A Necessary Evil

Hi friends, welcome to another episode of The Grid Is For Squares! Today, we’re discussing something that we hate but something that’s an unfortunate reality in building an off-the-grid homestead: money.

We built our awesome yurt platform last month, which means the next step is to purchase the actual yurt. (Check out our timelapse video if you haven’t yet!) But the yurt will cost about $10,000 and our finances are really tight right now, which means that despite all of our hard work and careful planning, we’re not sure if we can responsibly buy a yurt right now. Which sucks! Why did we even build that platform then?! Blurg!

It’s so hard not to stress about money, and not just during the pandemic but generally in this late-capitalist hellscape where GoFundMe is apparently a health plan. We’re hoping to be self-sufficient and communal eventually but, ironically, that won’t be possible until we’ve built a lot more and thus spent a lot more money.

Talking about money can be difficult… at turns, I feel ashamed of how much and how little money we have. There are tons of people out there who couldn’t have built what we have already; they work hard but are surviving day to day. But I also feel embarrassed sometimes compared to other homesteaders who have way more funds than we do and have been able to build a much more impressive homestead in much less time. So we wanted to take this opportunity to be fully transparent about how much we’ve spent on our homestead so far.

Can you really put a price on rocks and trees?

Turns out the answer is yes, and it’s tens of thousands of dollars.

Let’s jump into some hard numbers. According to my research, it takes an estimated $200,000 to set up a self-sufficient homestead. But we don’t have that much money (not even close!) so our plan is basically just building as we can. Thus far, we’ve spent a total of $65,000. Most of that went to our 10 acres of land: $58,000, which we paid with $45,000 down and a 5-year payment plan for the remaining $13,000. (And be aware that most banks won’t give you a loan for bare land.) The yurt platform we built last month cost $2,000. The remaining thousands have gone to our greenhouse, tools like a chainsaw and wet/dry vac, various building materials, and more.

How have we saved that $65,000, you ask? Especially as artists and hippies living in California? Well, we’ve been socking away money for years, saving it in a separate Money Market account, which has made it easier for us to not spend our property savings on daily expenses. We do recommend that method it works for you.

We’ve also made… let’s say “lifestyle choices.” Just saying those words makes me cringe because I know there are millions of people out there who, despite working hard, could never save that much money; there’s Lifestyle Choices and then there’s The System Is Broken. And lest we forget, us working in the arts and environmentalism in California, rather than “normal jobs” in the Midwest, was a series of lifestyle choices too. Luckily for us, between our various jobs and having no life (even before the pandemic, we didn’t go to movies, we didn’t go to restaurants, we didn’t go on vacation), we’ve been able to painstakingly save that $65,000.

That’s all to say, it hasn’t been easy. It’s involved a significant amount of sacrifice. And, in case you’ve forgotten, we also currently live in a one-bedroom apartment with Vince’s mom. But it’s all been worth it because of the progress we’ve made on our homestead dream.

We then reflected a bit on our childhoods and how they’ve shaped our feelings about money. Vince says he grew up poor, so the fact that we have any savings is enough for him. My upper-middle-class parents, on the other hand, raised me to be “financially responsible” in ways that mean I feel like a failure for not reaching certain milestones. I think there’s a part of me that’s always assumed I would eventually become a Grown-Up Who Doesn’t Worry About Money. In the deepest darkest recesses of my heart, I won’t feel like a successful artist until I become rich and/or famous. But I’m 35 now and I ain’t there yet, so I’m earnestly trying to reframe my life outside of capitalism.

And that’s part of why this homestead appeals to me… it breaks the paradigm of Success/Failure. Capitalism only allows us to travel up and down a single continuum: on one end there’s Failure/Poverty and on the other end there’s Success/Riches. But a homestead takes us 90 degrees in the other direction, allowing us to create our own reality that doesn’t conform to traditional success or failure. And hopefully that, in turn, helps us break some of the other binaries that society has locked us into without our consent.

Soooooo all that said, after doing a deep dive into our finances last week, we determined that we can purchase our yurt and have a cushion of a couple thousand left over. In a few days, we’ll send off our $5,000 down payment, and in 8-10 weeks we’ll finally have a yurt to put on our platform!