Episode 148: Homesteading on a Budget: Practical Tips to Grow Self-Sufficiency with Less Money

Intro

Hi there, and welcome to the Homestead Education Podcast. Do you have a homestead, farm, or just dream of a rural life? This is a show to help you, and your kids, grow your own food and grow as a person. I’m your host, Kody Hanner.
I’m a homesteader, homeschool momma six, and small-town enthusiast. I was raised by an old-school ranger, and blessed by the grace of God to have been exposed to so much of what rural life has to offer. Join me every week to talk about homesteading, homeschooling, and growth with a homestead education.

Hi and welcome back. I just want to remind you that you can get all of my homestead science books on my website, and many on Amazon, for a new way of teaching agriculture to today’s youth and aspiring homesteaders by focusing on small-scale farming and self-sufficiency. If you are a school, co-op, or retailer, feel free to reach out to me directly.

What’s Going On in Kody’s World

So it’s been about a month or so since I have just popped in and given you guys an update on what’s going on in Kody’s world. I mean, a lot of you follow me for the homesteading, some of you follow me for the homeschooling, some of you maybe follow me because I’m a little off, but you know, that’s okay too. I actually had someone, and if you’re listening you’ll probably hear this because you do listen to my podcasts, that I dropped my water bottle while speaking in Colorado, and I was kind of embarrassed because it was really loud and like everybody heard it, like I’m talking like metal water bottle to metal stage.

And she’s like, you know, it kind of wouldn’t be you if you didn’t do something like that. So I guess I have a signature thing, whatever.

Daily Homestead Life

So homestead life, let’s start there because I mean, I think that’s kind of like the driving factor for all of this. I mean, what we do, that, I mean, that’s literally how we eat, it’s a big part of our income. So the homestead is a daily thing that we’re working on. Sometimes it’s mundane, and there’s really nothing to talk about, because the only thing that happened is the kids went and fed and came back and said, everybody looks good.

And we go about our day. Other days, it’s an all day thing. You know, we’re farrowing, we’re moving pigs, we’re gardening, we’re processing milk.

Modern Homestead Conference Recap

I lately we, well, we just got back from the modern homestead conference in Coeur d’Alene. I’m still exhausted. It’s an exhausting weekend. It’s a fun weekend. But it’s outdoors, it’s hot, we’re on our feet. I’m talking to a lot of people, which of course is amazing.

But you know, I mean, after two, three days of it, you’re pretty much done. But we had a lot of fun, we did some giveaways, we met some really cool people. My daughter really put herself out there and went and introduced herself to an influencer that she really looks up to. And not only gave, introduced herself, gave her some gifts, but invited her back to the booth to talk to us about some health things. So I thought that was super cool, too. And just the fact that she was willing to do that, because she’s kind of painfully shy.

Some of you have met her, some of you haven’t. Like when we’re on the road, but I was pretty proud of her for that.

Homeschool Prom in the Middle of Everything

And then as, you know, homesteading homeschoolers go, homeschool prom was Saturday night. And luckily, the modern homestead conference is only about an hour and a half from our house. So or well, from our town, our house is a little further, but I ended up curling and up doing her hair in the booth at the conference. So you know, I’m just like swing, you know, like slinging curriculum and curling hair. And I mean, just welcome to my life.

So yeah, before the conference, actually, like a week before the conference, because we went to another conference before that. We had three pigs for Owen one day. And I mean, that happens to us a lot, because we live cover. So a lot of times we will, you know, put everybody in with the boar on the same day. And then you don’t expect them to furrow the same day and then they do.

And so we ended up having to move some pigs around. And it was a good thing because it was our purebred Herefords. And this time of year, we decided to sell those all as piglets. And we, I mean, we couldn’t provide enough. So that’s really exciting to see. Not only the Hereford breed, people are more excited about it, but also just that we’re able to sell piglets this time of year, which can sometimes be hard, because people like to buy piglets and feed them out.

And we’re starting to, you know, hit that place where they’d be ready to butcher in like December, which I actually really love feeding them during that time, because you’re not dealing with mud season. And the temperature is more mild. And they’re small when the temperature is really hot. So it’s easier to like put them into like, you know, a covered area and stuff. And so but a lot of people don’t look at it that way. And we we do so but we opted to go ahead and sell all the two litters.

And then we’re keeping one for ourselves to feed out because we want to see what these ones look like fed out because it’s a new breeding pair. And then I’ll be able to maybe even still have those pigs on site when we’re selling for each pigs this year, but if not get really good pictures because that is the breeding genetics will be selling for for each pigs.

Late Garden This Year

Now I have my pigs all together. I do not have my garden altogether. I probably should have my garden in about three to four weeks ago. Unfortunately, our lives have been really, really crazy. I can’t even begin to tell you everything. But I’ll circle back to that. So we are putting in our garden right now, which is basically July 30.

My started plants are already a foot to 18 inches tall. So you know, I’m excited, like we’re still gonna have plenty. I’m starting some things that are quicker growers, like I’m starting a lot of greens and peas, which probably a little too hot for them. But what I’m doing this year is I’m trellising my squash over my peas and greens. So they get a lot of sun when they first start growing. But then by the time they, you know, could get too overheated, they’re going to be shaded by my squash.

So hopefully that’s how it’s going to work at least. And if not, they will be a little shaded going into fall, where I’ll be able to start my fall garden and not have to worry about freezing as much because they’ll have a good cover.

Ohio Homeschool Conference & Big Win

Now, everything that’s been happening to us. It’s I mean, we’ve had some really good things and some really things. So a couple months ago, we went to the Ohio homeschool conference. And oh my gosh, like, people were so excited. And I made some really good contacts there. And we sold out of everything like halfway through the second day. And it’s a three day conference.

I was literally like handing out pieces of paper with my like logo and QR code that’s printed on it. It’s actually notepads I give away. And I was just ripping pages off of those and giving them to people.

So it was really excited, exciting to see how much we’re a part of this movement that people want to teach their kids, you know, self sufficiency and healthy eating and clean eating. And it’s just a really beautiful thing. So I was super excited for that.

Coming Home Sick and Traveling Again

But we came home. And when we landed, like I got home and my husband and kids that had stayed home for that trip were kind of like, Oh, you know, like, we’ve been out doing fence lines all weekend. And we have some allergies going on.

And like, I woke up the next morning and my chest was like burning. And I had a little bit of stuffiness in my face. And I was like, Okay, I got some allergies to you guys stirred everything up. Thanks. And we left like 36 hours later, to go to a conference in Seattle that we were driving to. And I was working on the way over there.

And I just got more and more tired, like my body started to hurt. And my husband kept stopping and being like, you need to get out and walk around. And it’s just from being, you know, trapped in the car.

And we got over there. And I woke up the morning before the conference, we wanted a day over there just to hang out. So we woke up the Monday before the car or the Friday before the conference. And like, it felt like it was all in my chest. And I was just like, Whoa, like, I feel a little cruddy.

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Pneumonia Hits

It’s probably just, you know, like the allergies sitting in down in my chest. So whatever, like I’m good.

I woke up the morning of the conference with just a raging fever. Like, I don’t think I’ve ever been in so much pain. Like I felt terrible. So like five in the morning, my husband went down and got me like cold medicine and pain medicine and had me get in the shower and I took all the meds. I got out of the shower and I was like, like my fever was gone and I was feeling really good. And I was like, Oh, okay, guess we’re good.

Like, let’s go ahead and go. That was just some like random fluke and went to the conference. I was a little stuffy, like taking cold medicine all day and stuff.

We spoke, we had a good time, woke up the next day and knew it was bad. Like I was so sick. Like the fever was back. It was sitting in my lungs. I could, when I would breathe, I could hear it gurgling, like boiling water. Like it was, it was horrible.

And we started to drive all the way home. So we did that and we got home. I went to the doctor the next day and he’s like, yeah, this is absolutely pneumonia. And like, let’s, you know, get you on the steroids and the breathing treatments and antibiotics and all those things. Cause I had blood clots in my lungs when I was pregnant with my five-year-old and that, so when I get anything like respiratory like that, we’d like just take it a little bit more seriously. So we went full bore on that.

And two days into that, the coughing got so bad that I like either threw my back out or like pulled a rib or something. And I mean, I was in so much pain. I couldn’t catch a breath. My heart rate was through the roof. My oxygen was down.

It was pretty scary.

Emergency Room & Scary Moment

And so my husband ran me to the hospital and it, we were afraid of like, it was a blood clot or something. Cause it does hurt really bad and you get really high heart rate with it. And you know, especially with my O2 going down and, uh, I got to the hospital, they ran all the tests, got me on some oxygen, everything, they were, they, it wasn’t mellowing out. And then they gave me some pain meds. And then it almost like immediately mellowed out. And it was like, okay, so that’s what it was.

It was like a muscle thing and not a lung thing. So that was a positive, but I was still, it was kind of scary. And I was in a lot of pain and we had to leave less than two days later to go to a conference in Michigan where we were going to be the keynotes and speak like six times.

Tornado Cancels the Conference

So that was a lot. We went to the conference and before it could even start a tornado hit and shut down the whole conference. And I was just devastated because, I mean, we made some money for speaking. So, you know, we weren’t out for the travel, but I wasn’t going to get a chance to talk to anybody, sell my books, give my speeches, like, I mean, talk about like absolute devastation. And, you know, my husband, he had a really good outlook on it. He was like, you know, God said you needed to slow down.

So he gave you pneumonia. And when you didn’t listen, he gave you a tornado.

You know, so I just took the day and I slept and he brought me soup. And I mean, I wasn’t still sick at that time, but I was not better either. And he just kind of like, let me have a day. And that was really nice.

So then, we got home and I ended up getting a contract to supply a Baptist private school that pretty much was like as much as I would have made at the conference. So, I mean, I just feel like that was all supposed to happen the way it was supposed to happen. But I’m continuing to feel sad on that one because it wasn’t just about the money. It was about connecting with people and they were so excited to have us there to learn about homesteading, to learn about including their kids. I mean, just kind of everything that can go along with that. And then it was just kind of gone and I wanted to reach them.

I wanted to have those connections to uplift people, to enable people, not enable, enable is the wrong word, motivate. I don’t know. But, so I’m feeling it and it was a bummer and, but you know, we’re continuing on.

Upcoming Speaking & Summer Plans

We are speaking at a few more conferences this summer where we’re going to be talking about some of the same things. We’re going to be in Arizona and then in Arkansas, for speaking. And so other than that, I’m going to take the rest of my summer off, from travel.

I have, well, I have one like event that’s going to be like a really quick, like my husband and I are just going to be gone for the weekend. Other than that, I’m going to spend time with my kids. We do a lot of homeschooling this summer, a lot of gardening, huckleberry picking.

I’ve recorded all of my podcasts, through August. So this is kind of might be like the last time you get to like hear from me and I’ll give you an update on my summer. I mean, at least you’ll hear from me, but you know, getting like those recent updates.

So, just make sure you’re following us on Instagram and, or Facebook. And I’m spending a little time on Tik TOK now. So if you want to kind of see all the craziness that we’re up to, that’s where I’ll be putting that.

Listener Question Segment Setup

Now, I like to do a little section where I answer people’s questions that you send in. And I’ve kind of had a lot of, you know, we’re kind of going, like, I don’t want to say we’re going into a recession because I’ve seen a lot of positives with money, but I’ve seen some negatives and some uncertainties and people just don’t know where we stand. And so I had a lady reach out to me and asked me to do just an entire podcast episode on how to start a homestead when you’re on a budget.

And then I’ve been like mulling on it, thinking about it, you know, wanting to make sure that I really can give you guys some solid information. And I got a, I got a, sorry. I had some people come to me at the homestead conference this weekend and they had really specific questions that, you know, like I’ve been listening to your podcast and, you know, I like one lady, she’s like, I want to start raising sheep. I want to do the drug to consumer like you guys do with pigs, but my husband’s really concerned about how we’re going to afford hay and get to that point that we can sell the meat and not have it be costing us. So I was like, I think this is just a really good place to have that conversation. I had a few other people stop and ask kind of similar questions.

Like, you know, how do you deal with not having a regular income when you’re farming? You know, like you sell a whole bunch of pigs or a whole bunch of meat and then you sell nothing. And yeah, that’s a concern. And, so I kind of, I had a lot of those talks this weekend and it gave me, a lot of fuel to be able to have this conversation with you guys.

Main Topic: Homesteading on a Budget

So today’s topic is homesteading on a budget, building self-sufficiency when money is tight. So I’m just going to start right off the bat. There’s kind of this split feeling about homesteading and, you know, once upon a time it was if you were poor, then you had to do all these things to grow your own food. And that’s why convenience was sold to so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers after the depression.

We see now that that was not the best route to go. So, we’re kind of in this place now where homesteading is seen as only something that rich white women do. And I’m going to put it out there right now. I guess I’m a white woman, but I’m not rich. Not, you know, that’s the, and, you know, we are more comfortable now because of the businesses we have built. But when we started this, that was absolutely not the case. We did not have a trust fund. We were able to buy almost perfect land, but we didn’t come into it that way.

And we are not Pinterest perfect, like holy moly, not at all.

Our Actual Financial Starting Point

When we bought this place, so some of you know, my husband’s a disabled vet. And so we do have a base income from the VA, but then people are like, well, he’s home. So he’s able to do all that work because of his disability. He is not able to do all the work. That doesn’t mean he never helps that. There’s kind of a whole nother conversation there, but it’s especially in the early years when he was struggling with the depression from his liver diagnosis and stuff like, yeah, we had his income, but we didn’t have him. It was a lot of me and the kids doing things. And then, yeah, he like helped, but it was kind of, it worked out to about the same amount of hours as if he was gone within a full-time job and then was coming home and helping in the evenings and weekends.

So this is absolutely possible to do with, you know, just mom and kids doing it and dad’s income. If you’re able to do it, you know, find ways to do it where dad can come home to or vice versa, then awesome, do it. But it’s not going to look like that right at the beginning.

If you don’t have some sort of plan like, you know, I know a lot of people that will sell a property in a higher property cost state and then move to a lower property cost state. And then they only, you know, their home is paid for and they have a little money in the bank to, for their living expenses until they decide what they want to do next, whether that’s make their homestead pay or, you know, go to work remotely or, you know, get a little job in town or whatever it is they decide to do. But not everybody starts that way.

How We Actually Got the Property

And honestly, when we moved here, we did it out of necessity because we had to, you know, basically save my husband’s life. So we had, when he, when his first wife passed away or his late wife passed away, he moved back to California to be near his mom, which is where we met. And he had bought this tiny little house in the tiny little farm town that he had grown up in.

And when I met him, that’s the home he lived in. After we were together for about a year, we decided that we didn’t want to live in that area anymore. And we moved to Oregon.

And when we moved, his VA loan was able to cover the house that we bought, but we actually lost money on the house in California. And then we bought the house in Oregon. We added a few things to it. We lived there for a few years. And then when we decided to move, the market had gone up in that area. At the time, Bend was the fastest growing small town, like in the world or something like that.

And we lived in near Bend. So we were like in the bedroom community for Bend. And we were able to sell our house and be able to put quite a bit down on the property we were buying in Idaho.

But we did not pay for our property. Like we put enough down that we were able to take out our full VA loan to cover like this property. So like not only did we not have any money in the bank coming here, we were paying the max loan amount that we possibly could.

So, and I had no job. We only had my husband’s income, which definitely covered all of our base expenses. We wouldn’t have been able to move had it not.

But what it didn’t do was cover expanding the farm, paying for the high end foods that my husband needed while we built the farm. And so, you know, I kind of joked like, okay, we have our dream homestead, but we can’t afford to eat, so we better get at it. And I mean, that was really like we moved with some food.

We moved with some canned foods. We had full freezers when we moved. We went hunting. We officially like got all settled in like the end of August versus September. And a lot of our neighbors brought us fruits and vegetables that they had grown because they were like, we want to welcome you to the neighborhood and know that you aren’t going to be able to have a garden in yet. So we wanted to share with you.

So we thought that was really sweet. And that absolutely helped us through that first winter. From there, I mean, I had a baby and COVID hit and I did start working in real estate, but that was, I mean, it took me a year before I got my first real estate sale.

So I was also driving to town several times a week to either work in the office or show houses. And all it was doing was costing us money. There was no income with that.

So we really had to make the farm pay and pay fast.

First Lever: Cutting the Food Budget

One of the things we did is our food. I mean, we cut our food budget back so far. A lot of it was from growing food. Some of it was hunting. Some of it was, you know, doing things different costs. I do have an ebook called Homemade Cost Cutting. I will link that in the show notes. I’m making a note for that because that was a huge piece of where we saved money.

Like we took our food budget from $2,500 to $3,500 a year to $1,500. Like we saved like $2,500 a year switching to this. I mean, like our monthly food budget went from like $1,200 to $3,000. Like it was insane. I mean, and little things like that seem like they aren’t much, you’re like, oh, big deal. I’m going to save $20 a month.

But when I can save $20 a month by making my own laundry detergent, because yes, by the way, we were buying, you know, $10 to $15 laundry detergents every single week when we went grocery shopping. And so, I mean, that was, you know, laundry supplies added up to maybe $100 a month. That’s $1,200 a year on laundry supplies.

When I started making our own stuff, I spend about $30 a month or $30 a year. Like I buy all the stuff and it lasts me a good year. And at this point, you know, I just kind of, when we run out, we buy more, but it’s only a few dollars here and there when we run out of something.

And that makes such a huge difference that that, you know, extra $100 a month now that I have that I used to spend on laundry supplies now is open for me to use on something else.

Cooking Whole Foods to Save Money

And then we’re, you know, cost-cutting in other ways, like not buying lunch meat, buying roasts that I catch on sale for $1.50, $2 a pound. And we take it home and we roast it and slice it. And we get 10 pounds of roast beef sliced for sandwiches and wraps and french dip sandwiches. And I mean, whatever it is that we want it for, for, you know, essentially $2 a pound plus whatever herbs I use in the house. Instead of it’s like $10 a pound from the deli for the good stuff, which good stuff, it’s still full of salts and everything.

And my, if you buy it over, like in the cold cut section, you’re still paying six or $7 a pound for something like that. And it’s not even the highest quality foods. So we were able to eat the higher quality foods for less money.

And I had the money to buy like, yeah, a lot of people go, okay, you got this roast for $2 a pound, but you still paid 30 bucks for it because of the size of it. Yeah, I absolutely did. But because I had a hundred dollars leftover that I was spending on laundry meat, I was able to do that.

And now I have my lunch meat for the entire month, maybe two months, especially if I freeze it. And now I can take that same process and do it with something else, which is, you know, maybe a 15 pound sack of potatoes for $5. For $5, I can get what, one small bag of pre-made French fries over in the frozen section, or I can go home.

I have a slicer thingy that yeah, I paid 20 bucks for, but again, I was able to afford that. The first time we did something like this, we hand cut all the potatoes. The second time, you know, for one, we were like, yeah, we’re never doing that again, but we did do it, you know? And the second time it was okay, with the amount of money we saved, we can now afford the potato slicer thing to make fries.

So we made fries out of like 15 pounds of potatoes, froze them all. And then the kids had fries, like whether we were doing it with dinner or lunch, or the kids just wanted a snack, they could pull out a bag of fries, put it in like the air fryer, the oven, or toaster oven, or whatever, put different seasonings on it, and it’s a meal.

I mean, right there, like, you know, because we do things sometimes, like I’ll make chili, and then after we eat, I don’t freeze it as one big pot, I freeze it in like individual little containers.

So then for lunch, the kids can, you know, bake some fries, heat up a thing of chili, and have chili fries for lunch. And I mean, it maybe cost us a dollar, max. So I mean, those are the types of things that we did right off the bat to be able to just afford some of the other things we needed or wanted to do.

Using Savings to Invest in the Homestead

In a lot of cases, that was investing in the animals that were going to feed us in the future, or, you know, the gardening or whatever it was. And we just really, really skimped on what we ate. And that doesn’t mean that anybody was going without, it doesn’t mean we were couponing, it doesn’t mean that we were buying cheap food, we were buying whole foods and cooking it.

Because everybody complains about how expensive real food is. And the problem is, it’s not too expensive. It’s too much work. And that’s where like the line is drawn.

So throw that out, do it. I don’t spend all my my whole life in the kitchen. We spend maybe a day a couple times a month. And we get a bunch done. And then I have routines to make the stuff during the week work.

And I don’t spend any more time in the kitchen than anyone else does. It’s just it looks different. Like I might spend three hours one evening in the kitchen to only have to spend 20 minutes the rest of the week and have nutritious whole meals.

“Start Where You Are” Homesteading

So with this whole, like, how do you start homesteading? Just start where you are, because you don’t have to have 40 acres. You can use you know, your balcony, a backyard, a windowsill, your third of an acre. You can rent land, you can, you know, find a friend who wants to go in halves on a hog that they have a little bit more property.

But you are going to grow some something that they don’t have room for or something like that. I mean, it just it works out differently. Like that’s there’s all sorts of options.

You know, because homesteading is really a state of mind. It’s about growing food, making food from scratch, learning the skills. It’s not all just about raising large livestock.

And I know sometimes that can be the dream. But you know, similar to how you save up to like, you know, maybe your dream people who have like different hobbies. My hobbies have always been like, you know, hunting and farming.

And, you know, I also joke that some people have hobbies and some people have businesses. So this is my hobby. This is my business. This is what I want to be doing. But, you know, say somebody likes to ski, and they’re always having to rent boats. So they’re saving up money to buy a boat.

If you want, I mean, of course, you’re going to be saving money for a down payment on your homestead or whatever it is you’re going to do. But learn skills. Consider that like a bank, like you are learning the skills and saving them in your bank so that one day when you have a homestead or while you’re working towards it, you’re getting to do all the things and you’re learning them.

So that’s buying a book and reading about it or trying it at a friend’s house or learning, you know, how to butcher meat like by buying, you know, you can go to the butcher shop or even a lot of grocery stores and buy primals, which is where you get like an entire leg from a pig or a cow or something. I mean, you have to pay for it, but you’re getting it in that whole form and you can take it home and learn to cut meat that way. So you don’t have to have your own sheep or cow or pig or whatever, even chickens.

I mean, just practice, buy a whole chicken and cut it down. It’s cheaper that way anyways.

So it’s all just, you know, like these pieces you have to put together and be intentional about that. Like I’m intentionally buying this whole chicken rather than the breast so that not only am I cooking dinner for my family tonight, I’m learning a new skill and I can use the carcass to make broth. Check. You just kind of covered all the pieces right there in this skills bank.

You Have to Hustle

Now, there’s a lot of hustle that goes on in coming up with the money. And, you know, everyone thinks that you just like you buy your 40 acres and you go down and you buy $1,000 worth of fencing and you build your fence and you buy your $1,500 cow and the $3,000 milking system and you have all this money and no, no, no. Like nobody has that.

I don’t know if I guess a few people do, but you got to hustle. If you really want it, you have to work for it. And I mean, it’s just true for that on anything, but like, stop waiting for it to be handed to you or stop feeling sorry for yourself because you don’t have it.

And if that pisses you off, maybe you need to reevaluate because I work hard for everything I have and I have great things. And then, and things that mean something to me, I’m not talking like expensive things, like things that mean something to us or our farm or our businesses, or that our kids have the experiences they want to have. And that’s because we worked for them.

You know, people come to me, I’ve had people come to me and be like, Oh, you’re so lucky. Or, you know, you were privileged to get this. No, no, I was not. I worked for everything. Like even, you know, sometimes I’ll tell people that you like my dad had money. He did.

Yeah. But he didn’t agree with me going to school. And I was a single mom. And so he thought, or, you know, going like to college, and I was a single mom. So he also thought like, well, if you’re going to be a mom, you’re figuring this out on your own. So I did that by myself.

The only time he gave me money is if he was giving me gas money to drive over the mountain and like see him for the weekend. Or work for him or something like that. So this was not just a handout situation.

Like I worked my ass off for it. And like neither of my parents have ever, you know, had gone to college. This wasn’t something that was expected, or even supported in a lot of ways.

This was me doing it like straight doing it like I lived hours away from my family. If I wanted a babysitter, I paid for it or I traded for it. I mean, this is like I was hustling doing this stuff long before I was ever a homesteader.

Creative Side Income Examples

You know, as an ag major, I had a lot of people I worked with on the school farm, they lived in fifth wheels, they didn’t have places to wash their large bedding unless they went to like a laundromat and spent, you know, 50 bucks. And I worked with these people every day and I knew them and trusted them and they knew my kids. So yeah, if I wanted a sitter to go out to dinner with some friends or get a drink on a Friday night or go on a date or something like that.

Yeah, I was a single mom at the time. I would trade them, I would make them dinner and then they could use my washer and dryer and I’d put the kids to bed and then they would hang out and they would hang out with the kids and I would be able to go do whatever it is I wanted to do. So I mean, this is just, you have to, like I said, you just have to work for it.

And I hope I didn’t offend you, but sometimes it just takes a lot of work. You know, you can do odd jobs, you can save that money, you can, you know, flip things, flip furniture, clean people’s houses, do their taxes. I mean, if you know how to do that.

And I mean, a lot of people are coming out of the corporate world and they’re like, yeah, I can do taxes or I can, you know, do bookkeeping, like do bookkeeping on the side. Like you don’t want to go do a full time job because you’re wanting to be home on your homestead. But you could do bookkeeping as a side job, like in the evenings when you’re not outside working, and that right there is going to be the money you need and you’re not taking away from your homestead or your homeschool or whatever it is that’s going on.

Make Money From What You’re Already Doing

You can create value from the things you’re already doing. So, you know, a lot of people talk about selling plant starts and it seems like a little bit of a pipe dream. There’s been years that I’ve started 2,500 plants and I just sell them for a few bucks a piece.

I’m not undercutting anybody because when you break it down, like if you go to the garden store and you buy the little six pack, you pay like, you know, $4.99, $6.99 for it, whatever. And I’m selling my little plants, like one little pot at a time for like two or three dollars. And it probably actually works out to more, but people come and they like that, like, you know, $2 and I do all of these different heirloom varieties.

And so they can, they don’t have to be like, I’m getting a six pack of beefsteak tomatoes. They can be like, I’m getting mortgage lifters and San Marzano’s and like, they can build their pack. And it’s worked out really great for us.

And then there’s years where I didn’t do that intentionally. I just started what we needed or we had some things that we lost. This year is kind of one of those years.

And I have enough to plant my garden, but I’ll have some leftovers. And we have a little farm store here. So whatever I have left over, we’ll go on a table in front of the farm store.

I’ll snap a picture, put it online. Maybe I’ll sell them. Maybe I won’t.

I always keep them watered. I pot them, you know, if I can. And sometimes I’ll get some extra like cherry tomatoes or something like that growing in front of my farm store, which is fun for my kids, fun for people who bring their kids.

How Plant Starts Turned Into a Pig Herd

Now, I actually, I, we started our entire like purebred pork herd from plant starts. I had a pack of seeds. I started growing plant starts.

I sold those, bought more seeds, like more varieties, started those, sold them, used that money. I was going to use it to buy a couple of pigs just to feed out for ourselves. I ended up catching a good deal where I sourced a bunch of pigs for the community.

I ended up making enough off of that to buy about 10 pigs for ourselves, all the feed to feed them out. And I got them, I sold them all as whole and half hogs, except for the two we were putting in our freezer, which was already the plan. And that gave me enough money to start our good herd, to get the supplies we needed.

Pigs happen fast. They call them mortgage lifters for a reason. So I was able to very quickly jumpstart a very profitable, lucrative part of our homestead.

And so you just have to figure out what that is in your community and what you’re, what niche you’re filling. You know, some people even just baking bread, I know it sounds simple, but I’m not talking like fancy sourdough either. I mean, you can do that if you want to.

Just bake loaf bread and sell it. Especially if you live in a place where you have high traffic, I mean, good quality loaf bread that you’re using, quality ingredients, possibly local flour or whatever it is you’re doing, that you can market that differently. Especially if you can be like, buy your bread, milk and eggs, you know, here.

It makes a difference. And it costs me a quarter a loaf. That’s it.

So as long as you’re selling it for more than a quarter, you’re making a profit. Sorry.

Have a Purpose for the Money

But it has to be with a purpose. Because you’re going to be working harder than you’ve ever worked, but you want it to count. So when you’re making like, you know, money off plants, don’t be like, I’m just making money to make money and I’ll figure out what I’m going to do with it. Because that’s when you end up spending on things you shouldn’t spend on or it just it’s it doesn’t work out right.

So when you’re doing it with this purpose, you do it where if you make $500 off plant starts, that money needs to go towards $500 in lumber to do your raised beds next year. You know, and you don’t have to do it exactly like that, but have a plan. Or, you know, some people use I don’t remember what the method is called, but you find something that you’re selling regularly, like people buy your bread year round.

So year round, you need to make enough money from your bread to pay your gas bill, like because you have a gas stove. And that’s one bill like checked off your list that’s being paid by something that you’re doing. And then there’s the snowball method of debt, you know, pick your smallest debt, pay that one off, then use the money from that to start paying your next debt.

And next thing you know, like your credits higher, you’re putting more money in the bank, you’re able to afford your next level stuff. So, you know, just like I said, just be really intentional about what you’re spending your money on. Otherwise, you’re just making money to make money.

And sometimes you spend that positively, sometimes you don’t. But when you go, oh, I’ve been selling plant starts, you know, all year. And so I have, you know, $500 in the jar.

So sure, like we can go out to dinner tonight, like we can afford that. Like, no, no, no, that’s not what that’s for. Unless you say I’m going to sell plant starts to be able to afford to have date nights with my husband.

Kitchen Is Your Most Powerful Tool

You know, I talked a little bit about how we saved money in the kitchen. So I kind of want to circle back to that one, because there’s some really powerful things here. Like your kitchen is your most powerful tool for saving money, period. Like just done.

Because when you’re cooking from scratch, you’re buying in bulk, you’re not relying on that convenience that I talked about. So another one that I, you know, kind of didn’t bring up is the bulk buying.

Another one, everyone, you know, oh, if I want to buy in bulk, I need $1,000 right now to go buy everything in bulk. Who has $1,000 to go buy everything in bulk for the year to just use it and then buy it again next year? Like that just doesn’t. So what we do is that money that we’re saving from making our own potato strips or whatever, potato strips, like french fries.

You can take that money and say, okay, you know, like I saved, you know, $50 doing this. So I’m going to go buy $50 worth of bulk flour. And then the next month, like now you have your flour for the year, the next month you are paying, you know, like with your potatoes or your lunch meat or wherever it is that you saved money, you take that money and you go buy your sugar or honey or whatever for the year.

And then your coffee, and then you just keep going through that. So every month, like it takes like a good year to get a routine, but every month you’re doing that. And then suddenly you’re not having to save money to buy those things.

You have a certain amount of money set aside each month to do bulk buying. And you’re not having to find that money. It’s just already there because you’ve been saving that money all along because buying bulk flour, like I said, it’s a quarter dollar for a loaf of bread.

If I go to the store right now, even the cheap, cheap stuff that I really don’t even want to feed my kids, but sometimes do is $1.50 a loaf now. Like it’s, you can’t even get like dollar bread anymore. So, and if I want to get them something halfway decent, we’re looking at $2.53, maybe $4 a loaf.

And if I’m wanting sourdough or any type of specialty bread or anything, that’s like, you know, the whole grain with the nuts and that type of stuff, we’re looking at close to $10 a loaf. And that’s in Idaho where I feel like the cost of living is pretty low. So think of that quarter a loaf. Think what you could be buying with that.

Coffee & Creamer Savings

Another one that, you know, people joke about, you know, how much money you would save if you didn’t buy coffee. And a lot of people go, well, I don’t buy coffee. We live 40 minutes from town. We don’t buy a lot of coffee. I mean, we buy coffee grounds.

We don’t buy made coffee. Maybe, maybe one time a week when we take the kids to co-op, if we can afford it, we will get ourselves a coffee. And that’s kind of just our little treat to ourselves because I never teach the first class in the morning.

So we’ll drop the kids off. And that’s if we have errands to run or whatever, we’ll do that at the same time. My husband and I get our little treat.

Other than that, though, we make our own coffee creamer. We do all of that at home. So I’m buying coffee, but I’m not buying like the expensive creamers and stuff, which I mean, a small bottle of the creamer that we kind of like from the grocery store, which then I realized literally didn’t even have an actual ingredient in it.

It was just chemicals. I mean, it was like $5 for when we’re drinking at home and my husband and I are both having coffee and maybe the teenagers having a cup or we have company over, maybe it lasts a week, maybe, probably not, probably just a few days. So, I mean, even just that $20 or that $5 over the month is 20 bucks.

When I make my own creamer, it’s like 13 cents. So yeah, you can’t even like compare.

Health Savings From Cooking

So yeah, I mean, just, just keep on with those things. You can always look for something. Like I said, I have my homemade cost cutting book. Also when you’re doing a lot of, you know, making your own bone broth and fermenting breads and those types of things, it’s really helping your gut health.

So you’re not having to buy as many, you know, supplements or probiotics or the other things you need, like pain medications, because you have body aches, because your gut floor is all messed up. Like it all just kind of comes together.

Bartering to Cover Big Costs

Another one we do that I kind of mentioned before is bartering. So use your skills and the goods that you have to get what you need without spending actual cash. Like, you know how I talked about like the pig and the eggs, like trade what you have. Trade eggs for raw milk.

You know, a lot of people do already have chickens, but some of them don’t. Or during months when their chickens are molting and yours aren’t, you might be able to trade with their, do you have a trade like my husband does mechanic works for the mechanic work for the neighbors and trade for hay. It handles our hay bill every year.

And then I can have, you know, the two dairy cows I want and a small herd of beef cows. Where we’re getting milk, we’re getting beef every year, we’re selling our beef. And I’m not having to pay to feed them. And that’s a huge, huge piece of being able to have a herd the size that we do.

We’ve even traded piglets to neighbors for one ton things of grain. So my pigs go through about a ton. Well, at least my like mama pigs and stuff, they go through about a ton of grain a month with that. I can trade one piglet per ton of grain. So if I have that lined up, that’s 12 piglets.

That’s only one litter. When we have 30 or more litters a year, one litter would cover all of our feed for those moms. I mean, that’s right there that that makes it where we can grow our herd, and we can do the things that we need to do.

You can also trade your labor for knowledge. So you want to learn how to do something you want to learn how to milk a cow, you want to learn how to cut hay, whatever it is offered to go do that for somebody. Like if I if will you teach me how to bale hay and then I will buck it all out of your field for you like you’ll be tired but you’ll have a new skill.

And you know, plus so many homesteaders they’re just willing to teach like they it’s not.

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Homesteaders Want to Teach

It’s not a thing, you know, like, they’re not trying to gatekeep stuff they want to teach you. I mean, here I am teaching you what I charge for. I charge for my curriculum where I put it into lessons and paid for the book to be printed up and you have something to show your state, you know, I mean, that’s what I pay for. Or that’s what I charge for. Not the knowledge, the convenience of having the knowledge all in one place.

That’s kind of like a difference there.

Finding Things Cheap (Craigslist, Marketplace, Free Fence)

So find things for your cheap. You know, Craigslist, Facebook marketplace. So they are so great. The difference is that what’s really you can find things for you sometimes on low prices. Another one we found is somebody was like, if you take our fencing down, you can have it for free.

Okay, I have teenage boys. We went over there and took down like a mile of fence, rolled it all up, put it on the trailer, and we had enough to create a whole new pasture, like done, like so wonderful. Sometimes things are broke.

So, you know, if you need to, you know, if you need a lawnmower or something like that, you go get the broke thing and you come home and you fix it, but you have to learn something new. Thrift stores, you know, sometimes that can just be a fun hobby, but then you’re finding like canning jars and cast iron and sewing stuff and clothes for farm work. And I mean, not even that, like we live in a really small town where there’s not a lot of options for fancy shopping.

And my kids have gotten clothes for like fancy events that they’re only going to use one time at local thrift stores, you know, nice button downs and high heel shoes and things like that. But they’ve also, like, my daughter got a pair of really nice hiking boots at a consignment store recently for 15 bucks. They were probably maybe worn once.

You could see dust like in the cracks. And I think they were Keen’s, which usually go for 100, 150 bucks, and she got them for 15. Like, seriously, thrifting is not that big of a deal.

Like, just I mean, it’s a big of a deal in the good way. It’s not a big deal in a bad way. So do it just.

And, you know, we do it a lot of times, like because we live so far from town, we’ll take our little box trailer into town, and we drop it at our friends actually own the consignment shop, but we will drop it at our friend’s consignment shop and go thrifting. And if we come across something that’s too big to fit in the car, one of us will just hang out there and, you know, guard it or whatever. And my husband or I will shoot back to the consignment shop and hook up and go back and get whatever the big thing is that we wanted.

And the kids love it. And it’s a day out of the house, we maybe get an ice cream or, you know, something cold to drink over a drive afterwards or something.

Build Community & Work Days

You really have to build community, because somebody else is somebody’s always new, somebody’s always moving forward. And they can help you, they can, you know, help you get to the next step. But you can’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle or someone else’s top, like you have to get there, they got there, you can get there.

But if you’re building relationships, you’re going to get skills and encouragement. You can invite people over for work days. I know that sounds really weird. Like, but I would absolutely like we’ve had the best days going to barbecues at someone else’s houses, or we do it here.

We say, hey, we have a project, we need extra hands. We will, you know, cook dinner for everybody. You know, we’ll just sit on the smoker.

So it cooks all day. And I’ll have like, maybe like cowboy beans in the crockpot or something. Bake cookies the night before, and everybody comes over.

They work all day, the kids play, we have a barbecue afterwards, good times, nobody’s expecting money. They just are doing it for the experience, the community, the helping out some friends, because we would do the same thing for them. So don’t like, you know, discredit like the community that you can possibly have with people.

You’re Richer Than You Think

You also have to realize that you’re richer than you think. Because the self-sufficiency, remember how I talked about putting that into the bank? That is your wealth. Your skills are your wealth.

The food security that you’re creating for yourself, whether that’s today or in the future, that is your wealth. You may not have like cash money in your hand, but you have grit and creativity and purpose. Like purpose, oh my gosh.

Like as a society, we don’t have purpose. Our children don’t have purpose. That’s why they’re depressed.

That’s why they’re anxious. That’s why they don’t know what they want to do with their lives, because they don’t have purpose. Like, oh my gosh, like the more purpose you can find, the better.

So don’t wait until it’s like the perfect time or you have enough money. Just start today. Like have a plan.

Think about where you want to be, say in one year, five years, 10 years, and make a plan to make that happen. You know, start with your skills. Start small.

Start making some money. Do whatever it is that you need to do.

You know, that broken lawnmower that you learned how to fix, guess what? You can go buy 10 more or source 10 more, fix them and sell them. Like, I mean, something that was a necessity for you is now money in your pocket. And don’t walk away from those. Those are, I mean, even times when money is, you know, we have worked really hard to get where we’re at, but it’s not always perfect.

And we are still doing those things. We are still hustling during the hard times. Or when we see opportunities, whether we can afford it or not, we take them.

Example: Rebuilding Antique Milkers

We needed a new milker. We started looking around for these antique milkers that we use. It’s a special kind that we use that works really good for us.

Rebuilt, they can be up to $800 a piece. But my husband can rebuild them for about, the cost of the stuff is anywhere between $30 and a hundred. And then he, you know, his labor.

But every once in a while, we’ll start looking for one and we’ll find them online where somebody’s like, I bought this house and there’s these old milk things in the back. Like, come get them for a hundred bucks. And we’ll go there and there’s like six or eight of them piled up.

And we’re like, we will take them all. And then my husband can rebuild them. And we can, we don’t sell them for $800 because we don’t think it’s fair, but we definitely are making a profit on them.

And it’s something that we need anyways. So we always have some on the shelf. If we have something go, like one of our milkers goes down because they are antique.

So we have issues. We have a fresh one that we can turn around and start milking our cows the next day with while my husband fixes the broken one. So don’t pass up those opportunities.

Start small, start big, whichever works for you. Just don’t let yourself get burnout. If this isn’t already your hobby, or if this isn’t something that you are hardcore passionate about, don’t start big, start small.

And just see like what you can make of it.

Resources & Coaching

Now, remember, I’m here to help. We have our curriculum. I have blogs. I have a bazillion podcasts. I think this is going to be my 150th podcast.

There’s other information out there, which can also be free. I have my homemade cost cutting book, $7. We have our homeschool curriculum that the high school level adults buy all the time, or you can learn as a family and have your kids’ science checked off too.

There’s also, I offer coaching. It’s a flat rate. You let me know what you’re thinking about.

I do research. We do a call. We brainstorm.

I put together a business plan and an asana board for you. And we meet back up in a month and talk about what’s not working. So yes, that is an investment.

But if you’re in a place right now where money is good, but you want a homestead and are afraid that that’s going to make money bad, this is a great place to invest in the coaching that I have to offer. Because I have lived or worked in agriculture literally every day of my life. Not my life right now.

When I was born, my parents owned a ranch. I have lived on a cattle ranch where my dad was a hustler. I majored in agriculture.

I hunted. My mom was a taxidermist. My dad was a hunting guide.

I worked in food. I’ve been a food safety consultant, a food safety specialist. I have done small farm consulting for 15 years.

We have our own small farm. This is what I do. And it’s what I love to do.

And you’re going to get so many wonderful ideas. So reach out to us. I will link my coaching as well in the show notes.

But if you have questions, if it’s a right fit for you, or you just have a quick question, I’m always, always, always there to help you out.

Closing

So with that, I hope you guys keep growing, and can’t wait to talk to you again. Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, please head over to your favorite podcast player and leave a comment and review.

This helps me to know what you’re enjoying and helps others find an episode that can help them. Thank you for joining me today at the Homestead Education. And I hope that I have given you something to think about this week.

To help others find me please comment and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. You can also follow me on Facebook at the Homestead Education and Instagram at homestead underscore education. Do you have questions that you would like answered or just want to say hi, please email me at hello at the homestead education.com. Until next time, keep growing.