Can you farm without a truck? Or what about making a living on the farm without a side (full-time) job to supplement your lifestyle? Stay at home mom in today’s high cost of living, forget about it. What’s all this talk about retiring early when I don’t even know if I will have enough money to retire by the time I’m sixty-five years old? Well, I know someone who does believe in a dream and he has a plan to get there.

Introducing The Truckless Cowboy! Yup,that’s me, the guy talking to you. No, I am not some hardcore cowboy who does everything with my bare hands or on horseback. To be honest I don’t even really like horses that much, but I did buy a farm and love raising cows on it…usually. In fact I even own a truck , but seriously do wonder why. Why would a farmer second guess owning a truck you say? Of course farmers need a truck. Here’s the problem, I can’t afford a truck when I can’t afford the time to stay at home and fully enjoy this farm. This is just one example of a paradigm I have had to challenge in my life.

I believe it is possible to achieve your dreams. Henry Ford (the guy who’s name is on my truck) once said “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t …you’re right.” So to the questions above, yes I believe we can live the life of our dreams while raising a family right here on our little farm. But I didn’t always think we could. Just like farming does not necessarily require owning a truck; neither does living in modern society require you to spend all your money and “retire” at a completely arbitrary age like 65. This is simply the status quo and I know we can do much more.

Our dream is to retire early so that work will be optional for the rest of our life. I like the term financial independence better though because retiring at thirty sounds boring to me. Financial independence is having enough passive income or money to cover your lifestyle for the rest of your life. The key is that the money comes in whether or not you sell your time for it. Whether or not we choose to work. If we no longer have to work for money we have no option but to live life honestly in pursuit of our dreams. 

We dream of raising a family on a farm full time with enough passive income to cover our basic expenses by January first 2023. It is October 2023 at the time of this post. That puts me and my wife right at and above thirty years old when we hit our goal. That is six years and two months from today, and a possible sixty five plus years of financial freedom on the other end. That is also how long our little money pile will have to sustain us for too. I know this sounds like a big goal, naive or even too good to be true. And only time will tell what will come. But this is not a yes or no dream, it is only a matter of time. What’s the worst that could happen? We are grossly off with our plan and it takes twice as long? So instead of retiring in seven years at the age of thirty we retire fourteen years later at the age of 37? That sounds pretty good to me. You see, if I were pondering whether to become a doctor or not, that is a yes or no pursuit. I can even pursue it for a decade and quit in the middle of my residency while falling short of my goal and paying the full cost of tuition. But by taking control of our money, dare I say master it, it is only a matter of time until we reach financial independence.

So now that we have a goal or a dream we can take steps to pursue it. The first step is getting clear with where we are. How much money we currently have and what we make now. We need to be totally honest with ourselves or we will not gauge properly the steps in between. Then we need to define our vision for our mountain top. Like a map, once we figure out where we are and then where we want to go, only then can we figure out our steps in between, and there is always more than one route we can take. This is what I will dig into in the coming articles. So follow me and let’s take that journey to the top of the mountain together.