How Do/Did We Afford to Homestead with One Income?

 Hey Friends!

Today on the blog, I'm briefly chatting about how we managed to Homestead on one income all of these years, until now. Let's chat! The secret? Living intentionally.

Budgeting

When we first started Homesteading, we assessed our goals, income and expenses we would have to get started. We figured out where we needed to reduce cost and created a budget. The easiest to reduce cost was with our grocery bill by:

Gardening

Raising Meat Birds

Meal Planning

Cooking From Scratch

Stretching Every Dollar

Next, was being very careful on what we spent our money on. The best bang for our buck, if you will. Stretching a dollar can be easy with a little work ethic, a will to learn and self-discipline. We stretch a dollar by:

Buying Used

Fixing Everything Ourselves

Trade or Bartering

No Luxury Investments

These are probably the biggest and most controversial tips in my post but it's how we've managed to run our dream Homestead for the last few years on one income. Here are sacrifices we made/continue to make on our journey:

No Vacations

That's right! We don't go on vacation...anymore. To clarify, before we decided to homestead, we took all of our "big" vacations. We went to Alaska for our Honeymoon in 2009, the Bahamas & Disney in 2010, Tennessee in 2016 and Disney in 2017 & 2019. After that, we were fully focused on growing our Homestead. 2019 was our last family vacation (for now) and we're okay with that.

We do, however, go spend a day, every so often, in Biloxi or take short Homeschool road trips for a change of scenery or break. We're also avid campers. We recently sold our camper to reduce debt but are planning to build a Schoolie, completely debt-free in the future.

Sometimes, when you're passionate about the direction you're wanting to take your life and pass down to your kids, you make sacrifices. Especially when you're building a business. One of the most expensive luxuries in life are vacations. We feel our money can be put to better use by investing in our business. We won't rule out future vacations. I do have my heart set on going to Italy for our 20th anniversary, but our farm and business needs to be in the "maintaining" stage, not the "building" stage before we go anywhere else.

No New Vehicles

Y'all, we are a one, decade old vehicle household and that alone, helps tremendously financially. Especially since it's paid off. It wasn't easy in the beginning, but we make it work. We don't believe in investing in the latest and greatest trucks or cars, just to say we have it, then get into all of this debt. In all honesty, it's highway robbery what vehicles cost these days. If we would ever invest in a "new" one, we're going backwards, not forwards in terms of year made. lol For many reasons.

No Impulse Shopping

We don't go to stores and impulse buy things we don't need. Most of our purchases are either to improve our home, business, homestead or if we absolutely need something in terms of clothing or necessities. Would I love to go Thrift Shopping just because? Heck yes! Would we love to update our wardrobe? Absolutely! But, we make sacrifices for the life we want to build.

No New House

We did the nice, new fancy house thing once before and that's how we ended up in ridiculous debt. We've been in our current house for going on 9 years (with a 3-year hiatus for the fancy one. Which if we don't count that, we've been in our current house for 13 years. lol)

Have we wanted to move in the past? Yes! Have we planned to move in the past? Yes! Even out of state. But every time we talked about it, we ended up right back where we are now...happy with what we have and building a home instead of house. Making our home a place we don't need a vacation from.

For us, that is the key takeaway to true happiness. Confidence in what we want in life and being happy with what we have. Living within our means.

I hope this helps give inspiration to anyone wanting to build their dream homestead but feel it's unrealistic because of finances. It just takes self-discipline and a true passion for this lifestyle.

Check out my other money-saving blog posts:

Starting and Maintaining a Debt-Free Business

How Do I Keep Our Grocery Bill Under $150 Per Week