Title pretty well sums it up. We (H38 W37, 5 kids 13-8) were fortunate to sell in a high COL area and use that equity to buy free and clear in another state. Income dropped dramaticly but we are still making around 70k annual combined.
We paid 320k for our home/land and pay about 1k annual in property taxes. We don’t have a whole lot else assetwise. 40k in a 401k and maybe 25 in pensions that probably won’t vest but waited to move them until we were sure we wouldn’t be returning to that state.
After a year we are barely scraping by each month. Zero cash reserve and no clear way to get there. I had attempted to scale up a small business and discovered it simply didn’t scale. I can’t get it to budge off about 15k annually. Recognizing that I’ve moved to taking what work I can get as a substitute teacher which ends up adding about 1500 a month in season and isn’t adversly impacting my side hustle. We live fairly lean, rarely going out to eat or spending frivilously but just utilities groceries and vehicle expenses (one car payment about 310/mo. 6 payments left but both cars have issues and not much life left) seem to drain us.
Long term I will probably go back and get my teachers liscence (and then building admin) and feel ok about this but short term im worried as while it’s great not having a mortgage I’m recognizing that that also means we arent building equity beyond appreciation any longer. I don’t think it was the wrong call to not get a mortgage, that wouldn’t fix cash flow problems just delay them. But I’m wondering how we can leverage our position now in a way to keep building equity. Are we stupid to not have a mortgage out on something? We’d love to own rental cabins some day as it aligns with our vision for the future but I hesitate going into debt for an airbnb…. just feeling like we’re floating about and not really leveraging the position we’re in but unsure what that would look like given low cash flow… help?