Full-time homesteading? No "job"?

Would love to know how they did it...my property tax is about 2800 so I don't think I could get my expenses quite that low but I would welcome any suggestions about how to lower my yearly nut.

Were you a member here before under a different name?....some of your writing sounds kinda familiar but I can't remember the name. Quest ?something or other?

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A wise person speaks when they have something to say but a fool speaks just to say something

Darntootin, this thread has intrigued me. I have been wondering what it would take to do this myself. I, too, am in upstate NY, land of high taxes. My 40th birthday is in 2 days, I am not married, have no kids or prospects at this time. I live at my "in town" house, paid for, 2.5 acres, semi secluded. I jointly own, with my sister, 80 acres about 40 miles away from my current residence, also paid for. My goal is to get some type of housing on that land, whether it's a berm home or single-wide, whatever. I have been saving to do this out of pocket. I would like to try to rent out my current home, because it's in a very popular area, I shuold be able to command a good rent. This, at minimum, would cover taxes on both places every year. So, I would be left with basic bills after that, and I may have to retain some type of "normal" job to pay these. I do not have 600,000 in the bank or investments, though.

I think with 600K you would have absolutely no trouble making a go of it for as long as you wanted. Between the Mrs and I we made a lot of money in our working years, we invested well and made a good return on property we owned which allowed us to retire in our late 40s.

We draw two of my pensions already and have hers and one more of mine to come when we turn 59 1/2 and if SS is around then we havent even counted on that at all. We live frugally, grow most of our own food, and paid cash for all the equipment we needed on the farm and for us one of the keys to live well on a lot less is to live debt free. So too me, you could do it just fine if you had that kind of grub steak.

But your dismissing of medical so easily could be a mistake. I have always been the teflon guy, never an injury, never a broken bone, never a health issue until the last few years where I have had 5 surgeries now totaling close to 300k and I am only 51. Granted a lot was from injuries received in military service but not all of them and none was from disease where I had the option to just decide my number was up. The Mrs and I have excellent health and dental insurance but like others mentioned, you could probably get a low cost catastrophic policy with that big of a start which would protect you from losing everything.

But I fundamentally agree with your philosophy. We gave up good secure and relatively high paying jobs to follow our dream and we dont regret a minute of it. We work hard on our place, we work for ourselves, and we do what we want when we want while we are still young enough to enjoy it. I used to have high blood pressure and worked 6 days a week; now as I write this dawn is breaking and we will take a walk into the back pasture to look for wild life and check the cattle; then a leisurely breakfast, then we have decided to cut wood for the wood boiler and harvest some more sweet potatoes. Tomorrow we will do the final cut of hay, split the wood we cut today, and do some maintenance on one of our trucks. The old BP is now consistently around 120/75.....I wish I could have retired 10 years ago. Go for it.

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Interestingly, I have noticed that my friends who live off their land have fewer health issues than those who live from the supermarket. My friend had dental surgery a few months ago, and her dentist was astounded, said she healed at the rate of a teenager. She is 62.
Nancy

salmonslayer, yes I think that type of lifestyle would make me happy. I did it all summer long and I lost a bunch of weight and got in the best shape I've been in 20 years. That alone is worth ten insurance policies, IMO.

Don't get me wrong, I would have insurance IF I could afford it AND be a full time homesteader. But it's just too expensive, I can't do both and I have to make a choice about whats more important, living my dreams or giving them up for fear of what might ( or might not happen ) in the future. My life and time is too precious. I've looked for what you guys call 'catastrophic insurance' but it doesn't exist here in NY. The state has regulated that stuff away to get everybody 'in the pool' and contributing to everyone else's care.

The cheapest policy I can find that is worth anything is a 'self employed' policy called healthy NY and it runs about $350 per month...that adds another $4,000 to my yearly nut. Then instead of needing 13,000 I would need 17,000 which is pretty substantial. I don't think I could swing it and still live the dream.

Who's better off? The guy who smokes, is overweight, and works a stressful sedentary job WITH health insurance. OR the guy who works his land all day, eats fresh natural unprocessed food, doesn't smoke, but doesn't have a policy?

So from following this thread, you want to be able to have $400K invested and have $200k as an emergency stash, with a return of around $16k per year. But there have been many questions about inflation and health insurance. I'm sure you mentioned it, but where are you planning on putting the $200k?

My way of looking at it that would solve the inflation problem is I would invest in the stock market in large cap stocks with the focus on dividend investing. There are stocks out there that have increased their dividend every year for more than 50 years. If you would take Procter and Gamble for instance, they have products in >90% of the houses in the US and are currently expanding into China and India. Comapanies like this one, Coke, Johnson and Johnson, etc are not going to just disappear. Granted the stock price will fluctuate but even if it goes down by a significant amount for a year or 2 you haven't lost anything as long as they keep paying the dividend and you don't panic and sell when its low. I know a few of these companies have averaged a 10% increase in their dividend every year for the past decade, so not only would your income go up, it would be increasing faster than inflation giving you some disposable income to either invest, add to the emergency fund, or buy more toys for the homestead. And no I wouldn't throw it all into 1 stock just in the remote case you have something like Enron show up.

But going back to the other part about health ins, if you where to bump up the amount invested to $500k in dividend paying stocks averaging 3.8% that would give you more than $18k per year in income, plus if the emergency came up so you needed some of that extra $100k invested, you would be invested in large cap stocks that are liquid enough that you would have access to the money in a day or so if required. So now that extra $2-3k you would need for the high deductible health ins you looked up would be part of that income.

Plus you would still have any income from the $100k emergency fund you want to put into something you deem really safe. This could also have some interest income (~1%) that would probably be best to continue to add to the fund instead of spending so you can try minimize inflation once again.

And that is not counting income from the homestead. I am sure you will have animals to sell/barter, or vegetables to sell at farmers markets, etc.

I do understand with the market turmoil that has happened in the past few years many people are dead set against anything to do with stocks, but if you look at long term investing (>10-15 yrs) I don't know of anything that has outperformed dividend paying stocks, especially if you have the ability to reinvest the dividends.

So yes I think your anaylsis of needing $600k to support yourself when you are living off of <$15k/year would be easy to do. I think if invested correctly as every year goes by, financially it will actually get easier, not harder to pay the bills. And that is investing conservative. If you include real estate into the mix and become a landlord I think you could easily bump your income to 10-15% of your investment/year. But that would also increase your work load dealing with tenants.

Some of us are not choosing to homestead with "no job". Homesteading is the job and the way of life. Just in case scenarios are nice but you only have today. We are blessed to have our needs met as well as some of our wants.

Yup I hear ya man and if it was me I would go for it too. I dont want to leave this earth having any regrets and sometimes you have to evaluate risk and do what makes sense for your situation. Lots of folks thought we were nuts for walking away from the paychecks we had for life on a run down farm in the middle of the rural and poor mid west but now lots of them have confided they wish they had planned for something like we are doing. We spent the better part of 10 years planning our escape from the rat race so get crackin!!

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