What would you do???

Ditto what BamaSuzy says. My husband is constantly worried about the fact we have a mortgage, even though we easily make the payment and are making an additional principal payment every month. The reason? It is almost a "hobby" for us to study the world financial markets. We read a lot, my husband does technical analysis of markets, stocks, indices, etc. and we are not very comfortable with what we see and what the future may bring. We want to be out of debt and put whatever assets we have into real things and not paper.

Maybe we are just paranoid nut cases and totally wrong (but I doubt it, because we hear a lot of individuals respected in the area of economics saying the same thing). Whatever. I refuse to be a slave anymore. We never want the bank to control our lives through a mortage again.

Well Sidepasser, I can't think of much advice to give you on most of what you are pondering on. I do have a suggestion that might help you with the insurance. Self insure!. By that I mean that you should raise your deductible. Most people have a $500 or $1,000 deductible. Raise it. I've raised my deductible on my barns/farm to $5,000. Basically I'm insuring against truly catastrophic events. By doing that I cut my premium way down.

For the borrowing thing I would suggest you contact Farm Credit Services. I haven't taken advantage of anything but agricultural property loans but I know they seem to understand farms better than most lenders.

As usual, just my 2 cents.

Mike