Hello from Norway!

[poleo]

ERE has been one of the most useful eye-openers in my life, along with attending United World Colleges, an international boarding school. The latter made me understand that the world is our playground, and that I can go anywhere. ERE made me understand the rest.

A friend of mine, whom I introduced to ERE, put it eloquently - you feel like Neo discovering the Matrix. That's the exact feeling - "why hasn't anyone told me?".

Anyway, today I'm about three years into establishing a farming enterprise in the north of Norway, my native country. When I say three years, most of this time has gone to trying and failing at other projects in other places, though all of them in Norway. ERE and related financial literature has been an integral part in planning our agricultural endeavors, as this type of operation has plenty of intrinsic wtf, which is possible to hedge by strict financial thinking.

The future looks promising, both financially and vocationally. Already both my partner and I are able to pick and choose jobs, thanks to understanding what a job really is and not being dependent on full time paychecks the same date every month. What an incredible luxury, being able to dedicate one's time to reading, studying, socializing and creating projects, filling in the gaps with work once in a while.

In other words, we're currently not rushing towards FI, as I still must study investing quite a bit more. Both investment in financial instruments and in real-estate, the latter being a possibly easy way of making some quick dough in the Norwegian market. I'll most definitely get back to this in the appropriate forums, and try to contribute in the different discussions.

This forum is such a find. Without having participated, of course, it still feels like I've found "home".

Both myself and my partner have some school debt from before we had become scholarly about personal economics, though we luckily have managed to get out of housing debt by selling our old smallholding. Instead we'll move into a caravan (most probably), as having a house on wheels seems very sensible for the time being.

My main projects are to work in a paid job in a local conventional dairy farm for a few more months, plan and carry out our Salad Bar Beef-operation (based on Joel Salatin's work) and in my spare time work on writing a radical blog about agriculture, which I strongly believe Norway needs (being a rather conformist country). In the future, when I'm practically FI, I'd like to set up sustainable agricultural shindigs in places that need them, namely countries less fortunate than ours concerning both financial and social capital. That seems meaningful now at least, and I have friends doing such activites in both Malawi and Nepal currently, and they sure enjoy it.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to discuss many interesting things in the time to come! (And if there are fellow ERE-minded people in Norway, that'd be fun to know!)

[thehappyphilosopher]

Beautiful! and welcome! Give a shout when your blog is up and running, sounds interesting. Agriculture and Permaculture has always been an interest of mine. Norway sounds too cold for me

[jacob]

Farming in Norway? RE and investing in Scandinavia (based on extrapolating Danish MO), school debt? You're already an outlier.

There are a few Scandinavians around here. About evenly distributed.

[poleo]

Thanks for the kind replies,

I've been browsing the forum a bit like a hyperactive child in a cinema lobby, and in so doing have made myself aware of the journals-section. I think I'll write one of those, as it would be really quite useful for myself - and if someone else should be interested too, well how about that!

Scandinavia is both good and bad - like most places - that's my intellectual opinion. I don't like the Law of Jante, though I find it possible to work around most of the time. I do look forward to taking up a bit of travelling again, as my wanderlust has been suppressed in the course of developing our agricultural projects; perhaps that'll provide some perspective. This reminds me of another thing I don't like - government regulation. Well, I better stop there I think.