A very common question I get asked is that how did I plan my move to the mountains financially. How much money did I have in my kitty before I made the move? To be honest I did not plan the move financially at all. I had some savings and both my and my wife’s parents helped, and when that was not enough we took loans from friends and family. For the first five years after we moved here we lived in a very basic one room house, without an attached bathroom, that we built for ourselves, this was till two years even after we built the premium living space for our guests to stay. For those two years a day did not pass when we were not a little jealous of our guests.
People usually think that to shift your life from cities to mountains or other idyllic places the most important factor is how much money one has. From my experience it is not even top three. It is true that if you want to build a luxurious holiday home for yourself you need money and mostly that is all you need but if you want to make a home and a life in the mountains, you would need much more than money, you would need a will to go through the hard parts, you would need a dream, a purpose to keep you going when going gets tough, you would need a malleable character to help you get used to a way of living you have never experienced before, you would need a ‘zid’ to make it happen. There were times definitely when money did solve many of our problems but most of the times it was these other things that kept us there in the mountains, on our path.
Mostly people want to gain the benefits of a rural life without losing the comforts of urban life. We are not doing that, this is not our second home, this is our only home. We don’t look at it from a financial perspective, when we see it we see our plants and dogs and cats, we see each other and we see the life we all are going to live together here.
So to people who are waiting to make enough money to start a new, slow life somewhere I have only one thing to say, make a dream, a dream precious enough to lose yourself in it because money alone will never be enough.
