Plunging into Homesteading; A Rattlin’ first year of lessons and finances.
When I first began raising animals I was in a way grandfathered into it by my family. I was lucky enough to have grown up in the farming scene and, while I’d had some experience with my own small business raising and selling rabbits as a kid, I didn’t expect that when it came to starting my own farm/homestead it would feel a bit like plunging into freezing cold water.
One of the most encouraged ideas people give when asked for advice about beginning a homestead is to consider your “why”’s, for me one of those “why”’s was the love of animals and the simpler life. I’d busted my backside working numerous farm jobs and retail jobs from the moment that I knew how so that I could afford my animals as a teenager, I was no stranger to making it work and my love for having animals was always a driving factor even when my rebellious nature was forced to obey the rules of conventional jobs for “the man”. When my husband and I were married there was an unspoken assumption that we would buy our own farm and property and make a living out of the homesteading life despite the fact that we’d started out in an apartment. In our apartment we struggled because well.. jobs are more unstable sometimes than homesteading! My husband and I both have opinionated personalities, which doesn’t traditionally give to being a “yes sir” worker doing a 9-5. We constantly question if there is a better way of doing, if our boss really knows what they’re doing, and do not get me started on working with other people. I also found in the workplace that I was taken advantage of, I was willing to do anything and work hard, long hours with very little pay and had barely any free time to enjoy working with my animals. In fact, I “make” as much money on my homestead today as I did in my long term job as a feed store section manager and that’s not much! In the workplace I’d spend hours of my life doing things for someone else, and then come home and spend my money on feeding my animals and paying for bedding, and veterinary, etc. Now I spend my time doing what I love and the money made goes straight back into the previous list of expenses.
So what does all this have to do with finances? Well, it’s a backstory to help you understand what drives me; the worst case scenarios and past experience that I never want to do again. I can’t imagine a life without my horses so what will it take to keep me and them afloat? What will it take you to achieve the life that you crave?
Our first obstacle one month into owning our new piece of paradise; finances. Let me make this clear, at 22 years old I had very little real knowledge of home ownership finances and wish my or my husband’s family had really worked with us and explained how it all worked so we knew what we were getting into. Immediately we were hit with our monthly mortgage payments, we were still paying for our normal expenses; phone bills, gasoline, vehicle payments, credit card payments (I’d put my college bills on my credit card, I don’t recommend that....) and suddenly had new bills! We moved into our house in September of 2017 and, being the beginning of autumn, there were other expenses to pay for! I needed to put a loft full of hay in for my 4 horses and flerd of goats and sheep. I needed to purchase feed, have the animals vetted for the year, pay for pellets for the stove in our house and, oh yeah, did I mention our house was a fixer upper? The list of our expenses suddenly grew very large and then my husband left January, 2018 for military training for 4 months. We started this venture with a $22,000 nest egg… it became our down-payment for our 8.5 acre farm! So how are we still doing this five years later? Read on!
#1: Have a calculated savings
My first moral of the story here is to make sure you calculate what it will cost to be doing what you want to do and save up. There is no better plan when initially buying a homestead than to save up every penny you possibly can; it’s much more difficult once things are underway. What things should you consider? not only costs of farm things such as feed for your current animals, but also house things! What needs done in your new house? Do you need new flooring installed? Do you need to take out a wall or upgrade your heating? Calculate how much it would be done for professionally (Because you may have to pay someone when all is said and done) and ad that to the amount of money you want to have saved for moving day. Here are a few things to consider:
Feed/Hay for winter
Heating costs; Propane? Wood? Coal?
Animal bedding
Infrastructure upgrades
House upgrades
Savings to live off for at least 3 months (Mortgage payments included)
Emergency health funds
Property and school taxes for the year
In February of 2018 “things got real” and I grew up real fast. Our bank barn that we had purchased with the property burned down with the hay we’d stored for the winter and most of our home goods that we’d stored in it while redoing the house, as well as all of my livestock equipment that I’d saved up and a priceless saddle that my friend had entrusted to me to care for. We were devastated. The smell of wood smoke drifting on a winter breeze still makes my heart beat quick. I lost my breeding stock of rabbits, a sheep and a few goats to complications from the smoke, but my horses were safe. We didn’t know what we were going to do; losing our barn may have been the last straw to a very short adventure in owning a farmstead. To our surprise and eternal gratefulness our community rallied around us. People I had never met before came into our lives delivering feed and hay for the animals, my neighbors took precious time out of their days to help build free standing structures to help shelter the animals from the brutal cold that February winters can bring with them. My husband’s home unit arrived to help tear down the old structure and save wood from the barn. It was incredible. Community was everything. When our insurance money came we were able to bring ourselves back to a flat playing field financially and start fresh. This was a devastating blow that God made the most out of for us.
#2: Infrastructure is Crucial
Both caring for animals and doing projects is expensive! To cut your costs and keep your bottom line in the plus, do your renovation and important living projects like insulation BEFORE you commit to feeding animals!
My second moral of the story, and this one couldn’t be helped all that much for us since the barn burnt down and reduced us to starting at zero again, make sure that you have the infrastructure or the funds to build what you need before you purchase animals. Yes we were at a plus financially but a deficit infrastructurally and in property aesthetics! I had come from Scottsville with my Fergus and Friends “Browsing crew”; a rag tag collection of 14 goats that I was able to use to remove brush with over the summer for clients. I had about 8 pregnant sheep that were coming up to lambing time without any way for me to shelter the new little lamblets from the cold, 4 full sized horses and 4 shetland/mini horses in a pen off of my porch. In hindsight if there were ever a time that I probably should have sold out and restarted instead of trying to stubbornly hold that set of creatures over it would have been then! We needed infrastructure pronto. On top of all of these struggles, my husband came home from training and, well, I soon would find out I was pregnant with baby #1 and that husband was schedule to be deployed January of 2019! Oh boy.
Sheds/Barns/fencing are expensive, so is extra feed for your animals and paying veterinary costs for accidents that happened because you don’t have the structures you needed to care for the animal appropriately. I lost a lot of livestock in 2018 due to a myriad of different problems! Freezing, feeding issues(Ketosis to name one), parasites, etc. because of my lack of needed equipment and structures. If the property you purchase does not come equipped with the appropriate buildings and fences, you will need to purchase these and it does not come cheap. Wait on your animals and put everything that you need into building. I am still struggling with issues such as the barn flooding, foot rot from wet pastures, parasites and toxic run off from the manure pile because my infrastructure is not where it could be and I spend all of my time and money dealing with issues and feeding, that could be put into building and growing the farm the right way. I will stubbornly get where I want to be eventually but it’s not easy going and I have to rely heavily on non farm income, like breeding Zena, to afford it all.
The trouble with homesteads in general is that any type of infrastructure costs money. We found quickly that our property, on the edge of a swamp, was wet and needed tiling and drainage installed. We threw money at the barn, at fences, at feeding the animals, etc. only to find out… it runs out! This is where I wish I had done something a little different financially: Saved a chunk of it. But we didn’t and having to split what we’d been given for the barn up to make the animals safe and care for them well until the barn would finally be constructed in the fall of 2018 meant that we had less money to put into building the barn. I shorted myself on the foundation and to this day regret not spending as much as I possibly could have on gravel and a cement pad to ease my own pain in later years.
When it came time for the barn to be built we ended up slightly above our budget, by about $6k just to finish the pole barn shell. We were forced to take out a loan. Unfortunately I had also maxed out my credit cards subsidizing feed for the animals because we were making nothing back monetarily from them, so building back up to the level of infrastructure that was needed put us about 16k in debt again. Do you see it? Dancing on the line of sustainability, it confirms the general idea that if you believe you have the money you will spend it and will never actually have the money. Living within your means is apparently a hard lesson to learn in your twenties (I have yet to learn it!).
#4. DIY
My next point is do it yourself. At 5 months pregnant and husband working more than full time and prepping for a deployment I found myself building the interior of our barn myself. I used a mixture of wood types, some of the old oak wood from the burnt down barn, some donated wood that had been in someone’s backyard and some white pine from our local store. In this way I was able to save a lot of money for both labor and new supplies. It was hard going with my small circular saw trying to chew through those old warped, rough cut chunks of old barn lumber but it was done. Soon I had an interior of my barn!
Just because you don’t hire a professional doesn’t mean that your infrastructure isn’t perfectly sound and useable. Building the interior of our barn didn’t exactly make it look like a million dollar horse stable because, well it’s not! And I still have some shame in the fact that I wasn’t able to sink handfuls of cash into the project to make it look like a million bucks, but when it comes down to it, that’s not the point and purpose of homesteading now is it? It needed to fill a role and it did just that, since then I have made some adjustments and if we were staying on farm for the long haul I would likely re do it, but my DIY has done what it needed to and is still standing today after being bashed around by countless different types of livestock. You can cut $ off your projects by just using a little creativity, some youtube or blogger’s help and a couple of tools and don't you ever feel ashamed of the work you put into it. If someone else looks at it and curls a lip that’s their problem, I liken that to a child drawing an animal that is like a bunch of lines; It might not look like much, but someday they may be a great artist creating the next Mona Lisa, or they may be an adult never willing to draw again because someone sneered at them and said, “you suck, kid.” Be brave.
What I love the most about DIY is that, while your first time doing it may not be insanely beautiful, as you build and create things yourself you learn and teach yourself what to not do. Eventually you will build up a whole new skill set that you may be able to share, maybe some day from all of the “not a million dollar” builds you do, you will learn the method to making something look like a million bucks out of not much and will no longer feel the shame of having someone ask “Why didn’t you just pay someone to do it?” Hashtag, “what’syourdrive?”
#5. Be Debt Free
My last point brings us back to the beginning. Debt. Debt is a fluid thing to me, I wish I had the extra cash to fund the projects that I need to but I have a list approximately a foot long of things that need to be done to this day and it’s been 5 years that we’ve lived here! Parts of the old barn platform still stand starkly, like the bones of a dead animal, in my backyard. The old retaining wall, a cement wall about 5 feet high, still separates the driveway from the drop off and I worry every day a child might go out, take one wrong step and tumble into the basement of what was the old barn. When a visitor pulls in the drive the first sight is metal sheets of old pole barn sticking up from the earth and items, that should be housed in the garage that we aren’t fortunate enough to have, barricading the drop until the day that we can afford to shell out 20k to bulldoze and set up a new garage.
The barn floods every fall and spring, and even sometimes during the summer if it’s a wet rainy year. I need to purchase more gravel and eventually buy enough cement or grease the palm of a contractor who can mix and pour a concrete pad for me to help the barn stay high and dry and CLEAN. Until then I spend countless dollars trying to keep bedding in the barn to keep feet and hooves dry, despite having to shovel it out into the manure pile the very next day.
The windows in our little house are old wood and glass windows. If you put a hand by the frames you can feel the winter air rush through them. The house only has one 15 foot section of baseboard heating to keep the entire thing warm and needs new heat installed and the pellet stove fixed. The wood floors have spots where we unearthed mold when we first moved in but due to the house not being level we aren’t able to DIY the floors ourselves. The pastures are wet and need new tiles and drainage and gravel pads. Oh and I shouldn’t mention the fact that I covet a tractor to do some of the hard labor that is needed on this farm.
Do you see what all of these have in common? They require $$$. As long as I have projects that need to be done I will be in debt. But what if I’d started out on my homesteading journey without a negative in my bottom line? What if, even better, I’d have started with a savings account that would gladly take the hit for these projects? Debt is the first and the last. These days I attempt to take a calculated risk when pulling out debt; will this pay me back someday? if not, I wait and weather the complaints and the worry until I can pay for it. If so, I will take a risk and use a source of borrowed income to afford the task. It’s a gamble and as such I believe holds an unreliability and uncertainty to it that I wish I didn’t have to carry, but that is my way of doing; NOT the one I would suggest.
A smarter me would suggest to have the funds for what you need to do. A smarter me would say shred your credit cards, keep a bank account with an emergency fund and home improvement funds. A smarter me would say stay out of debt, don’t even use it as a calculated gamble. But then… Don’t all starting businesses have to have some sort of extensive funding? I’d love to find the sort that doesn’t require being paid back. My goal was to eliminate the amount of years I gave to the system before I was able to live a life that I truly love. And I do love this despite all of our struggles.
Homesteading is amazing but don’t expect it to be easy. Finances are stressful and can own you or you can own them. Expect your first year in homesteading to be somewhat like the first year of marriage; tough, expensive, disheartening. There are so many learning curves to animals, finances, home owning, and in my case being a parent to navigate. I jumped in feet first and almost blacked out when the ice water stole my breath. You don’t have to. Keep heart; things get better in the following years.
