Juniper says hi

[Juniper]

Hi everyone!

I’ve been occasionally lurking around here for a few years now, and thought it was time to join in. I’m in the middle of some transformations in my life, and there are all these crazy opportunities right now that could either put me right where I want to be in a few years, or could end up distracting me and trapping me in a high pressure career if I’m not careful. So I decided to start posting here as a touchstone, to keep me accountable to myself.

I’ve basically been living a sort of modified ERE lifestyle for some time already. I made a huge mess of my 20s, mental illness and unhealthy relationships and addiction and whatnot, but in November 2012 I bought an RV and things started to get better. I quit smoking, started working out, etc. I started saving money. I’m low earning ($10387 last year, less in each of the last 3 or 4) and low spending ($400-$500 most months, plus $500/month briefly right now), and last year I put $7000 down on a 20 acre parcel of empty rural land, which I will finish paying off on November 1 of this year. The land is about 1.5 hours from the city where I have been living for the last 14 years, so while I will gradually develop and move onto it, that’s in the future.
I have no car. I bike everywhere and maintain/fix my own bike. I will soon have to buy a car or small pickup truck or something, so that I can start building on my property, but right now I don’t have enough savings to feel comfortable spending any more. In six months or so I should be ready. Most of the time the RV is parked in the national forest, and I pay no rent, and I drive it rarely (less than one tank of gas per year). I have a solar panel on it.

I do a variety of odd jobs. I’m a tax preparer, I drive occasionally for a company that does a touristy thing, I do a little filing for a bookkeeper friend, some gardening help, etc. Until a few months ago I substitute taught, but eventually that annoyed me and I stopped. Also, I’m an organizer, I do a lot of activism of various sorts, which is of course usually unpaid, but for the next two months I’m being paid to be the volunteer coordinator for a political campaign (for a ballot measure, not candidate). The person who hired me for this position is sort of… ambitious for me? She keeps talking about positions of more responsibility, work, and money that are open to me in the very near future, and I’m a little alarmed. It is quite possible that I will accidentally end up as the executive director of a nonprofit (this has been explicitly offered) or something like that, which might be a good means to my ends if I do it for a couple of years, but, well, the work to be done is potentially never ending, and long term I’d really rather have a permaculture medicinal herb farm/queer artist retreat center on my land.

So, that’s what I’m here for. I have a certain sort of financial independence already, in that I need so little money I don’t ever feel the need to do anything I don’t want to do, but I want to get more than that for interesting projects and long term goals, and not get distracted from those projects and goals. I'll soon create a journal, to help me think through the decision making around all the possibilities as they arise.

[prognastat]

Welcome to the forums, glad to have you here.

Congrats on getting your life back on track and talking about it definitely helps in keeping track of yourself.