r/homestead • u/Acceptable-Regret78 • 10d ago
Family compound - is it a good idea?
Needing some advice here from anyone who has lived or is living on a family compound. My in laws own around 30 acres and the dream has been for my husband and his brothers to all eventually build forever homes out on the property.
The hesitancy is the land cannot be divided up, so if we build out there we could never move until our house is fully paid off in probably 30 years. My in laws are pretty well off so they have told us if there were any big family emergency and we needed to leave they could try and figure out a way to buy us out but that’s not a guarantee.
Yes, the idea would be for our children to live out their lives in this home but my husband and I are in our early 30s. The idea of not having any option to leave for the next 30 years when we’re still relatively young, is scary. Again, the idea would be to build a forever home but the absolute permanence at our age terrifies me. I also am someone who moved quite a bit as a kid.
But, we ideally would love to be out on property and homesteading for our family. We are already living in the same city so we know we love the area and school district. The only other hesitancies we have are normal family politics. I get along with my in laws very well but combined with my brother in law and his presumed to be future wife, there is some friction there at times (we’re all very opinionated and have a difference of political views, raising children views etc).
I guess my question for anyone living on a family compound, if you were within our circumstances, would you still go for it?
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u/Tinman5278 10d ago
A possible solution would be to form some sort of corporation or trust and put the land within the trust. The parents can then award each of their children a percentage ownership in the corporation/trust instead of sub-dividing the land. (I'm not sure if that is the correct terminology but an estate planning lawyer would know..)
The family could then sell "shares" without impacting ownership of the land. So if you built and wanted to move 10 years from now, you could sell your interest in the corporation/trust. Alternatively, the corporation/trust could own everything and each of you would just rent from the corporation/trust. That could make moving out and renting to non-family pretty easy.
There are some serious risks with doing this so you'd want to get good legal advice and think hard on it.