How do you grow food off-grid & What is the vertical garden tower you have?
Our hydroponic vertical garden is called a Farmstand by lettucegrow and it’s an all-in-one system that I’ve been using and loving since the summer of 2021! It is self-watering and self-fertilizing and uses 95% less water than traditional farming. It literally only requires 5-min of maintenance a week to grow up to 36 plants in 4 sq. ft. I paid full-price for mine, but reached out to affiliate with them after I fell in love with the system. So if you use my link to purchase one, I get a small commission at no extra cost to you 🙂 I wrote a blog post about it if you want more info and I also have a $75 off Discount code: FRIEND-G7RD
How do you make money?
The short answer is that both my husband and I work remotely online and we rent out land/accommodations.
For our freelance online work, and advertising/managing our rentals, we have high-speed satellite internet (Starlink) at our off grid house, which allows us to do pretty much anything online that you would be able to do in a city.
I personally created an online business as a digital storyteller via my website/blog and my social media platforms, which has allowed me to become location independent and have multiple income streams. I make money through brand partnerships/sponsorships, affiliate marketing, and Google ads. After a few years of teaching myself those skills, I also became a freelance social media manager, videographer, and communications consultant. If you want to know more about that, I go into detail about all the ways I make money online (and you can too) in this blog post.
My husband Ryan is a freelance graphic and web designer. He also does odd jobs here and there like handyman work and trail maintenance.
Finally, we make money off of renting out our land and properties. We have rented out a section of our land long-term to people in self-contained tiny homes/RVs, then we built a glamping (glamorous camping) accommodation that we’ve rented out short-term, and now we rent our first house on Airbnb for short-term getaways, and manage it easily ourselves because we live down the road.
How did/do you afford your house and homestead?
Ultimately, we pay for things/afford things, the same way most people do…we work, save, spend, and we have debt. And quite frankly, our house(s)/lifestyle are much more affordable than people probably assume. In fact, we have dramatically lowered our cost of living compared to our old “traditional” lifestyles.
We have now bought two off-grid fixer upper houses in the middle of nowhere (with home loans), which is much more affordable than purchasing real estate in civilization (in the suburbs or urban environments).
Our cost of living off-grid has ranged from $1000-$3000/month over the last 3+ years that we’ve been homeowners. Please also note, that our original house is only 760 sqft (including the loft main bedroom), and is not connected to standard utilities like the electric grid, or town/city water or sewage, which makes it WAY cheaper than a traditional home. I extensively cover the cost of our first home and all of our individual off grid living expenses in this blog post (which are probably much cheaper than you’d think).
The new off-grid 1.1K sqft house on 40ish acres that we moved to in November 2022 and live in now, we bought with a second home loan WITH my mom (since she now lives here in a 12 x 20ft shed turned tiny house). In order to make this happen financially on our end, we are renting out our original house which covers the mortgage for that house and our mortgage on the second house (that we live in).
Again, both houses are off-the-grid (meaning no public utilities), and are VERY remote, making them MUCH cheaper than traditional houses. Both houses combined cost less than an average house in the suburbs or even rural neighborhoods in the U.S.
We also do the labor ourselves for home renovations, and building and land projects (which saves a ton of money). And we are doing things very slowly. So when we have extra money, we buy materials for projects, and when we don’t, we don’t.
How do you afford to travel so much?
Over the years, how I travel, and how I pay for travel has evolved a lot. I traveled A LOT independently in my twenties on a shoe-string budget. I have been to 53 countries on 6 continents, and all 50 U.S. states. The short answer is I have used cost-saving travel hacks (to travel for free or on an extreme budget), and I typically work(ed) for 6-months to a year non-stop (save money), then travel(ed) for extended periods of time, or I simply work while I’m traveling (remotely or by doing in-person work).
While I was living in a van and traveling around North America, I also had a very low cost of living. Typically under $1000/month. So traveling was cheaper than when I was living a stationary life in NYC and paying $1100 just to rent a tiny room in a tiny apartment.
Now my favorite cost-savings travel hack since we have so many animals is TrustedHouseSitters. It’s a REALLY cool membership-based website that allows you to travel on a budget by helping you find FREE accommodation in exchange for pet sitting OR it can help you find FREE background-checked pet sitters while you travel!
How much did your camper vans cost?
In 2017, I bought (on a travel credit card) my first used 2016 Ford Transit low-top cargo van that I lived and traveled in for 4 years for $24K (for the empty cargo van) and I spent $3500 converting it into a camper.
Then later, I had a high top added and the whole thing remodeled. That conversion was worth about $48K, but I got a huge chunk of the labor cost sponsored by leveraging my blog and social media following that I built while living on the road.
In 2021, I sold it for $68K and bought a 2008 Ford E-350 shuttle bus that was already converted into a camper for $50K. We then fixed that camper up, traveled in it for a few years, and sold it for $55K.