April 2024 recap + BIG NEWS for our family!
We moved & bought a business! Here's the full story ...
Welcome! APL is a newsletter for the woman desiring to build a strong marriage, purposeful life and an enduring family legacy.
April was mostly family time as we visited both sides of our families in Missouri. Levi got a lot of time with his grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and a lot of outdoors time — this child thrives in the country. Daniel finished up paternity leave and is working remotely for a bit, and I’ve mostly spent my days in a cycle of nursing and contact naps in the Solly wrap.
It’s been so hard not to share this, but we’re taking major leaps of faith towards a few big dreams we have for our family.
Since February, we sold our house, had our second baby, moved to a different state, bought a business and have been living with family (and out of suitcases!) as we wait to close on our new house this week.
We actually closed on our business and put an offer on a new house in April, so those were definitely highlights last month!
I’m going to share the whole story, mostly to write it down for our own memories, and to share how God blessed us through our waiting season.
This is a long post with lots of photos, so if you’re reading on email, you’ll need to click to read it in full on my blog!
Ready?
In our first year of marriage, we took a giant white poster board and wrote down a mind map of all of our dreams and goals — from what we want to accomplish in ministry to where we want to live.
We then tried to break it down into smaller action steps to figure out what to prioritize and how much money we’d need to reach our immediate goals, which for us includes raising our kids in in the country and building up successful family businesses to give us financial & time flexibility.
We actually put the blueprint on how we developed a vision and plan for our family legacy into a workbook that other couples can use — you can learn more about this resource and get a copy of the legacy guide here.
Both my husband and I grew up in Missouri, two hours apart, but shortly before we met, my husband moved to Indiana for work. After we got married, we talked about staying in Indiana for a year or two, but agreed that we eventually wanted to move back to Missouri so that we can raise our kids near our families.
But, no matter how much we tried and prayed about moving back to Missouri, God kept the doors closed, so we made a home in Indiana, even as we kept dreaming, praying, saving and working towards the future we envisioned for our family.
In early 2022, my husband found a beautiful ranch in Stockton, Missouri. Stockton is a tiny lake town with a population of about 2,000. The town is two square miles and there are no stoplights.
We couldn’t afford the ranch, but we sure did spend a lot of time dreaming about one day making it ours and thinking about how we could get there financially. I had grown up an hour from there (and Daniel’s parents live two hours from Stockton, so we’ll be about halfway between our two families), but other than going to Stockton Lake in the summer, I wasn’t too familiar with the area.
My husband got to visit Stockton for the first time in May 2022 when my brother got married at a venue in Stockton. We drove through the countryside and stopped by the ranch we loved (it was sitting empty, pending a sale at the time).
Stockton felt like home. Well fell in love with the area, but like any rural small towns, jobs are hard to come by. My job is remote, but my husband worked for John Deere and that required him to be in cities where Deere had corporate offices or staying in a field role with lots of travel (neither option fit in with the vision we had for our family). So, we knew that if we truly did want to live in the country and move back to Missouri, Daniel would have to find a remote job in his field (which would be hard to do and match what corporate pays) or he’d have to become self-employed.
One of our family goals is to build generational wealth by establishing multiple income streams and as we study finance and investing, we’ve recognized that both of us staying in corporate 9-5 jobs is not going to help us achieve our goals.
After reading Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel we decided the best option was to eventually buy a business instead of starting our own. The book shares the statistics, but the chances of success are way higher if you buy an established business vs. starting one from scratch and with baby boomers retiring, there are lots of business owners looking for an exit strategy. But, we didn’t think we had the finances to accomplish this for a few more years, so buying a business felt like a someday dream.
In September 2023, Daniel, without much intention, did a Google search for commercial properties in the Stockton area. There it was, a listing for a commercial property for sale in Stockton. It had been on the market since spring, but even though we checked real estate listings in that area almost daily, we had somehow not seen it before.
After some googling, we learned that the property had been a fescue seed cleaning business for 42 years. If you’re like me, with no Ag background, here’s a high level summary of how this works:
Farmers harvest fescue seed in combines and bring it to the seed house. The seed house dries and cleans the seed and then packages it. The bagged seed is then sold in stores like Lowe’s and Tractor Supply to customers who want to plant grass on their lawns and fields.
At first, we looked at the price of the commercial property and the business and were like, “It would be cool, but we can’t afford that right now.”
But we also couldn’t stop thinking about it. We checked the listing every day to see if it was active and talked about what it would be like to own a business like that. My husband has a degree in Agriculture Systems Management and worked for a similar business in college, so it was a good fit. It was literally everything we dreamed of - even better, actually!
In October 2023, we drove down to Missouri to visit family and decided to take a day trip to view the property - mostly out of curiosity, but also a small glimmer of “what if?”
We met with the late owner’s son, who shared with us that the business had been started by his dad after six years working in corporate (Daniel had been working in corporate for 6 years at this point….), and that his dad had an agriculture degree from the University of Missouri, Columbia (also where my husband went to school). His parents had started the business when his dad was in his early 30s (Daniel is turning 30 this year). His dad passed away in 2020 and the kids had their own interests they were pursuing, so the family put up the business for sale.
The more we learned and saw of the business, the more our hope grew. We went back home and prayed for weeks as we poured over the business financials the sellers shared with us and our own financials to see if we could make the numbers work.
In the end, we decided that although it would be hard and we’d have to make some substantial sacrifices to make it all work, we would regret not trying. So, at the end of November, we made an offer and after some negotiation, our offer was accepted in December.
In January 2024, we listed our house for sale (by the way, I shared the testimony behind this house here - if you’re single or in a waiting season, read this!). The timing was complicated since we had a baby due the first week of March, so depending on when the house sold, we’d either be moving super pregnant or with an infant - neither was ideal, but we also couldn’t wait since we were under contract on the business, contingent on the sale of our house.
January was filled with house showings - we had anywhere from a dozen to 25 showings per week, which was difficult with a toddler, me being eight months pregnant and us both working from home (oh and most of January was below freezing temperatures!). We spent a lot of time working at coffee shops (while Levi went to our nanny’s house, thank God for her flexibility and hospitality!), in the toy section at Goodwill, at Lowe’s/Home Depot, and indoor playgrounds.
Even with all the showings, February came around with no offers and we had to decide whether to take the house off the market for a few weeks since the baby’s due date was fast approaching and having a baby mid-move wasn’t ideal. Before we did that, our realtor suggested lowering the price just a bit for a week just to see if that generated any offers. Sure enough, within 24 hours, we got three offers and ended up going under contract in early February with a closing date at the end of March so that we could have the baby in Indiana before moving.
Luke was born March 11 and we packed up our house and moved the last week of March. Moving two weeks postpartum and with a toddler isn’t for the faint of heart, but we did it somehow. We are so grateful to our church family in Indianapolis - the women brought us home cooked meals daily for two weeks and the youth group and our pastors packed up the house and loaded the truck. As excited as we are for this next chapter, we miss our church family in Indy so much.
Although we’d been working with a realtor and looking for a place to live around Stockton for months, everything we tried - buying, renting, AirBnBs - fell through. Our realtor pulled every string he could think of, but it was just closed door after closed door (shout out to Billy Bruce Realty - Billy has truly gone above and beyond in helping us with this transition and move!). I was anxious but my husband kept reminding me that God had gotten us this far, and He wouldn’t leave us now; that something just right for us would come up on the market any day.
So, we put all of our belongings in storage and decided to stay with family for a few weeks as we prayed for God to send us a place to live.
Two weeks after moving, a 3.5 acre homestead came on the market, 20 minutes from the business we bought. We drove down to look at it and made an offer the same day. It isn’t perfect, but it’s exactly what we need in the season we’re in while we work towards buying our dream ranch someday. God willing, we’ll move in next week after six weeks of living with family.
Every step of this has been divine timing and provision.
It truly felt like God kept the eyes of potential buyers closed until such a timing that would allow us to stay in our home and have the baby in Indiana.
He provided a house for us in Missouri after what felt like stepping off a ledge for us by moving states two weeks postpartum without housing lined up.
Two weeks after we closed on the business, the widow who sold the us the business passed away - we had moved up the business closing date so many times as we waited for our house to sell, so it feels like a blessing that we got to meet her at the closing and that she got to see who would be taking over their family business before she passed away. We are humbled to build on this couple’s legacy and the business they’ve built as a family.
We are so excited about this new chapter for our family — it’s so much change with a new baby, a move, a new house, a new church, a new community, job changes for Daniel and starting a new business — but it is also so many answered prayers that we’ve been waiting on and working towards.
Daniel is leaving his corporate job with John Deere and will focus on our business full time and once I’m done with maternity leave, I’ll continue to work full time & remotely in my job at Crowe (I do tax risk management and quality control at an accounting firm).
We’ll share more about the business soon, but our vision for the seed house is to provide local farmers and ranchers with fescue seed, cover crops, and feed products; to collaborate in growing more profitable operations; and to give back to the community.
We have so many ideas and plans for this business - it still feels like a dream, honestly! If you want to follow along as we build this business, follow @stocktonseedhouse on Instagram and Facebook and I’ll be writing more about it here as well!
I say it all the time, but God’s best is truly worth waiting for, and this is another testament of His faithfulness and perfect timing.
If you’re in the midst of your own waiting season, here’s a devotional I wrote in my single season & have re-read parts of it for encouragement as we’ve waited on these dreams the last few years. I hope it encourages you too!
Until next time,
YPS
Wow, what a beautiful testimony of persevering faith! I love how your vision planning, hope, and curiosity led you on God's right path. I just found your newsletter, but I'm excited to follow along your journey!
What a beautiful testament of God’s faithfulness!! I’m so excited for you all. 🤗 Congratulations!