Mabon                                                                        Elk Rut Moon

I’ve been vacillating on the solar power. The impetus to install it is strong both from a future tense perspective, renewables are necessary, and from a political perspective, distributed power generation removes one more lever of control. But. It’s expensive and not strictly speaking necessary. We have limited funds from the sale of our Minnesota property and need to be strategic about how we spend them.

Part of that strategy involves protection of an emergency fund that covers a suddenly disabled vehicle or a precipitous drop in stock prices. The latter could drastically reduce our monthly income for a time. We’ve made a decision about how much we need in that fund and will protect it. That leaves a finite amount of money for kitchen remodeling, external sprinklers, a lower level bathroom remodel, solar and other things we think of later.

This morning, while the dogs were outside after their morning meal, I ran through various amortization schedules. My goal was to find a five year loan amount that could be paid off at the same monthly amount as our electrical bill. Once I found that I got easier about the whole thing.  The loan will protect some of our available cash for the other projects, get paid off in an amount of time that will leave us years to enjoy zero utility bills, and give us a way to advance the great work*.

It may or may not add value to the house, but it should attract the kind of buyer we want, just our gardens and orchard did in Andover. The prospect of zero utility bills will be an incentive.

*Thomas Berry defined the great work of our time as the creation of a sustainable presence for humans on the earth.