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Self-sufficiency means different things to different people, but all of the different approaches have some things in common.  Here, we’ll walk through what those things are.

The core of self-sufficiency is minimizing your reliance on others for the important things in your life:

• Food and water
• Shelter – your comfortable home
• Clothing

The extended view of this revolves around doing things for yourself:

• Living within your means, especially when your means change
• Cooking good food for yourself
• Fix what’s broken, if it makes sense to

Notice it’s minimizing reliance on others, not necessarily being completely self-reliant.  Focusing on what you’re good at will help you have excess to share with others who have different talents than you.  There’s a whole lot more detail for each of these items. We’ll dive into some of those details below.

Living within your means

Every financial guru says “live within your means”  I get that it’s trite, but it’s true.  First step in becoming self-sufficient is knowing what your means are.  That’s covers a few things: 

• How much income you have 
• How much of that you spend
• How much of that you can avoid spending

It’s really that simple.  If you’re spending more than you make, you’ve got to make a change.  You will never be self-sufficient.  That’s a hard fact.  It’s a hard thing to swallow for a lot of people, but it’s just a fact.  If you don’t have any choice on the money that goes out the door then you have to increase the money incoming. If you have a choice, start cutting back on things that you don’t need.  Frankly I don’t know anyone who needs satellite or cable TV service or any of the streaming services.  Now most of us have those and that’s okay, as long as we can afford them.  As soon as we can’t afford them they need to go by the wayside.  I had this experience: about 10 years ago I was out of work, my wife was working we had four kids in the house and we needed a way to trim our budget to the bare-minimum necessary expenses.  The unnecessary things had to be cut out of the budget or we weren’t going to be able to keep the house.  One of them was that satellite TV.  We loved our satellite TV service but we just couldn’t afford it anymore.  We cut the cord and have never looked back.

Sustenance: Food and water, including cooking for yourself

There are a lot of ways to start saving money on food and water. What are the easiest ways?

Do you have a bottled water service or are you buying drinking water? That’s a little ridiculous in my opinion, unless there is a compelling reason why the water in your town is not safe. Drinking tap water is absolutely fine; generations of Americans and a lot of people in a lot of other places have grown up on water that came from the city. There are notable exceptions like Flint, Michigan, however for ninety-nine percent of us, tap water is fine. If you want to get a filter system or a filter pitcher because you like it that way, great, but buying hundreds and hundreds of 16 oz. bottles of water that you throw away the bottle when you’re done or recycle? That’s just dumb.

Food – there’s a lot of things that can be said here. Everything from producing your own food, which we’ll get to, growing a garden, or minimizing the cost of food when you buy it. There are some things you can do to minimize the cost of food when you buy it:

Shop at farmers markets. They are generally better quality and lower price then going to the grocery store. You will get what’s in season, you’ll get what they can produce, but that’s okay. It’s generally healthier to eat whatever food is in season at the time anyway.

If you’re not vegetarian you can purchase meat in bulk by, for example, buying a cow, having it butchered, and dividing the meat. I did this with a couple of friends. It turned out that across-the-board we paid about $1.99 a pound for every cut of meat regardless of what part of the cow it came from. We had filet mignon for $1.99 a pound; we had chuck roast for $1.99 a pound; we had steaks for $1.99 a pound…you get the idea. It worked out very well. You can do the same thing buying a pig or buying whole chickens.

Growing it yourself. You can start a garden in a couple of pots on your back patio if you live in an apartment in the city; you can dig up some ground and start growing things in your yard which gives you the additional bonus of less yard to have to mow. If you can see your way clear to raise some of your own meat, that’s great! You can get meat chickens from chick to butchering size in about 12 weeks. It’s a little bit more expensive actually than buying chicken; however it’s better-tasting, you have more control of the process, and you know what your chickens have been fed and exposed to.

Shelter

Shelter is probably the hardest one to work out on your own. You’re going to have to usually rent or buy the house. Don’t make it so big and such a financial burden that you’re living and working for your house. You can minimize the costs by financing appropriately if you purchase. Over the long haul a 15-year loan is going to be cheaper for you than a 30-year loan just in the interest. By saving 15 years’ worth of interest you’ll be in much better shape. Overall, your monthly payments will be higher, however your total payments will be lower.

Clothing

There are a couple of ways to minimize the cost of putting clothes on your back. If you’re good with a sewing machine, you can make your own clothes. However, here are a couple of easier steps you can take until you learn more about sewing:

1 don’t buy name brands if you can help it. A perfectly functional, usable pair of pants not made by Levi Strauss is going to cost you half.

2 shop at thrift stores. I know. I know. It’s not cool, but it is much less expensive and you can find some really good stuff, especially if you go to the thrift store in a wealthy area. We have a wealthy part of town close by and the Goodwill there has some awesome clothes because that’s where the people who have extra disposable income donate their clothes.

Fix it (if it makes sense to)

Getting into things you can do for yourself… you’ve got to have a lifelong learning attitude. If you’re not willing to learn something new all the time, you’re probably not going to be all that self-sufficient. Fixing things for yourself is much less expensive if you can do it (and do it right) than paying somebody else to do it. For example, I just replaced the water heater in my house with two water heaters and added a water softener and a new water filter for less than the price of hiring someone to replace the water heater.  I had to learn a few things like how to work with PEX, where to tie into the plumbing system, how to connect a water softener; but by paying attention to the instructions and applying a little bit of ingenuity my son, son-in-law, and I were able to get it done. If you can trade work for work, that can also help. My son-in-law, for example, works professionally in HVAC so he knows a few things about wiring. I knew I had to upgrade the circuit for my water heater from 30 amps to 50 in order to accommodate two water heaters and he had the knowledge to change out the wiring. I leaned on him for that, and as things go along, I will do other things for him. The challenge is whether it makes sense to fix something. On a water heater, all you can do about that it just has to be fixed or replaced. Sometimes, though, when it comes to your car, fixing the car again and again and again is going to get to be more expensive than it’s worth. That’s a judgment call you’re going to have to make. There may come a point where the car is only worth $1,000 and needs $4,000 worth of work. It may be worth $1,000 to save you from having to incur a new car payment, but that’s the judgement you’re going to have to make.

Build it (if building is cost-effective)

Learning to build things yourself can be very rewarding I thought the cradle for my granddaughter when just before she was born it was probably less expensive overall then buying one and it has the added benefit of being kind of an heirloom piece of furniture for the family and that all of the babies can use from now on can I find that pretty cool. If you’re going to have to take three weeks off from your good paying job and lose 800 or $1,000 worth of income in order to build the pole barn yourself and might be worth paying somebody to build a pole barn. the other consideration there is whether you want to learn how to build a pole barn or some of the things about that process either way if you assist you may be able to get it none break on the price

 these are just a number of the big things you can do to improve your self-sufficiency and what those things can do for you there is a lot to be said red you researched learned about each of the topics especially in the gardening or fixing things yourself categories . future posts will include specifics of some of the things we have done or are doing in each of these various categories.