For the question of why we are selling so soon after building. Well, we thought this was a dream retirement home. We would be here forever. We have since discovered that we are sacrificing a lot by living here. There is a never ending list of things to do to maintain 20 acres. These projects cost money. The commute to town is insane. I will soon have a child in school and would spend 2 hours a day driving her to and from school. When we purchased the property, there was a wonderful school right down the road, however it has since been closed due to low attendance. The final nail in the coffin was the news that my husband is going to be transferred to Singapore for work Q2 2015. We want to be proactive in selling this place to give ourselves greater flexibility when that move happens. Also, we calculate that if we want to stay here forever, DH would have to work 16 years. To stay here until retirement, then move and buy a less expensive house, would necessitate working 12 years. To move now and rent/relocate/buy a house in cash (120k range), DH could retire in 6 years.
As a retired builder from a rural area, I'm glad to see that you are among the few that figured this out pretty quickly. As I meander through my post FIRE years, I constantly reflect on how many folks that I know that find it necessary to make themselves slaves to their rural properties. It's one thing to be a wage slave who is confined to the cube 50+ hours a week, since you "had" to have that trophy house in the burbs, with all the bells and trinkets. It's another to be able to live comfortably on a large rural spread that owns your butt 24/7/365. It's the never ending story. Fill your head with silly dreams in the Mother Earth magazine, buy your 10/20/40 acres, and a few years later you wake up to find you have dropped six figures in "improvements", you own $40-50K in various equipment to keep the place maintained, and if you slack off and fail to devote 30 hours a week to it, the place starts sliding backwards quickly. Now don't get me wrong, the majority of these folks will all tell you how wonderful life is. Call me jaded, but I think three out of four of them would cry tears of joy if you offered to trade them for a nice modest place with little maintenance, and a pile of cash that was big enough to actually take some time off and enjoy their life. I don't know what ancient philosopher first said these words of pure genius, but.... "you don't own shit, shit owns you" Good luck, and enjoy the drop in stress after you sell the farm.