Homesteading On A Budget

This blog has been up and running for several years now and one of the topics that I don’t usually cover is finances. There’s a lot of reason for that, but one of the biggest is that I don’t feel overly qualified to offer a lot of financial advise. I can’t tell you who you should invest your money with or the best way to raise your credit score. But I do feel qualified to tell you how we do things here on our homestead. So here is how we have tackled homesteading on a budget.

Homesteading On A Budget

First and foremost, you should absolutely have a budget. Not just for your regular finances, but also for any projects or animals you have. One of the things I have seen over and over, and fell victim to ourselves, is not having a solid budget. Next, you should always plan for failure. While it may seem counter productive, it’s always better to be ready for failure than caught with your pants down. Finally, you should never, ever rely on new income sources to cover something.

This isn’t an end all be all list of homesteading on a budget. But it is a place to start.

Start With A Budget

It is shocking to me that even now, in 2024, people still don’t have or know how to budget. This is so weird to me because we’ve always had a budget. It’s a product of growing up poor and staying poor for a long time. Hell, having a budget is what eased us out of poverty and into solidly middle income.

When it comes to homesteading, you should have your regular budget for paying bills and getting food, gas, clothing, etc. But you should also be budgeting what projects, animals or other “add ons” you will be adding to your homestead.

A prime example of this was the greenhouse. We knew that we wanted a greenhouse and that we did not want a kit greenhouse. So we had to figure out how to build it, draw it up, purchase materials and begin. The problem with any project like this is that you are going to forget something. So making sure to have an extra buffer built into your budget is a great way to not get stuck.

Types of Budgets

It doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of budget you use. This post from Nerd Wallet is a great place to get started if you need a little more help figuring out what kind of budget will work for you. It could be a zero budget, where every penny of income is accounted for and you zero out your bank account every month. It could be the 50/30/20 budget were 20% goes to savings, 30% goes to wants, and 50% goes to necessities. Or a pay yourself first budget that focuses on savings first.

We follow a mix of these budgets. Because I am a spender and Jared is a saver, we use that to our advantage. Basically, just enough money goes into our main account to pay bills, take care of the homestead and some “fun” money. Then the rest goes into his savings to cover bigger projects for the homestead, putting money back for big purchases like purchasing a whole cow or into our emergency fund.

The most important thing is to have a budget and that it accounts for everything. A budget that doesn’t account for chicken feed isn’t going to do you any favors if you are constantly having to dip into other funds to pay for your chicken feed.

Planning For Failure

I wrote a blog post about planning for failure here, but it’s mostly geared towards earning an income from the farm. It doesn’t really talk about planning for failure on plain ole homestead. So I wanted to touch on what planning for failure means to your budget and homestead.

Planning for failure on the homestead really revolves around having back up plans. It’s the same idea that you won’t start an emergency garden in the middle of an emergency. You should start it when you don’t HAVE to rely on it to feed you. That way you can learn and grow that muscle first.

Planning for failure looks like having 2 proven milk goats if you are trying to move away from store bought milk and cheese. Because if one of those goats goes down, you have a back up. It’s better to have to figure out what to do with too much milk, than not enough.

But when it comes to finances, it means that a $1,000 emergency fund is not enough. To be honest, regardless if you homestead or not, that is a tiny emergency fund to start with, especially with inflation. But on a homestead, it’s WAY too small. If your well pump goes out, that can be a $3,000 fix. A call and visit to the vet can easily rack up thousands of dollars.

As you are setting up your budget, make sure that you are taking into account what will happen if your garden fails and you don’t get a lot of food. Take into account a freezer failing at any point. Make sure that you have back up plans.

Never Count Chickens Before They Are Sold

Everyone is guilty of expecting one thing to happen, and then it either doesn’t or something worse happens. It’s equally true here. In fact, this saying exemplifies homesteading. Do not expect that 50 tomato plants will produce enough for your family until you have consistently maxed those plants production.

If you are working on a new income stream, like a farmers market, don’t rely 100% on that to feed your family. You should absolutely hustle like it’s the only income you’ll have, but you should plan that it won’t. Just in case.

If I had quit my job to focus on the farmers market, we would have been sunk. If I had quit my job to focus on this blog, we would have been sunk. And yes, you should go at every new venture as if your life depends on it, but in these crazy times, I’m not willing to risk my family, finances, and farm to rash decisions.

How Homesteading On A Budget Works For Us

I’ve mentioned in various points how we do it, but I will condense it down all right here for you.

First, we work full time jobs and that pays our bills, projects, and other homestead stuff. We are not at a point where the farm can sustain us. Plus, we really like our jobs.

Second, we try to only take on projects that can be self sustaining. That means that we don’t want to have to work our asses off off farm, to pay for the farm. So little to no inputs to keep that project running. For example, we don’t feed a lot of feed to our chickens. They get kitchen scraps, from home and work, and forage for bugs and grass.

Third, we use our financial habits to our advantage. Jared saves money, I don’t. So I’m not in charge of saving money. I get the bills paid, food/feed bought, and plan projects. Jared saves every penny so that when the time comes, we can build the new decks, purchase meat animals, etc.

Fourth, we account for EVERYTHING and plan for failure. This helps keep things from popping up. And while there are still surprises, it’s not as terrifying because we have back up plans to the back up plans.

Fifth, we have monthly, quarterly and yearly finance meetings were we sit down and actually go through our finances and figure out what is happening, is it working and where we want to go from here. I am a firm believer in money talks with the whole family, but specifically your spouse.

Finally, while we hold each other accountable, we also give grace. Life is hard, there is not reason to make it harder by constantly arguing with your person about money. So keeping accountability is important, but so is kindness and grace.

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