>Have a family farmed passed down since my great grandparents

Shouldn't A multi-generational farm be paid for by now?

>Why is life cruel /out/

Because you choose to focus on negative things.

>>893371
Yeah but taxes are high, and it's an old house built in like the 50's or 60s and needs maintenance. Not horribly pressing it's just the fear that what if one day it came down to it

>>893379
In the us sometime the feds will pay you to do nothing with the land. Maybe try that if you don't wanna make the land productive. It's pretty hard to lose a farm to taxes.

Well, you have plenty of time to get your shit together, finish college and land a decent job.
That is, unless your whole family suddenly died or something

>>893379
i'm guessing the house is in the rural
i seriously doubt taxes are that high man
how much are they

>>893385
Depending on the acreage it could be pretty high.

>>893366
Figure some way you could make money off of it to cover the taxes and shit.

>build small house in one corner near the road
>rent it out for just enough money a year to cover the taxes.

Also learn basic maintenance and repair, it'll save you big money over the years.

>quite college (you don't want to be there anyway, which means you're wasting money and taking up a seat for someone that does want to be there)
>travel around and work on farms for a year or two, learning as much as you can
>come home, start farming
>build a few small cabins torent out for extra income.
>Offer dinners of fresh produce and local game

There you go, you get to hang out, live on a farm, build things, grow stuff, go hunting and pay your property taxes.

work with a *local* land trust (not the nature conservancy, please) to encumber the land with a conservation easement. if you truly don't want to develop it and want to keep it as open space, a conservation easement can almost completely negate the tax burden even for a large parcel. you may need to do some environmental remediation to put it back to a natural state, though some jurisdictions allow agricultural easements. as with most land-use issues, conservation easements are creature of state law, so your mileage may vary.

if you're interested, google a land trust near you and ask them for details. however, if you ever get serious about this, make sure you hire your own attorney to represent you, don't just go along with the land trust's atty; you are NOT their client, and they have no obligations to you.

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31KB, 451x594px

>>893553
I guess I'll follow up on what a conservation easement is:

Basically, you're donating a part of your ownership interest in the land. So, for most things that you own, you own every right possible. Consider my toaster: I own the right to use my toaster, to sell my toaster, to smash my toaster, to take my toaster apart and build a robot out of the parts... etc.

Same with land. If you own it free of any bank's mortgage, then you probably own all the rights. You have the right to do whatever you want to it. Live there, sell it, subdivide it, build whatever you want on it. Each one of those rights is valuable.

Taxes are owed taxes based on the value of your land. Great land, big tax burden. Shitty worthless land, not much taxes to pay for it. What makes land great or shitty? What it sells for on the open market. What to people buy land for? Not just to have it look nice, but for building shit on, or for tearing up for the resources.

So, with a conservation easement, you're basically giving up the rights to develop or harvest resources from the land. You "break off" your rights to build on the land, or to deforest it, dig a quarry, etc. So you take those rights, and you give them away (they are held by a land trust, which is a type of nonprofit, because someone always has to hold a right). The land trust can't use those rights because they're a nonprofit that has sworn not to do that, and you can't use them because you don't have them.

Now your giant, beautiful parcel is not worth much money, since it can't be used to build yuppie condos. So guess what? You don't own any significant taxes on the place. The land is the same as it ever was, and you can go on doing whatever you were doing, so long as that wasn't developing it.

As a perk, you might even get the land trust to come plant some nice trees on the land, or restore the creek you've been parking your old cars in since the dust bowl. land trusts are pretty cool (other than the nature conservancy).

>>893565
My dad's friend recently did one of these, had a largish chunk of scrubland that he only used to run cows on. Gave up the rights to develop or sell off chunks of it, and got $500,000.