Saving for Camp

If you know me or Steve IRL, you'll know that we've tossed this idea around forever. Do we want a camp in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains (a place we absolutely LOOOOVE) or do we want to try to invest in a waterfront house? (Lake/Ocean?)

Let me be clear: we have no money. Ha! Well, that's not entirely true. We have no money at the moment.  Almost every penny we save goes back into the house or the kids. But, BUT! The goal is to one day have money! And what we want to do with that, we're not sure.

DUH - we are obviously putting aside the "traditional" items we have to save for: college tuition for two kids, make sure our 401Ks are good and we put as much away in that, as much as we can stand (while still trying to live a life). Let's hope when I revisit this blog in 15 years, we will have a camp :)

Steve and I are on Zillow probably every week, just perusing the options. Seeing what's out there. Seeing what we could potentially afford in say, 15 years.

We kept going back and forth (hypothetically, ha!) on whether we wanted to be close to water or not. We're leaning towards not.

For starters, anything that is waterfront will cost an arm and a leg and will require us to sign over our first-born child.

Secondly, we currently live near the lake. Not ON the lake, but damn close to it (about a 5 minute drive).

Thirdly, we want land. True, we could try to purchase property that backs to state land, but after talking it over with Steve, realized that we will need our own property, so we can cut down trees and whatnot. Steve is thinking upwards of 20 acres. (!!!) Maybe he'll settle for 10.

So we created a new account that will be used specifically for this. We will put whatever extra funds we have each month (after our other savings account and kids accounts and 401K are dealt with) and see where it takes us.

A few things we need to take into account:
- Proximity - since we want to actually use this camp as a vacation home, and use it on weekends in the summer and in the winter, we want to be able to get to the camp in less than 3 hours (2 - 2.5 hours would be ideal). Steve will need to be able to get to the camp easily to check on it. But, we also want to be near a certain location for snowmobiling in the winter. It needs to be "up north" enough and near the trails.

- If this actually comes to fruition, how will we remove snow up there? In theory, it sounds fun to get a shit-ton of snow and bring toys up there. But if you can't even get up your own driveway....well that would suck. So we'd have to invest in some sort of snow removal equipment. But it'd be nice if it had more than one purpose, so it looks like Steve just might get his tractor some day.

- Acreage - I'd be fine with less acreage than Steve, but in the long run, it does make sense to buy as much property as we can afford. It'll just go up in value and it'd be so nice to own our own paradise.

- The camp itself - let's just say this: I'm all for roughing it, but having asthma, two kids (one who will be diagnosed with asthma), two dogs, etc. I'm hoping for something more along the lines of GLAMPING. I'd love for it to have electricity (via generator) and running water (I doubt this will happen). We stayed at a beautiful log cabin the summer of 2013 and it was absolutely glorious. The cabin was new, well maintained and simply gorgeous. If we're lucky, we can find a camp that has been started (frame/shell) but that we could finish up. At the same time, I think it'll be fun to build a tiny home. I actually think we could do it, too.