Debt Free Off Grid Homestead - Our Freedom 35 Story

freedom 35 it's no joke but it might not be exactly what you think it is but a lot of people ask how did we end up with a debt-free off-grid homestead and so we kind of thought about it and i don't think we have any secrets but we do have a story and i thought we'd tell you our story and in fact we have a bunch of old footage from when we first built this place and we can show you what this place looked like nine years ago and so this is it this is our freedom 35 plan our debt-free off-grid homestead oh no way that was awesome [Music] all right your turn your turn no way yeah here it's your turn [Applause] when you're camping you somehow in your brain justify having none of the normal comforts and conveniences of a normal house and somehow it's fun to sleep in a tiny little tent on the hard ground in your mind you've you've said i want to be close to a beautiful lake and because we want to be in some wonderful place we're totally willing to camp in a tent and use a little camp stove and sit around a fire with lawn chairs and so if we can do that when you want to go off grid when you want to go homestead when you want to get debt free you can do it you can just camp and that's the that's the secret like it's actually that easy and that's what we did so we went camping on our land we could sell our house get rid of our mortgage and we had our little piece of land and we had our camping gear what are we doing right now what are we standing on yeah and what's gonna go right here our house you want the tent how come today is june the third or the fourth who do we have in here hi mom hi sarah julia and kezia what are you guys doing oh no are there mosquitoes in there no there's mosquitoes out here that's too bad not too bad that's too bad and of course the kids love it i mean they don't know any different they they would like prefer to camp all the time so we built our house and it took us about six months before our house was uh warm and dry and ready for winter ugh this is a pretty hard hold up we're digging dad [Music] it's that easy around [Music] of course you can there's jeff bringing in her woodcook stove oh that's pretty amazing what are you guys doing [Music] we'd already passed that first critical challenge which was like how do you actually get out there and get that free and the answer was camping anyways it's time for us to head back we'll see you back at the ranch look at all those hard-working little ladies hey [Music] it's hmm oh yeah there she is just a second big long dark abdomen hey i think finally this good weather will help them there'll be lots of feed out there lots of lots of clover little babies you dropped one this is delicious that's it this is like we've been waiting just eat that hole without you it was so good the little garden here by the house is like a little snack cupboard these peas my goodness they're giant yep i'm coming a nice cup of tea in our new screened-in porch this is our mosquito protection plan this is better than we imagined it right absolutely the in porch has been on our list for years and man is it just so amazing it's like changed our life are you trained for this no i love it with the high roof and the and the clear roof we can see all the aspen shimmering who's the millionaire in this situation hey we're finally getting a little bit of green on our roof hey yeah his root cellar has been amazing you get to eat that in exchange for some milk this is definitely part of why we're so wealthy absolutely we get fresh goat's milk and fresh goat cream and that's awesome cheese and we get to have cute little baby goats every spring sweet girl definitely not starving no there they go that's what they want what also makes us wealthy is having a huge garden and these are the brand new gardens this year and how about having piggies all the carrots are looking pretty good rose still early but i mean there's a stinking huge head of cabbage really onions are sure growing good yeah just in the straw look at that nice uh you should come to my baby see them garden where's that at my house really yeah okay oh yeah that is pretty wow i like these little ball ones i know they're cute but this thing this is awesome wow oh nice sarah's got her nicely done some people want to see what's going on in the house sam okay so the door is holding up and look at the girls put all this trim in here milled it and planed it and shaped it and made it into like a ship lap right yeah yeah that looks great show me the finished side oh this looks so good we haven't shown people that that you may built a bed in here and there's a bed over there with the mosquito net and look at that nice shelf that uh and the bowl there you can see the bowl the shelf that sarah made [Applause] does this give you joy yes i got giddy when i open the door it's like steamy worm greenhouse in here tomatoes everywhere tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes and peppers look at the peppers on this thing i know wow look at them all there's pickles everywhere there's pickles way above my head there's pickles like eight feet up there look at this guy yeah you want to see a funny one do i think he's edible hmm rich wow that is awesome well done rose thanks you're a professional no i'm not i'm learning oh my it's yummy you got to keep your eye on these because one day just boom i know there's a cauliflower you can see there's stuff like going on down there but sorry look at the broccoli what was that look at that i'm really excited about them this year i don't think picked easily but right hey jeff oh not ready look how big this thing is oh wow what a thumper he's pretty handsome guy he's pretty chill have you spent some time with this guy before i've seen him in the afternoon what do you have in your hand show me show me your froggy how's the water really nice why aren't you going all the way in then because it's over there oh here is just getting wet okay i'd have to commit to a lot more than just a dip when we bought this place we did not know it had a beach like this man it's just awesome we were telling you this story about how we went from like normal job and a normal mortgage working full-time we seem to still like be losing money even even though you know we were kept chiseling at it i don't know it just wasn't working and we thought we just got to do something drastic okay rose what do you say this is it i thought you said we were gonna build here so we got a view of the creek we're close to the water good sun exposure to the south and to the west so we bought a piece of property that was only accessible by a quad but it was cheap it's cheap like bush and then we were able to get rid of the mortgage and all the debt and once you're debt free work is a whole different thing it's like not something you do just because you have to it's like well wait there's certain types of work i would like to do and there's risks you can take so i was actually able to quit a regular job and start my own business sometimes we worked a lot and sometimes we didn't work a lot at all but the key was we kept working and we kept making money and then i'd say this is like the third key thing that in our story the first one was getting out of debt by camping on a cheap piece of land the next one was keep working but the third one was use your your money and your time and invest not just in like normal investments but in yourself in your homestead you know learn new skills invest in your own health like eat better food but also like a monetary investment is uh invest in a garden yeah and a greenhouse we're still participating in the world yeah it's just that it's on our terms yes like we we like took the power back we gotta take the power back and then eventually you get to the point where you're kind of living like a millionaire you're eating terrific food you're spending time with your family you're doing things you enjoy and you're passionate about you should have like a drive to be productive or a drive to explore or a drive to serve like i think every person has that in them don't try and like stack up millions of dollars i mean one you can see what the stock market does it just takes you for a ride but also it's got to have a fair return to actually beat out inflation you know what just keep working that's the secret and it's not that you just keep working you don't have to work like a slave all the time no do something you enjoy yeah and do it as you need to or as you want to yeah because you're not behind the eight ball right you can do what you want that's right yeah you know what i want what wanna confuse yours [Laughter] yes that's what i was thinking about a kombucha do you love the beach yes it's my happy place it is pretty awesome you know camping [Music] and then slowly building our homestead we did without a lot of stuff that normal people have right or people normally have but we also have things that people normally do not have that's true maybe the single biggest thing that people are concerned about doing what we did is is basically the hygiene related stuff it's the bathrooms showers and washing so in our story you know clearly we believe in hygiene so so how did we do it so in the summertime when we first moved out we had like solar bags we'd heat them up outside in the sun and then we'd have a shower and then when it was too not sunny to do that we'd just heat up a pot of water and put it in a solar bag which seemed lame while you're doing it but as soon as you get in the shower like this was so worth it that first solar bag we had was a gallon that little teeny tiny one yeah that one was like uh uh maybe like a six-year-old boy size it was a i was gonna say it worked great for me we believe it's luxury to have a huge long shower oh yeah like when i go like it's not like we think that that's lame it's just that it is luxury and we don't have it all the time at certain times of the year we do because if we got rain water and if we got the wood stove going we can have huge long showers and we can have them twice a day if we want and then the outhouse i mean most of the time i appreciate the composting outhouse toilet when it's really cold outside or when it's mosquitoey i do not like the composting out of this toilet only because it's freezing cold or i'm getting eaten by mosquitoes so i'm not gonna lie that part is terrible yeah but the rest of the year it's quite nice it has literally saved us i'm gonna say 100 or 200 000 because like to get a well out here right 30 grand but then we need more solar system you know add in another 10 grand but then you need a whole septic system there's another 30 grand so now you're up to like 70 say 75 grand well you don't have that so you have to borrow it and if you tack that into a mortgage that's 25 years long you're gonna end up paying double or triple that we're now talking about a composting outhouse that's pretty darn awesome that's saving us well over a hundred thousand dollars for washing dishes we just heat up water on the wood stove while i'm cooking or whatever and then we just dump the pot of water into the sinks and we've got a gray water system so when i'm done i get to just pull the plug in it drains away which is yeah actually like luxurious as well yeah and in the summer time we got the rainwater tanks outside then you can just walk over there and wash your hands at any time so yeah that's why we don't have a lot of infectious disease in our family well that looks pretty nice hey yeah the fire's nice too wow like say we were um millionaires mm-hmm would we be eating anything different right now no we would have bacon on the potatoes we'd have bacon you're right we would have our own bacon bits on the potatoes you got us we're not actually millionaires oh yum it looks like a toasted marshmallow looks so good christina you are a professional it's actually my feet my feet are professional oh your feet are the that's where the skill lies the first year we moved out here uh we moved into a tent but i still had a regular job yeah and then the next year so year two i thought well you know what i can risk um quitting a regular job and starting my own business yeah so we started our own business and then i worked a lot yes and i worked a lot for let's say the next three years yes but we we're instead of trying to catch up we're now getting ahead that was the year where we took a lot of time off and we only worked half the year because we could finally afford to and we didn't work as much and we've got a lot more done around here and we did you know fun projects and went on trips yep so before we had maybe 2500 worth of mortgage property taxes insurance utilities that's 30 grand a year i mean you don't have to be a mathematician to know that that's gonna add up really fast like 30 grand for five years let's do it a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in your pocket that's after tax money and you can have some gardens and you can save thousands of dollars a year on your food and that brings us to now because for a little over a year i've been able to not work much at all and it's good because the homestead really needed to like finally get some things done and now what are we gonna do we're just gonna keep going but what are we gonna do enjoy the homestead and keep working on projects and keep improving it and will we work yeah right but will we work for money yes of course you know there's a time to work and i love to work when it's time right but there's times that you don't need to or want to work and you have a family and you got a homestead the point is we can do whatever we want it's not a pipe dream you can actually do this it works for us yeah it may not work for everybody but it works for us and i think everyone's gonna do it differently but i think the principles are gonna be the same yeah you gotta get out of that debt that's crushing and without the debt you can keep working at the things you're skilled at instead of just trying to catch up you can actually get ahead you can invest it in yourselves i don't know i think you should do it i think so many people could do this i don't even know what you're waiting for like if you need to get into the woods you need to go now [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Gridlessness

Views: 166,943

Rating: 4.9569831 out of 5

Keywords: debt free off grid homestead, off grid homestead, off-grid, debt free living, debt free homestead

Id: JKi5K4KTZMM

Length: 25min 43sec (1543 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020