> To be perfectly honest, we really didn’t give our purchase the right amount of consideration. We were so excited and scared that we forgot to properly assess the practical side of owning a 65 year old institutional building with no insulation.
When you don't have a mortgage/rent payment, it appears that you can live a simple, full country life on very little. They run their 3 suite Bed & Breakfast ($200+/night each) plus they operate a bluegrass music camp/festival that brings does decently too. They've been able to get press for their little business, so I'm sure they're doing just fine.
Re-frame it in your mind as if they decided at 40 years old to put their savings and lucky timing in the housing market and invest in a low to no debt 'lifestyle' business.
edit:
A few other notes:
- people plant acres of trees with in-demand wood and then sell the future rights to those trees. Don't have trees growing, can't sell the future right to the trees. This is pretty common, and the author of the article probably felt it was obvious why they were planting a lot of trees.
- kids selling surplus produce at a roadside retail stand are not going to be selling by the bushel/acre. This is a lemonade stand, not a commercial business. The kids are going to have enough cash from their summer operation to buy new tablets or other fun things, but not enough money to survive on.
- I can buy forest land for less than 20$ / tree. If I go to Eastern Europe, I buy land with 10 year old oak for half that (if you buy large enough plots). Please quote a price for timber futures because your story sounds like baloney.
- 2 tablets - let's say $500 for two. A single piece of corn sells for what, 50 cents? At an expensive supermarket? Let's pretend they convinced everybody in that rural atea to pay urban prices. That means they had to sell 1000 of them, over two months, 15 a day, 7 days a week, from a roadside stall. Yeah, don't see that happening.
The corn thing is just running the numbers to make it logical, rather than illogical. Instead of buying $250 tablets, they could buy $50-$100 tablets. They could sell by the dozen, which would mean they'd only need to close one or two sales each day. Since their parents run a music festival / camp, and three B&B suites, I am generous enough to consider that they had enough traffic make enough to afford a tablet of some sort.
As far as timber futures or even the financial side of that business, I admittedly don't know much about. I do know of and see people that plant and maintain several acres explicitly for selling the lot's wood in the future. I assumed that such a time-expensive thing would have been turned into a financial product years ago, but that part I admit is a guess rather than fact.
Quote from their blog https://lettersfromthelunchroom.wordpress.com/
And their Toronto house was a former crack den so they probably didn't make millions with selling it.