Zeroing in on Zero.

In order to retire early, we have had to come up with inventive ways to get around spending money. It turns out it is great fun and has become our hobby. A penny saved is much better than a penny earned since we don't have to leave the farm to do it. Making do with the stuff we have is a challenge. Although, after so many years of mind numbing accumulation, you would have to be pretty unimaginative not to be able to adapt what you already own and aren't using, to your present needs.

Like most people our age, we have plenty of good useful things for resources. For me, the trick to using them is actually finding them. Recycling begins and sometimes ends right there. Fortunately I have developed a good organizational strategy-- just leave things where I used them last. How many times have you made the well intentioned mistake of putting something away so you don't lose it and then can never find it again. Learn to just drop things where they are and go on to something else. Works like a charm.

The challenge at Missed Skeet Farm is not accomplishing something, but doing it for a cost so low it approaches Zero. It is problem solving and treasure hunting combined. Once you get the hang of it, it becomes more and more satisfying. For us zero is a limit in the true mathmatical sense. I had a geometry teacher who explained limits with this problem. If you and your girl friend were sitting on each end of a couch and you could move half the distance to her each move you made, would you ever actually reach her? Someone who was actually paying attention blurted out "No". He smiled and said "thats correct, but you would get close enough for all practical purposes." The thought of those "practial purposes" has made the explanation of limits stick in my head since eigth grade. (Who says math can't be fun.)

Nothing tickles me more than finding a way around the need for money. It is the same feeling I get from tying a fly and using it to fool a fish. The fish has a brain the size of a buckshot, but I feel so clever when I get them to take a fly I tied, I will talk about it until everyone hides when the seem me coming.

As it turns out, most of the solutions we come up with were used by people generations ago, but abandoned as affluence influenced our ability to be clever. This only increases the charm of an idea for me. If we could be half as resourceful as our grandparents were, we would be clever indeed.

I put a screen door on the living area of the barn this summer and used a wildly curving cedar branch as the handle. Half the camps in Maine have this style of handle on their doors, but I am very pleased with myself for dreaming this up when I couldn't find a handle in my hardware collection.

The barn itself was a study in building with a budget approaching zero. I estimated the cost to be about 4500 when I got the building permit. It is over a 1200 sq ft.
The estimate was off and we only spent 3500. This is less than $3/sqft. Houses run around $200/sqft. To say the barn is nothing fancy, might be too flattering however, it illustrates what you can do when you are determined not to spend anything.

Today I have to finish cleaning up upstairs. (Someone left stuff laying all over the floor when they were done with it.) I'll make some more shelves out of the wood we milled (at a cost approaching zero) and tie things up with baling twine (recycled). I will feel clever and self satisfied and smile to myself all day long as I solve one problem after another without spending a dime. I have written about this to inspire you to be creatively cheap. Self satisfaction is the key to happiness--being cheap is the most inexpesive way to achieve it. Total cost for this bit of wisdom, zero.
Don,'t you feel cleverer already?
Well, keep trying it may come to you.