Keeping us poor on the land

Back when I was looking at properties to buy when I first moved up here in 2008, I recall a woman who lived next door to a property we were really interested in, saying, in an off-hand way, 'we love it hear, but it keeps us poor'.  Now, we are far from being poor, but living on a property, where you buy in mulch in the truck-load, does bring with it additional expenses, which does have an impact on the bottom line of the household budget.
This year seems to be a bit of a doozie so far.
First, the hot tub motor started to sound rather sick and rattly, so we had to buy a new motor and Steve installed this (having Steve as part of the household team does, however, save on any number of expenses, so there is a big savings there :-).  Unfortunately, the ozonator has also had the richard, though we are still able to manage without it, though I think we will be buying another sooner rather than later. Ozonator, that is, not a new hot tub.
Then, our friendly pest exterminator had to rid our house of termites, so that was an extra cost that we hadn't accounted for in this year's budget.
And then to top it off, we discovered to our horror that our solar panels were not feeding in the power that they had collected into the grid. We had a guy come out this week to check the inverter and sure enough, it has packed it in.  A little online investigation found that many, many customers whose solar system had come with that particular inverter, had also experienced the same problem, though it seems we have been lucky with the length of time ours did actually work.
Anyway, this isn't meant to be a whinge, just a little observation on the costs of living at Larnook.