Tenzin
Appearances
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
Definitely. I am sure in our case that she has more than paid for herself every single year.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
That's correct. Yep. We both had some other investment savings coming into this. So there's a little bit more in that nest egg than just that. But that's what we're contributing on a regular basis.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
Yeah. So part of my question is how to sort of monitor where we're at to be able to continue to change that. Because if you ask me in August, I am ready to retire next year. And then this time of year, I'm like, I could do this for the rest of my life. I love it so much. So it really it bounces around a lot.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
I sort of see like three or four different options playing out for the future of the farm into our retirement. And one of my personal favorites is to just transfer day to day operations of the farm or ownership of the farm in whatever way, but continue to just kind of like stay here and play tractor hero.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
Yeah, it's a good one. I think it needs its own comic book.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
My wife and I both have just no shortage of interests and passions, so I could really see either of us stepping away from the farm to pursue some other project that we're passionate about. We have a couple of kids who don't really show much interest in running the farm, but they're only 9 and 11, so they're off the hook for now. I'm not going to try to put that pressure on them.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
I don't expect them to do that or need them to do that for any reason. So really just kind of depending on who is interested in running the farm and in what capacity, that will determine a lot of what we do. One of my big questions kind of coming from back when we started and we weren't keeping track of finances... we sort of felt like, well, the retirement is the farm.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
So you build up this farm and eventually the bank doesn't own it anymore. And then you can sell that and retire. And that made sense to me once upon a time. Now I'm kind of aware of the fact that if I sell the farm, I don't get to live here anymore. And it's no longer doing its job, both in terms of feeding the community, but also in terms of keeping the people who work there gainfully employed.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
So I'm sort of interested in just different ways of figuring that out. But also we direct markets so we know the people who are eating our food and we like them and care about them and want to continue having food for them. We do a lot of work with food insecure communities in our area and we want to continue that.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
We do have a financial planner who we use and adore. She has some experience with small business ownership. Our farm is not unique. There's not a whole lot of our type of farm, direct marketing sort of stuff. So I don't know how easy it would be to find a financial planner with any sort of very relevant experience. Selling a farm more of a commodity farm is a different thing.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
It's just easier to identify what the value of things is. The value of the farm as a functioning farm, somebody who wants to run it in a similar way is very different from the value of the assembled parts if we were to auction them off, for example.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
That's great. I didn't even know that that was an option.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
Yeah, that's a great question. We have always sort of been the kind of people who have like five plans at once with low attachment to any one of them necessarily. So much will depend on just the way that it plays out. But I also, as we've been farming, have really come to value the process of making a detailed plan and witness the power of having a detailed plan and reaching goals.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
I don't want to just neglect that. We definitely would like to travel. We spent a lot of time traveling earlier in our lives. We never completed a one-year lease anywhere before purchasing a farm. And we do travel still some now in the off season, but there's a lot of places that we'd like to visit not in February.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
One of them is staying on the farm. If we could come up with a good gradual succession plan, staying involved on the farm, helping facilitate that transition, still being able to derive some purpose from that and have the farm and us derive some benefit from that sounds great. That's sort of my ideal.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
The little bit of looking into transitioning and succession planning, it seems like a challenge to come up with a good streamlined plan. And I think the other thing is that I tend to look around and I see a lot of farmers 10 and 20 years older than us who are kind of up against that.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
And I'm reading into it, but it seems like if they had started 10 years earlier making some sort of a gradual plan, it would be an easier transition than to suddenly hash it out in a hurry or under some amount of financial strain. I feel like we're in a really good position financially.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
The farm is working well, not that it's any sort of get rich quick scheme, but it is definitely a bigger economic engine than I thought it would be when we set out and knock on wood, more reliable.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
I think that's absolutely right. I really don't know is the problem. And so I guess some of the things that I'm looking for are very broad benchmarks.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
I have played with NerdWallet's retirement calculator. I love it, actually. Thank you. I find it the easiest one, and then it maps it all out on a little chart. I very much appreciate that tool.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
Yeah, thanks for taking my question. This is pretty exciting.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
All right. Yes. Can do.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
Yeah, that's correct. That's our primary and basically only source of income. We are both all in on the farm. As you might guess, it's a highly variable source of income. It changes a lot throughout the season. It changes a lot season to season.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
And then there's a lot of little decisions made along the way that can multiply or ripple out and make a big difference throughout the course of any given season.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
We run about a 10 acre vegetable farm in north central Wisconsin. We have a very short manic growing season. So there's a high level of intensity. We've got about five employees on the farm. It's just kind of go, go, go between last frost of the spring and the first frost of the fall.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
It's not all Facebook posts, but that is definitely something that happens around here. Much of it is idyllic. I do love cats with jobs, so... Yeah, the cats here pull their weight. They do a good job as part of our integrated pest management program. So Tenzin, what vegetables do you grow? We grow pretty much all the standard vegetables.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
We don't do a lot with potatoes, although one of our employees has his own potato operation here on the farm. We grow a lot of carrots, a lot of onions, a lot of salad greens, a lot of brassicas, cabbage, kale, kohlrabi, that sort of stuff. We grow a lot of spinach and strawberries, melons, squash.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
We sell primarily in our local community. We started as a CSA and farmers market farm, and we still do both of those things. We are doing some, I would call it regional wholesale, but it's all pretty much still within the state with a couple of small exceptions. But within a few hours of here, we're doing more larger wholesale orders of bulk crops once in a while.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
We do also sell to restaurants and grocery stores in our area, but these are more like we would sell to maybe another CSA farm.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
The farm and we are maturing alongside each other. And I would say before the farm, we were good at not spending money we didn't have, but we did that by just not spending it. Then we got into farming and obviously that came with a mortgage and all that sort of stuff and a certain amount of money. operating loans and different stuff.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
We did set up our business, the CSA model kind of works like an operating loan that we're getting from our members. So people pay us throughout the off season and they sign up for shares coming the following season. So that has really helped us not have to go many months throughout the winter with no income, but it is still, it slows to a trickle.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
We are getting better at that. It used to just entirely be two separate bank accounts, but we would just pull money from one and put it into the other as needed. Now we're getting much better at keeping those things separated where we've been using QuickBooks for two years now to actually keep track of expense and income categories.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
Yep. And this is very much a small business. I mean, all farms are, but ours, because we do the direct marketing and a lot of the distribution and transportation and everything, the income and the expenses are widely varied. And a lot of what we're doing is marketing and communication.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
We have fully funded our IRAs almost every year, I think, since we started the farm about 10 years ago. So we had kind of sporadic contributions to them prior to that. But since getting the farm up and running, I think we've fully funded them pretty much every year. But that is about it. And is that a traditional or a Roth IRA? So we have both.
NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Debt in the Dating World and Retirement Planning for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners
And then we just ask our tax person which one we should fund this year based on our tax situation. A lot of farms have a lot of tax advantages. So we try to make use of those depending on how the season was.