Week 14 of Financial Independence

Last week I started my post "Week 13 of Unemployment". I got a little concern out of friends and family on this comment. It was tongue in cheek. Also, I'm anything but unemployed. We may be broke, but unemployed I am not! Haha. Again, another shot at humor. On to the update. 
The awesome railroad consulting gig sort of fell through for the time being. It frees up my future a bit but I was looking forward to that work so I'm a little disappointed. I'm sure it'll come back, but it conveniently fit into my schedule at this point so I was ready to do some cranking away. 
We signed up for new business insurance which is a relief. We had been struggling to get changes and updates and just about everything else in the past year+ and it was time to change to someone more local so I could show up on their doorstep if things weren't going as planned. I think we have that figure out now....finally. Some nice benefits are that the new insurance includes builder's risk insurance which is a nice benefit seeing that we're pretty much always in the construction phase of a new building. That saves us somewhere in the neighborhood of $1200/yr. That's probably the biggest bottom line adjustment, the rest is mostly a responsiveness issue. Business vehicle insurance will also be considerably cheaper too which is good. Total savings of around $1700/yr. We'll take it. 
I'm currently in a run-around with my building designers. They have been super great to me in the past so they deserve to be cut some slack, but we're getting a little nervous with timelines. Hudson plans haven't been submitted to the state so that's a source of stress at this time. We want to start building buildings in early September so we are definitely late to the game with current State of WI plan review turn around times. 
Also, we wanted to get going on Houlton's Building 5 but don't have the State approved plans back from the State. That means we applied for a Permission to Start form to get going with the foundation prior to full sign-offs by the State. This puts the risk on us if things don't get approved, but we feel like there is little risk due to our previous building getting approved and going through. This building is just a carbon copy of B2. We're hoping to have the review done by Aug 8th or so. So we should be good to start the structure on time (week of Aug 13th). You can't start the structure with the Permission to Start, only the foundation is allowed. Getting the Permission to Start doc took 4 days and some (more) hair loss to get in hand. But that came in on Wednesday night and we applied for permit on Thursday. We got the grading done for the foundation by Total Excavating so now we wait for the permit to come back to get going. 
In Hudson we got our bids back for grading work and paving. That is great. We're very close to budget so we should be able to keep trucking along. We had a meeting with the Credit Union to discuss the draw process for paying our contractors and it's very similar to Houlton. Hurray for that. But we did find out we have some more paperwork (yay!) to get to them. I think we're in the home stretch. We expect to finalize our loan next week. I'm crossing my fingers so we can get the contractors primed for construction. Getting closer!!!!
I ended the week with a little fun. Attended the Street Machine Summer Nationals at the MN State Fairgrounds. I did the Autocross event on Friday and Saturday. So much fun. I posted a link to video of the even taken by a friend I've made at the event. It's funny because I felt like I was just hanging it out there and when I watch the video it looks pretty sedate. Well, at least you get a feel for what Autocross is! I wish I could do this more but I don't think I can't afford the tire costs.