Newsletter
Hello, Suburbia! How're You Doing Financially? Not Too Good? We're Fine!
Dear Suburbia: Writing to say we folks out here in rural remote far west Texas in our mountain redoubt are doing great! My husband doesn't have a great income and I barely make any money on the occasional jobber--after all I need to stay home where I want to be to homeschool my teenaged daughter--but I make enough to pay my bills and get to save most of it because unlike you I don't go out and spend it on "stuff" like you do! My husband makes enough not only to pay all the household bills, buy more than enough food, buy gas for two vehicles (and, as you probably guessed, Suburbia, gas out in the country is way higher than it is where you live! Our "country store" sells it for $3.50 a gallon!), send our son, the Aggie, to college WITHOUT HAVING TO PURCHASE A LOAN! (I heard many of your kids were taking out loans from some college loan company advertised on television. Nothing like putting them into a lifetime of debt early!) Plus, we send our daughter to Girl Scout Camp every year for two weeks or more without having to use a credit card, and much much more. Did I tell you about the new mattress my husband bought for me for my 55th birthday? A brand new Serta, the ones with the comfort foam pillow pad. Paid cash for it!
And, of course you know that instead of buying a house using a mortgage, we borrowed from his mother (or was it my parents? I've slept since then!) to buy our 25 acres in the mountains, put a building pad on it for the house, and built our house ourselves (well, mostly he built it; I was going to Sul Ross State U for my teaching certification and working as a waitress for income on weekends)...naturally, we paid off what we borrowed pretty quickly, mostly because instead of going out and buying all this new furniture for it, we just either built or took in used furniture his mother gave us. Let's see...we did have to buy a couch, a sleeper sofa, because for the first year or so we slept on it until be paid cash for our first mattress about 23 years ago (and now you know why I implored him to buy a new one. One shouldn't use the same mattress for 23 years!). He built our kitchen table, cupboard, sink and stove top counter, and a coule of other things. And of course we bought a refrigerator with cash...and we still use the same refrigerator! And of course he also built the bathroom counter and we bought a toilet which uses very little water. Did I mention we built our own house? As to my student loan for my teaching certificate...well, we paid that off after three years of teaching. Did I mention I now homeschool? That's because my husband's income is high enough where I don't have to go out and work myself.
Yea, I know, I am going on and on about us. But let me just finish up by saying we had two kids, a son ("my son the Aggie!") who not only doesn't have a student load to pay off, but now has a part-time job which he can keep as long as he keeps up the grades! Our daughter? Doing fine while learning two foreign languages (Spanish is one of them. Guess the other?) And we will be able to put her through college as well. I'm not gloating, just stressing that if the kids are going to go into debt, it'll be their decision, not ours.
And don't worry, Suburbia, about any police state repression out here. About ten years ago we had a little "incident" out here and the "law" was called in. We had state troopers, DPS, US Marshals, Texas Rangers...the whole enchilada...out here for a week back then, a few homes broken in to, lots of noise from the loudspeakers aimed at the "incident" hideout a mile from my house, a curfew, and not being allowed to get back in to the subdivision if you left, power outages, and the rest of the police state apparatus. For the most part, only those homes closest to the hideout were searched and broken into and the parties to it repaid any damages. The biggest inconvenience were the power outages. Well, that's about as bad as it could get out here. Truly, this kind of thing probably wouldn't happen out here again, mostly because there are only so many cops and the like, and they will be too busy patrolling your neighborhoods to worry about a few dozen families out here in the mountains. But why should I even bring up the "police state" issue? That's because you, Suburbia, have no clue (naturally, you NEVER have a clue! You are clueless!) about HR 1955 and S 1959, the twin "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism" Acts. Now I realize that this is just another one of those laws THEY have been passing since the Clinton years, or, rather, since Hillary came up with the "vast right-wing conspiracy" theory surrounding Waco, Ruby Ridge and Okie City. There have been anti-homegrown terrorism acts since 1995. It is just that every law THEY pass along these lines is more and more repressive: now, it is a crime to even think about civil disobedience! You do realize that if your sons or daughters are even anywheres near an anti-war demo they could be prosecuted under this act. Or perhaps that illegal imigrant gardener of yours--what if he takes part in a pro-amnesty demo like the ones we had earlier this year? Or that animal-rights daughter of yours...what if she tries to save rabbits from the Draize Test like she did ten years ago? Or your son, the one who married that nice Jewish girl down the street who in a trauma of guilt sent money to some Palestinian food aid group that unbeknownst to her just happened to be on the Terrorist Watch list and got threatened with jail, and now he gets threatening phone calls from Abe Foxman? And that other son, the one who runs that alt.conspiracy site that makes Alex Jones look like a believer in the official 9-11 version? Just how long before your "safety and security" winds up being situated behind the barbed wire of a Halliburton-built concentration camp? I've warned you about this for years, but noooo! You just had to play soccer mom and dad, and, now that you might be close to losing your house, you might be wondering about a nice warm fuzzy jail cell that might not be such a bad alternative. Two squares a day, clothes, and enough soap to wash your brains with!
Sorry for the levity. I know just how serious your situation might become, since the last I heard your mortgage rate was going to reset to 10.5% next March. But, my dear Suburbia, did you just have to get that 3,000 square foot McMansion instead of a more modest used house you were thinking about buying instead because you knew you could afford it...but then you let that shyster lending agent convince you that the value of your new house would go up and up and up seemingly forever, so you figured why not take the teaser rate of 4.5% in March, 2006? How did you know that your lender would implode, and now you have little recourse other than to continue to pay 50% of your income on your mortgage, file for bankruptcy, or get foreclosed on? Who knew? Well, I did, for one, because I know that you can't keep borrowing and borrowing and expect to not have to pay it back! Someone has to pay it back, and it might as well be you. And it isn't just you, of course...my brother, who has been the paragon of financial success as well as the one in my family who everyone knew would be shining light for the world (whereas they all figured I'd be lucky to not become the black sheep!), not only is struggling to pay off his mortgage on the house he's living in--talk about McMansion!--but is now also having to pay off a mortgage on a nice-quite-so-huge house in some gated community...IF he can sell his first house, that is! So, you see, maybe yours truly, who, with her husband, appears to live like some kind of hippie-turned-survivalist in a 1,000 square-foot cabin in the woods and grows our own food and practices wise use of the land, isn't such a fool after all!
So, Suburbia, I'm one of those who can just sit back with a bowl of pop-corn and watch the movie--er, the financial disaster unfold, along with the end of the United States of America "as we know it." I know, I know, Sub, you don't like cliches and you don't like my throwing my "I-told-you-sos" in your face. But I told you so, many many times, including in some of the stuff I've written on this website. And you know I have told you that you need to find a way to purchase some land out here in far west Texas in the Big Bend area, otherwise known as "home of the last frontier" (in the contiguous 48 states, that is), because land is still cheap out here, and you can still create a real nice homestead for yourself for less than $100,000, including water well and septic tank. Since you are still wanting to pay off that house though, you can spend whatever you can come up with on the land, first. I know some lots out here you can buy for less than a thousand an acre! Buy the land now, and, then when your house is paid off or foreclosed or whatever, you can start building out here. You can probably hire construction sub-contractors for $15 an hour or less, still, who speak English. I know how loathe you are to hire illegals after that gardener of your walked off the job to go to that amnesty demo. Now it might be difficult to get decent paying work out here; after all, far west Texas is the land that high wages forgot. But, surely, after paying off your house or foreclosure and having land out here and all the time to build on it, you probably won't need a high paying stressful job anyway! You're going to have to need time to put in your garden, build chicken coops, maintain your driveway after the typical summer floods we have out here in what otherwise appears to be a desert only with lots of trees. I know you still have that RV, so, take your time and live in the RV while your have your house built. That's what many people do out here.
Well, I'm fixing to close on this letter, Suburbia. Maybe now you will be more willing to take my advice. There isn't a whole lot I can recommend for your kids who are grown up and moved on, except to implore you to convince them to get out of debt as fast as they can. That kid of yours with the uber-9-11 truth site: I may not agree with him, but he's got the right to say what he thinks. I know, Sub, that you ridicule him for what he believes and live in fear that he will be locked up somewhere by whatever fascist, but heck, think of all the folks out there (millions of us) who use our Constitutional First Amendment right of Freedom of Speech every day. THEY can't lock us all up! Impossible! You know how civil resistance works: lock one up and two take his place. However, the kids still at home: teach them the value of a dollar (even though that, too, is tanking!) and convince them, if only through your own foolish example, to never go into debt. As for you parents and adults: read the Bible (I know you claim to be Christian) and stop listening to your pharisee preachers who teach the escape called the "rapture". There isn't going to be any! And also vote for Ron Paul in the primaries (if you have to register Republican to do so, do it, you can always get out of it later). The man won't become our Savior (Christ is our Savior!), but he will try to set things right (at least until THEY regain power after four to eight years, barring Paul's assassination) and restore liberty. Now I know we've had this discussion before: you all accept government entitlements such as veteran's benefits and that temporary Medicaid your daughter got when she got into that car wreck and your son's Pell Grants and your other son's Food Stamps and your senior citizen parent's Social Security and Medicare benefits...you are worried because all those idiot media people such as Tucker Carlson (who claims to support Ron Paul!) say if Ron Paul became President well there goes the "social safety net." True, Ron Paul WILL do away with some of these social programs BECAUSE THE GOVERNMENT CAN NOT AFFORD THEM! PERIOD! But he has promised your parents and us "baby-boomers" that all that money we put into Social Security will revert back to us either in benefits or in some other privatized form. Do you really think a man who has been a doctor for 40 years or so and has delivered 4,000 babies is going to see our senior citizens thrown out into the streets? What Paul will do is make sure your younger sons won't have to die in some foreign country for the sake of the oligarchs and Israel. What Paul will do is take those troops coming home from Iraq and everywhere else and put them on the US borders to keep illegal aliens AND terrorists out of the US! That, per the Constitution, is what our standing army is for! And you scoff at the notion that he will tie the dollar to the gold standard again. I suppose you would rather have your money backed with nothing, because that is what backs it now! And, finally, Suburbia, get the heck out of debt! And teach your kids young and older to do the same!
Like what you read? Then subscribe to the Something Happening Here Newsletter! I do not have a set time for it to come out, but I try to make a newsletter once a week or as much as possible with hints and tips on how to live better and more naturally on your rural remote land. From handling garden insects to collecting valuable resources like water and firewood to raising your children to dealing with neighbors, I believe my 25 years experience living on the land can help you make the most of your rural remote life.
Click here to read the first newsletter about how we fix out dirt driveway after rains washed them out, dealing with mice, and more. Click here to find out how to I used herbs and natural products to help with allergies, cold, and other respiratory ailments. Click here to read Part 1 of the "Gloom and Doom" scenario and here to read Part 2. Click here to learn the ten essential items you must have to begin your new life on your rural homestead. Click here to stop worrying about what we cannot change and change only what we can. Click here to find out how I dealt with culture shock after I moved from the big city. Click here for some different angles on the Ron Paul phenomenon. And click here to read about how to liberate yourself from "the matrix". Click here to test yourself to see if you are ready to move into the country. Click here to find out how the people will defeat the oligarchs. Click here for some tips on preparing for winter in the country. Click here to bolster your resolve in dealing with garden-eating varmints. Click here for a dose of reality. Click here for this, that, and the other on "the machine". Click here to learn why you should buy locally, and to encourage you to stop believing all the fearmongerers. Click here to find out why the National Animal ID System needs to be scrubbed pronto! And click here for an interesting Thanksgiving story.
