This is the fourth chapter of this current series.
Continuing with a focus on finances since they are one of those unavoidable parts of life, we shift away from being debt free in this one and explore how being more self-sufficient aids in our family attempting to accomplish our financial goals.
CHAPTER 4 - SELF-SUFFICIENCY AND FINANCIAL GOALS
To start with accomplishing things like owning land outright and paying cash for a home is such a huge accomplishment. Our refusal to go into debt meant we had to work incredibly hard and be extremely patient, but, in the end, it paid off. Now, rent, mortgage payments, and loan payments are now forever crossed off of our list of financial obligations. However, property tax (a form of “renting” what you “own” from the government each year), various food expenses, vehicle expenses, insurance payments, and a plethora of other periodical bills still remain.
As we evaluated the options that we had to continue to eliminate bills and payments, the self-sufficiency that many who enter a homesteading lifestyle seemed to be added encouragement that this was indeed the proper path for us. Of course I cannot grow my own insurance, harvest my own gasoline, or build my own vehicle, but some of the common bills that many frequently pay can be greatly reduced or even avoided.
One of my main focuses is summed up in the phrase “trying to reduce the cost of living in order to increase the quality of life.” Simply put, this means that the less money I need, the less time I will have to spend away from my family trying to earn money. The less time that I am gone “working,” the more time I’ll have to invest in my family and real life goals.
It has been said each dollar you don’t need to spend is one less dollar that you need to earn, but that isn’t even truly correct. In reality, I am taxed on every dollar that I earn. Therefore, if I save one dollar buy growing an apple, not only do I not need to earn the dollar that it would have cost to purchase the apple, but I also do not need to earn even more money just to pay taxes on that dollar. For us, tax is much like interest, since it seems like it is in our best interest to pay as little as possible. While interest can be avoided by avoiding debt, taxes can only be reduced, so reduce them we will.
One of the main requirements for life is food, and this is one of the easiest ways to reduce financial needs. The vast majority of homesteaders (if not all) seem to understand and apply this simple truth to their lives. The more self-sufficient you are, the less expenses you should have, and growing your own food is an important factor. I’ll cover more about other reasons that this is important later, but simply look at it from a financial perspective here.
At a “beginner level,” purchasing seeds and growing food will always give you a better ROI than purchasing the actual food itself, as long as you can actually grow it. Once we take things to the next level, seeds can be saved year and after, and no further investment in food seeds may ever be needed. Things like this were rather common not all that long ago. Then, with perennial plants, a one-time expense and planting efforts can potentially provide you with decades of delicious food.
To shift away from fruit and vegetables and consider meat for a minute, both raising livestock and hunting can be excellent ways to become more self-sufficient while dropping the cost of living, especially if you process your own animals rather than paying a butcher. To make matters even better, animals reproduce, so if you have at least one male and one female of a species, they can provide you with much more meat in the long run, something that processed and packaged meat at the grocery store will ever be able to do.
When you exit a city mindset and are allowed certain freedoms, things get even better. For instance, rather than paying hundreds of dollars for a lawn mower that requires gas and oil, I can simply have sheep or goats “mow the lawn.” They’ll fertilize as they go, reproduce after their own kind, and you can even eat them. A lawnmower just isn’t capable of making baby lawnmowers to mow the grass next year and they aren’t vary palatable either.
As you should be able to comprehend by my last section, simple changes that are frequently made by more self-sufficient homesteaders fit in very well with our financial goals, and were added incentive to explore this lifestyle.
Until next time…
STEEMIT LIKE YOU MEAN IT!
