I accepted an offer on my farm this weekend. I expected offers from a couple of large farm corporations in the neighbourhood but I got a surprise, and the best, offer from a local young Amish couple. Will fly out to Ontario at the end of October to meet them: the deal closes November 1.
Anyone here who has sold a home or farm that has been in your family for several generations will appreciate my emotions at being the last one in my family to own it. Going to walk around it and take some pictures when I visit there in a few weeks time!
The local Amish community will help my buyer build a house and other buildings on the farm. It is unbelievable how fast they can build a house. They will cut down nearby trees to saw into lumber for the buildings and use wood for heating. They are self-sufficient food-wise.
They avoid all modern conveniences so do not have electricity, running water, motor vehicles, phones nor bank accounts, etc. Fascinating group. They manage to live similar to how my grandfather lived when he bought the farm in 1915!
There are many branches of Amish in Canada and the US but our Ontario neighbours live and look like those in Witness. I have not met my buyer but met many of our Amish neighbours in the 60s when they first settled in our area. They are good folks.
There has been a second large influx into our area in recent years from Southwestern Ontario where the Amish settlements are much older. Some financial arbitrage is going on. Farm prices in their former area are higher than where I live so they have been selling those farms and buying cheaper larger ones in my neighbourhood.
I will post just this older one for now as the crop shown will have been harvested by the time I return in November.
My wife and I were recently cycling past one of our soya bean fields so I stopped to take a picture of her in the field. These beans are grown for the Japanese market and are non-GMO, pesticide-free, etc., to command a premium price.
No. Our farmland in Eastern Ontario is of comparable quality. It is more about the location.
Southwestern Ontario has a higher population density than Eastern Ontario so there is more demand for land. Farm produce is also closer to markets, including the US.
Eastern Ontario is also less affluent than SW Ontario since there is not much industry.
We arrived last night and are staying at my older brotherās place (photo below) which was my grandfatherās house until he died in 1959. It is on the farm adjacent to the property we are selling. I lived in this house as a kid, starting in 1955 when we moved in to look after my grandfather.
The farmhouses in this area are all of this brick variety except for the very old ones that are built from stone. Grandpaās would have been built in the 1880s.
Yeah, that looks right. You donāt see too many in brick, definitely a lot of Italianate influence here which was popular around the 1880s. That little dormer is adorable.
Yesterday, I met the Amish family who are purchasing our farm. Was very interested in the young manās ideas for the farm. Basically he wants it to revert to the type of family farm I was raised on in the 1950s. Over the decades, all the fences have been removed and it is basically one large field with crops but no animals on it. His plan is to re-fence it into 8-10 acre fields, grow crops but also have sheep, workhorses and cattle on it: these were the same animals and smaller fields that we had in the 1950s.
Have included a photo below that I took this week of a corner of the farm featuring a tree I asked my former tenant to spare when he took out the fence it was in. The tree has shed its leaves for the year but is beautiful when in full leaf. There are other trees scattered throughout the property that I also asked the farmer to preserve. I took several other photos to have a record of how the farm looks now. Will take future photos to chronicle the new buyerās changes to the landscape.
He will build his house and related buildings next year but will dig his well this month once he finds a water witcher to find water. We used water witchers in the past but they are a vanishing breed. Hunting season started yesterday so gave him permission to hunt on the northern wooded part of our property.
Max 401ks - Complete. Last few paychecks should be a smidge higher for the both of us
Max HSAs - Complete. Minimal spend out of either of our accounts.
Add to brokerage - Complete. Did a lot of shuffling of accounts due to #4 but I believe we ended up in the $20-24k range in total
Get married - Complete
Build pergola - Not complete. Iām lazy
Honeymoon trip - Complete. We saw a lot of the continental U.S. this year.
Maintain charitable contributions - Complete. About the same as prior years
Leftover to brokerage for future down-payment - Complete-ish. Havenāt tracked this but know we have made one-off deposits here and there this year.
Next year will be a āfunā financial year for us ā A lot of (mostly good, I think/hope) changes coming for my wife and her employer and possibly a mini me added to the mix. Should make tax time in 2026 nice and stressful.
Did max the 401k. Iām going to be really close on the brokerage goal, the porch had a little (read: a lot) of scope creep and weāre getting close to $50k on this thing. So I may miss my brokerage goal by a couple of thousand dollars and thatās fine.
Next year, no massive home improvements planned so Iām going to have a pretty serious goal for saving in 2025. Weāve decided to wait on solar.
Good reminderā¦I had to hold back 5k to pay for some unexpected maintenance on the house earlier this year, but the checking account recovered since then and I had enough to lock this one in and moved that over earlier.
I know I have another 10k home expense coming next year, but hoping for the same. I have a new car purchase coming at some point in the next couple years, but hoping to push that one off as long as possible.
My dream is to only spend $10k on our house some year, lol. Maybe next year if I donāt do windows, or if I DIY them.
I got a bank alert recently letting me know I spent like $29k last month, and thatās $22k more than normal, something like that. Thanks, I hadnāt noticed.
Itās probably just starting for me. The house is coming up on 20 years old, so I am going through a round of replacing everything that wears out in that timeframe. 10k a year is probably what I can expect unless I go after the bathroom or kitchen, but that just feels like an opportunity to chase the latest trend only to have it go out when I decide to sell.
Cars, college tuition, thatās all on the horizon. Iāll watch enough money disappear in the next 5 to make up for the last 5.
