Taking Care of Business

When we moved to the country, we left behind two decent incomes, one of which came as a result of my husband’s contracting business, the other was from my accounting job.

Thankfully we were able to bring with us my husband’s eBay account, and my fledgling special interest website which I had hopes of monetizing in order to enable me to work from home.

When we first arrived, our house wasn’t ready for us to inhabit, so we had to move in with my parents. We stayed there for nearly four months while my husband made the house ready for our habitation.

Meanwhile, we had to make an income.

My dad had a brick & mortar wallpaper (& window blinds) store, so my husband worked as an independent contractor doing bids for window treatments for my dad’s customers. And my husband started listing & selling items obtained through my Dad’s wholesale accounts via our eBay store.

As we started to build our own customer base on eBay, I worked on creating our own wallpaper website & starting our own e-commerce business, eventually acquiring all of our own wholesale accounts. (I never monetized my special interest website, but it was my training ground for learning HTML and building a website from scratch.)

Thankfully, having Internet access from our home enabled both my husband and I to work/stay at home & raise our kids together, from their infancy to adulthood.

However, being home 24/7 brought a new set of challenges — such as separating “work” from the rest of our home life, having to prepare three meals a day, everyday, for everybody in addition to starting & running a business, and never having anything in the house remain clean & tidy for any length of time.

But, we were flexible and learned to adapt, and we remained adaptable as our lifestyle continued to morph into a more natural, land-based way of existence over the years.

Today, we still run an e-commerce business as a family. And because of the home-based, self-employed & produce-a-lot-of-your-own-food lifestyle we’ve developed, we each only have to put in about an hour a day to meet our level of financial need.

This doesn’t mean we are semi-retired. Rather, we each spend several other hours a day cooperatively employing ourselves in producing a lot of our own food, pursuing our personal passions and making the world in which we personally operate a better place.

[This page was last updated on 4/18/25.]