One thing my wife and I learned from seven years in rural Ontario is that country living doesn't always mean freedom from money issues, and of all our expenses the greatest and most persistent was the car. People who live in the country nowadays are actually more hooked on automobiles than those who live in the city, since there are long miles of highway between one's home and other destinations such as shops or a job. In fact, one of the biggest problems of the truly poor in the countryside is that they may have no means of getting to a job even if it is offered to them. For everyone, the obvious alternative to the automobile would be horses, but how can horses survive at the present time, with the roads dominated by high-speed cars and trucks?
Besides the car, our big costs were property taxes and house renovations. It was a good thing we had paid cash for the house and land, because if we had been paying off a mortgage we would really have had trouble making ends meet. I should add that at first we were not as frugal as we might have been: we had a fair amount of money because we had sold our house in Toronto, but because we had so much money we spent it too freely.
We did not expect money making to be the principal issue in country living, but such was the case. Although we ran a one-acre market garden as efficiently as possible, a profit always seemed to elude us. As time went by, we began to realize that there were not many people in the area who had financial security. Most of the people we met were living either on pensions or on welfare, or something similar. The pensioners were sometimes elderly poor people living on nothing but payments from the government. There were only a few people living on company pensions, which provided a higher standard of living. One group of people who had a reasonable income were the few trades people that the area could support - carpenters, plumbers, mechanics, and so on. The other large segment of the population was the cottagers, the Torontonians, who were likely to show up only in the summer, but these people didn't have to deal with the problem of earning a local income.
