When you look at your normal daily life in your apartment, house, condo, mobile home and you're hooked up to public utilities such as electricity, water and sewage and maybe natural gas, you normally don't give thought to it unless it stops working. Normally when the bill comes in the mailbox you just open and pay the amount on time. When it stops working though you tend to be very upset and it affects your lifestyle until the issue is corrected.
The reason for the above statement is to get you thinking. We take for granted that when we turn on the light switch, turn on a faucet, flush a toilet it's just going to happen and we just pay for that service.
With that being said, I want you to think a little different.
What if, you could supply yourself all of the above utilities? Removing the monthly payment to some big cat sitting in a nice air conditioned office in a $5000 dollar suit. What if you could invest some now for a future free of the corporate control on your life.
Now that your really thinking lets answer the question, Was it hard to change our life from on the grid to off the grid?
First off let me say this. It depends on how you want to live , what luxuries do you want? We have seen some who go off grid with zero electric and live a primitive lifestyle (that wasn't for us). We wanted to live as close to how we were living but minimize a bit.
Now saying that, we did not have the money to invest in a $10,000 dollar power system, $1,200 dollar water system plus our home and land. We didn't want the HUGE dept over our heads. Now there is nothing wrong with borrowing money to buy everything upfront and payback over time. We just didn't want that.
We choose to invest in land, and our home structure and build the rest with cash. That allowed for us to pay off the building and land faster. Once its paid off then we invest more in our power and water system.
We started off with a 10 acre plot of raw praire land
Then we purchased a 12 x 40 lofted barn style cabin.
This was our base setup. invested $22,000 into the land and building. The cabin is built on normal house building codes.
Now was this hard? Honustly anytime you start over from scratch you will have difficulties, BUT if you make a plan and stick to it as much as possible you will find it plesantly pleasing. Okay I didn't answer the question was it hard?
Leaving a 1800 square foot double wide with all the luxuries the corporate intities could supply us with did make us do some double takes, Air conditioning oh did we miss it!!!!
The hardest part of the change was actually working our our mindset. How we think about living. What we needed instead of wanted. Thinking on conserving instead of just being a user. That was the HARDEST part of the change.
We needed (wanted) normal living but minimized and smaller. So we had to work on our thinking first and foremost. This is were 90% of those who try to go off grid and minimize fail. They can't change their thinking so they don't change they way the live to make it possible to succede. We had some struggles with this but not many since we had been living in our semi for several years.
In the next article we will discuss our plan we had and show a little more of how we went about the change. We are trying to bring you upto date to where and how we live today.
Here is a video's from our past when we were first going off the grid. The video quality is not the best. This shows our cabin in its infant stages.
Thank you for the interest in our life and the way we live it.
