Etsy, Google Sheets, Smarty Pig, and Managing Debt Free Home Building

Since El Nino has run out of steam and our unseasonably warm weather has left us, I have a moment or two to catch up here. Briefly, we've been winterizing the little house, making some handmade Christmas gifts, and putting Jack in fuzzy sweaters.

Draw me like one of your French Girls

Raising money through Etsy

As I've stated in previous posts, I have supplemented our income by selling off our possessions, most notably my massive collection of My Little Ponies. I had to stop while I was working on the house, but I started back up in mid November.

The last round of pony sales went on eBay. I've been selling there since 1999, but over the past several years I have grown to HATE that venue. Their website is clunky, their fees suck, and sellers regularly get screwed by unscrupulous buyers.

Fortunately, since the items I'm selling are vintage I have another option. I have been selling handmade items on Etsy since 2010 and I LOVE selling there. I have opened up a new shop for my vintage items and it has been going pretty well. In the six weeks it has been open I've been able to raise over 75% of the money we need for our next step.

It's mostly stocked with collectibles and household items ranging from the 1940s to the 1970s right now, but I have so much more to add. There are more collectibles and boxes and boxes of ponies that need to go.

See all the things here

The profits from every sale I make are directly funding our homestead. In order to keep the funds organized, I have employed a couple different tools.

Google Sheets

The first is Google Sheets. Google Sheets is simply a spread sheet program that you can access through your Google Plus account. This is very handy considering how often I bounce from computer to computer. Here's an example of how I have mine set up:

The first column is the price that I sold the item for. The next column is what I originally paid for the item. This is an important figure to have as it will be needed come tax season.

The next two columns are Etsy fees. Etsy charges $0.20 for listing an item for three months, and processing fees after it sells.

If you use PayPal, you'd want to include those fees as well. However Etsy now has a feature that manages direct payments and PayPal payments through their account manager.

The next two columns are the total profits and self-employment tax. Total profits are figured by taking the sale price and subtracting the item cost, listing fees, and processing fees.

Since I am selling items at a profit, I must pay taxes on the income. One of these taxes is the self-employment tax. The self-employment tax is your FICA taxes: social security and Medicare. The rate is 15.3%. So, to find your total tax, multiply your profit by .0153.

You also have to pay income tax, however since we alway have extra withheld from my husband's paycheck, I don't bother saving for that.

The next column is an adjustment column. Most of the time, I only put the net profit into savings. However, on some items (mostly ponies), I want the initial cost of the item to go into savings as well. This column allows me to offset the initial cost being taken out of the profits.

The column marked "Total for SP" is the amount I put into savings. The last column helps me keep track of which sub-account that total is deposited into.

Speaking of sub-accounts, that brings me to:

Smarty Pig

When we first started packing money away so we could buy our land, I started shopping around for a place to stash our money. I don't like having it all in our checking account (darling husband is a spender) and I wanted to earn a little interest.

My Google Fu led me to Smarty Pig. Their interest rate was attractive. Well, as attractive as interest rates get in this day and age (which is pretty sad).

State of this country's banking system aside, Smarty Pig is a really great tool for saving money. The feature that I love the most is the ability to create sub accounts within your Smarty Pig account. These "Savings Goals" really fit into how we are financing this build. Here's their info page on creating goals.

When we first started planning how to do this, we were torn between buying a kit house like a Katrina Cottage or buying plans and building it all ourselves. One benefit to kit houses is that they would be easier and faster to build. A down side is that we would not be able to do any work on the house until we had saved 100% of the money.

This would be a big problem when it came to our temporary residence permit. Most counties (ours included) will want you actively building to keep your permit.

With the DIY house plans, we have the ability to save funds for each piece of the house, and build it as we reach each individual savings goal.

For example, late last winter, I calculated out the material cost for each part of our foundation. I started savings goals for the footings, the rebar, the cinder blocks, and the mortar. (I had to combine the funds and shuffle things around because of the re-design, but the funds were there nonetheless).

Smarty Pig lets you set automatic payments into your goals, or if you're a control freak like me you can transfer funds manually. It seems that they used to require a monthly transfer, but from my experience that is no longer the case.

A word of advice concerning goals: it may be wise to keep your goals small or even divide larger goals up into a couple smaller goals. Once the money has been transfered into a goal, you cannot do a partial withdrawal. If you have an emergency crop up and need to free up some funds, you have to close out the goal and withdraw all of it. This isn't a HUGE problem. You can just transfer it all back to the bank, and then create a new goal and transfer some of the money back to Smarty Pig. That's a little clunky, but not the end of the world.

One you reach your goal, you get to close it out and go buy things. This can be done by transferring it back to your bank, or you can put it on a gift card. They incentivize the gift card option by offering a bonus cash boost. There is a hardware store on the list of retailers, so this can really help on a project like this. Here's their page with gift card info.

I've been able to integrate this into my Etsy shop and use it as a tool to show customers exactly where their funds are going. Recently, the most aggressively funded goal has been the architectural blocks.

With each purchase I'm including a thank you note that tells them what part of the building project their purchase will go to. 

I'm going to try to update with more detail on each piece of the build so people can see exactly what is being saved for, where it fits into the house, and when it is purchased and installed. Until then, I have some Etsy orders to fill.

Pouring the Foundation aka More Things Are Happening!

Quick but pivotal update tonight: we have achieved concrete. I may have jinxed myself with the last post on being almost done, as three days later we had a catastrophic collapse around 85% of the trench.

Now, I'm not going to say that I wish I had stuck to my guns and refused to compromise on my original plans. However, When 6-8 inches of mud has fallen into the bottom of a trench, it is significantly easier to clear it out when the rebar is only three inches high than when it is 24 inches high.

So I spent many uncomfortable weeks straddling an awkward metal cage, which is held together with sharp pointy wire. I lost about three gallons of blood in the process and ripped the crotch out of five pairs of jeans.

Being that we are rapidly approaching winter, I was afraid we would run out of appropriate weather for pouring concrete. I think we managed to hit the last warm snap of the season. Thanks, global warming! Thanks, El Nino!

This morning I was all set to get my daughter to school and come home to pour some concrete. I started this journey by stepping off the porch, rolling my ankle, and falling right on my face. I thought, oh no, a wonky ankle is going to totally fuck up my day.

Oh, but the Fuck-up Fairy wasn't done with me yet.
I drop off my kid, start heading back, my tire blew out, and I skidded into a ditch.

Mind you, this is the tire that I just replaced in May. This is also the one day I decided not to put on jeans and went out in my PJ bottoms. No one is going to see me, right?

Wrong. Everyone dropping their kid off to school that day got to see me in my jammies yelling at my tire in a ditch. C'est la vie.

So, Mom to the rescue (thanks, Mom!) I get dropped off just in time to do 2 hours worth of prep in 45 minutes. So much panic.

All the drama aside, it's done. We worked 13 yards of concrete into a 24 inch high,134 foot long footing before breakfast. Before coffee even.

Level up.

Here's a few photos of before and after. There was too much to do to take any "during" photos.

I am disappointed that Jack did not supervise us at all through the pour. The little snot slept through the whole thing. Oh well. Here's a photo of him snuggling his grumpy cat plushie anyway.

Now I can relax a bit. The next step is to build four courses of architectural blocks on top of this footing. I'm not going to have enough warm weather to get anything significant done on that front, so it's time to head to the garage for some wood working.

What Is This?

That first post probably needs some explanation. Probably a lot of explanation.

Where do I start?

How about I start with where I am in life right now. Currently I am sitting in a tiny house on wheels surrounded by boxes of My Little Ponies.

Why? Wut?

For now I want to focus on the present and my ultimate goals and leave my motivations for a later post. My husband and I have purchased a five acre plot of land in rural Kansas. We are presently transitioning from the suburbs of Kansas City to a simpler and more sustainable life. These ponies were a major part of my life and now they are playing a major role in this transition.

We are attempting to do this whole thing debt free. The land was purchased with cash. We own it free and clear. We were able pay for it by cutting our expenses down as far possible and saving our money. Now we have the land, we have a humble little temporary home, and it's time to build our permanent home. I have a three point plan for doing this and not taking on debt:

1. Work our dicks off
2. Sell our unnecessary belongings
3. Work our dicks off some more

Seems pretty solid. Maybe.

So, I've been here selling off my collection on eBay. If you've never sold on eBay before let me just tell you this: it is a lot of work. I spend countless hours cleaning, and photographing, and editing, and fighting eBay's crappy interface, and making boxes, and packing, and printing, and rushing to the post office. Then sometimes they look at me from their boxes and I feel just a little regret that they're being sold off. Just a little.

Shut up and get in the box

The ultimate goal is more than worth it. Having our own little place out away from the beige fog of suburbia has been our pipe dream. Only the past several years have pushed us to reconsider how feasible it really was. Turns out, it is fairly feasible.

Maybe.

This land is my land. It is not your land.
It's real grassy... aaaaand it is my land... errybody sing!

Right now we're largely pushing papers around, getting permits, and raising money. We have a root cellar/storm shelter dug out and trenches for the water lines. We've run into some delays because of permits and banks and paper work. I'll be posting more about these delays later, but for now I'll just say, I'm not shocked by these delays. I'm just disappointed.

We'll be building our house largely ourselves. I've found so much inspiration from the tiny house movement and many alternative building movements. I'd love to do straw bale. I'd love to do earth bag. We chose a location that is relatively lax when it comes to building methods, but either of those methods are still going to be outside of our local code. I still think we can incorporate the spirit of these movements in what we do.

We plan on growing some crops and raising some livestock. Mostly small things like chickens, ducks, and rabbits. Eventually perhaps we'll have goats or sheep. My husband has experience working on a farm. Full admission, I do not have a great deal of experience. All I really have is some time in a greenhouse, many years of gardening, and the times I visited my great grandmother's farm. Those visits probably won't help. I was fairly young and was mostly told to just stay out of the way. In fact, my most vivid memory of the farm went something like this:

This is still largely how I learn things.

That is why I've decided to start this blog. The response among our friends and family has been immense. We've received so much support. We have some people that think we're nuts (they're probably right). We have people that are supporting us and think we're nuts. We have people that would really like to do what we're doing. So, if I can share our experiences, our triumphs, and our mistakes maybe I can help someone else reach for their dream. Or you can just laugh at us as we blunder, fumble, and possible electrocute ourselves. Either way, I'm good.