Can Homesteading REALLY Save You Money?

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When my husband and I first dove into the world of homesteading nearly 20 years ago, so much of the conversation was about how homesteading could save you money. This notion of simple living as a money-saving venture became especially desirable as the Great Recession took hold. We made startlingly little money during that time, so I relished any tricks and tips that helped us save a few pennies.

There was also something so appealing about a peaceful, idyllic country life. The aesthetic. The vibe. The earthiness. I could envision myself living that kind of life. If it was in an issue of Mother Earth News, I was into it!

Being natural-minded AND frugal, I saw the obvious intersections of homesteading and saving money. But does modern-day homesteading automatically equate to saving money?

Ten years on from our big leap into buying rural property and building a cordwood house, I’ve had a lot of time to process and ponder this. So let’s dive in and discuss.

Image: Rows of mason jars with canned deer meat; Text: Can Modern Homesteading Actually Save You Money?

First of all, what IS “Modern Homesteading”?

To be able to answer whether or not it can save money, we need to clarify what “modern homesteading” even is. I addressed this more deeply in this post, but to summarize, I think it is this:

Modern Homesteading is a combination of country life skills and a frugal code of ethics. Homesteading can encompass a wide variety of activities. Some of these activities include, but aren’t limited to:

Gardening
Food preservation (canning, dehydrating, etc.)
Raising chickens, quail, ducks, etc. for eggs
Beekeeping
Keeping dairy animals like goats or cows
Raising meat animals
Hunting
Fishing
Foraging
Soapmaking
Woodworking
Traditional Handicrafts

But beyond that, homesteading involves a certain ethic, and that ethic can exist no matter where you happen to live. It typically encompasses a few key ideas, chiefly:

Be a producer, not a consumer.
Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.
Increase preparedness.
Learn how to work with nature and not against it.
Learn traditional skills and crafts that support self-sufficiency.
But also work towards building community.

THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT WAY TO BE A HOMESTEADER. HOMESTEADING EXISTS ALONG A SPECTRUM, AND YOU MAY OCCUPY A VERY DIFFERENT PLACE ON IT FROM ME.

The Homestead Life Can Be EXPENSIVE

For many people, the Homesteading Dream looks like buying a rural property, building a house, creating some gardens, and maybe throwing in some livestock or some solar power for good measure.

On its face, this looks like a “simple life”. Out in the country, nice and peaceful, right? You don’t need much.

Or so you think.

Take living with solar. We might not pay a monthly electric bill, but our solar system cost us REAL dollars, and you don’t just spend them once. Those batteries need replacing sometimes, and they aren’t cheap. During our first system expansion, that was a $2400 just to get the exact same lead-acid batteries we had. And while it was cheaper per kilowatt when we upgraded to lithium, it was still a very expensive gambit.

(Albeit, a gambit we are VERY pleased with.)

READ: How We Upgraded Our Small Solar System (the first time around)

Buying gravel for our half-mile driveway is currently around $600 per tri-axle load, and the entire driveway takes about 6 loads if we do it all in one go. And we have to re-gravel the driveway every 3-4 years as the old rock sinks down or washes away. You know where I didn’t spend that money? In our little suburban midcentury ranch with a 30-foot-long driveway.

I have to consider the constraints of our solar system whenever I’m shopping for things like appliances. You can’t just go to the hardware store and buy the cheapest fridge there. Living off-grid, you usually need something specialty, which almost always costs more.

And managing our property requires a fairly substantial tractor, plus accessories.

Our current tractor cost over $5000, and that’s buying VERY used. A new tractor with similar specs would easily be five figures. The box blade, grader blade, and other attachments were acquired cheaply or for free thanks to family and friend connections. Our mower is a 10-foot flail mower we got for a few hundred bucks on Facebook Marketplace. While we did manage to save money on all of these things by buying used and working our networks, we never would have needed these things if we didn’t live on a very rural property.

I don’t regret the decision to live out here on this exact parcel and build our house.

Living here has provided us with opportunities and benefits we never would have had at our little house in the middle of town. Sure, there are times I find aspects of it annoying or anxiety-inducing (like when my husband has to clear snow and ice from the driveway with the tractor), but for the most part, I adore it. The rural property and cordwood house were always bucket list items for us, and I’ll never regret taking the plunge instead of sitting there and dreaming of the “what ifs” for the rest of my life.

cordwood shed with a set of nine solar panels on the left and six to the right

That said, I often think of the money we wouldn’t have spent if we had stayed in town. Gravel, generator fuel, solar panels, batteries, tractors, maintenance costs, specialized appliances, etc. etc. When you look at what running a country property requires, those costs add up fast. It is not inherently a way to save money.

So, how CAN you save money while homesteading?

First, do what you can with what you have where you are.

You don’t have to homestead on a big rural property. If country living is something you really love and feel called to do, I certainly won’t discourage you from pursuing it. After all, that’s what we did! But you CAN have a thriving homestead even if you live in an apartment or on a tiny little postage stamp in the middle of a city. One of my best friends does, and I am always astounded at what she is able to grow and do on her little lot within walking distance of a major downtown metro with half a million people in it.

READ: How to Homestead in the City or Suburbs

If we think of homesteading as skills + ethics, homesteading can save you money no matter how you go about it. I look towards embodying the ethics of using things up, making do, repairing items, or not buying a product as your first way to solve a problem.

I have been on both ends of the income spectrum, and looking back on it, it’s astonishing how easy it is to jump straight to “buy a product to solve this problem” when you’re flush with cash. After all, if I need help with X, Y, or Z and I can simply Prime ship myself something within 1-2 days to fix that problem, why not do it?

But there is an inherent waste in just buying our solutions. My hippie environmentalist heart is keenly aware of this no matter my tax bracket, but when saving money isn’t the goal it is almost alarming how easy it is to skip right over that and straight into buying things.

In homesteading, that might look like spending thousands on premade raised beds instead of building your own out of reclaimed or found materials. Or a fancy hydroponic system, a brand-new tractor, or a huge prefab greenhouse. The possibilities are endless!

READ: How to Start a Thriving Vegetable Garden for Cheap or Free

There are numerous homestead products available that are great fun to purchase. There are some I’ve purchased myself, find genuinely helpful, and sometimes recommend to others! After all, our time is valuable too, and sometimes the time savings of a product can be worth it.

But if saving money is your primary goal for homesteading, you will sabotage yourself by buying all the shiny new homesteading things.

So what can you do about that?

For starters, go shopping in your own home.

One of the best ways to save money is to get creative with what we already have. By taking advantage of what is available to us in our own homes, we can reduce waste and save money at the same time.

I like to ask myself:

How can I use what I already have?
Is there something here that can fit this purpose?
What solutions do I have access to right here on my property?

I am fully convinced that if the entire planet were to stop manufacturing everything TODAY we would still have too much crap to go around. Even when I was totally broke, I had junk drawers and closets full of random stuff, not to mention odd furniture that ended up in my apartment somehow.

Do I really need a cute desk set? Or can I use one of the many sauce jars I’ve hoarded to hold my pencils? Can I source the materials for a DIY project from the random lumber in my stash? How can I cobble together these found materials into something new and helpful?

It requires a bit of creative thinking, but shopping in your own home is easily one of the best ways to save money as you homestead. Heck, it’s a great way to save money even if you DON’T homestead.

Building Your Homestead Skills

Cultivating skills is one of the best ways to save money in a homesteading lifestyle. Sometimes you’ll have some upfront costs to sink into equipment, depending on what homestead skills you want to get into. But having skills will enable you to use those things and decrease your costs over time.

Let’s use canning as an example. To get into canning low-acid meats and vegetables, you’ll need a pressure canner, jars, lids, rings, and tools like a jar lifter, lid lifter, funnel, and bubble popper/measurer. From there, I’d recommend either taking classes at your local cooperative extension office or taking online classes from someone teaching safe and scientifically-vetted methods and recipes, like Sharon over at Simply Canning (this is how I learned to safely can deer meat!). Remember, saving money involves NOT giving your family botulism!

Once you have the equipment and have spent time learning the skills, there’s no big repeat cost. Jars and rings can be reused, and new lids are inexpensive. And if you don’t spend a lot of money starting and maintaining your garden, the food you preserve becomes virtually free. The same is true of a lot of homesteading activities.

On our homestead, we learned things like electrical and plumbing while fixing up our starter home, and took a cordwood masonry clinic to learn the technique to build our house. Other skills, like tractor repair, maintaining our off-grid electrical and plumbing systems, gardening, canning, preserving, and so on have been acquired over the years via research, networking, taking classes, and real-world problem-solving.

Make friends and build community.

One of the best ways to save money is often overlooked in the homesteading world because so many people get hung up on self-sufficiency. While homesteading may be about learning skills and being able to do things for yourself, that should NOT be done at the expense of building community.

We immediately set out to connect with others when we began our home build. For example, our excavator came as a recommendation from an uncle who had him build his basement. And as it turned out, our excavator is also a parishioner at our church. We formed a friendly relationship, and he’s done all kinds of work from clearing and leveling our build site to installing our septic and hauling driveway gravel for us.

Sometimes I think of all the money we would have spent if we’d hired some faceless company to do those jobs. The advice he’s given us over the years has been invaluable, not to mention all the physical work he’s done for us. The same goes for hiring our crane guy when we set our trusses, networking with our building inspector, and my city friend who gives us her excess quail eggs, fresh garden produce, and sourdough bread when she has it.

Homestead Money Savers

Whether you’re gardening, building a house, growing a garden, or tending livestock, these are some of the best OVERALL ways to save money on the homestead:

Barter and trade with your neighbors.
Check for items you need in local Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, Craigslist, Nextdoor, or similar networks.
Shop in your home first.
Look for what you need at thrift stores, yard sales, or flea markets.
Search for affordable or free items on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, or local auction sites.
Build genuine relationships with skilled individuals.
Live by the homesteader’s ethic of “use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without.”

My hope is that these tips and subtle mindset shifts will help you start living a “homesteading lifestyle” without finding yourself in over your head. Start where you are and make the best of it! The rewards awaiting you are greater than you realize.

Read these other great posts about saving money:

Learn more about our original cordwood homestead project here. And be sure to join us on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram for more homesteading goodies that don’t necessarily make it to the blog. Thanks for reading!