That sign hangs beside the register at one of the mechanics shops near my work.
Early on, litterally when it was just a thought, we realized this would take significant funding.... yes you can do it on a budget if you try hard... and you can get used, recycled, or discarded materials for some things for cheap or free.... but I rarely have that kind if luck.
We knew we did not want to go into debt in order to start this endeavor...
1- To start with I have to admit that we "cheated" while I already owned a home with a *very* little bit of land at the time we started seriously mapping out this journey it wasn't in a great place to do what we wanted... as we where planning my grandmother became ill and we ended up inheriting her house and a little more than 18 acers of the original family land. We sold the original house for more than I paid for it and used that money to place solar pannels on the new house.
2- We both already worked...alot. My wife works 40hrs a week at one job, while I work 40 hours and my 1st job and 36hrs a week at my secound. This gave us a little bit of money to start but there is far from enough to build what we wanted.
3. Inline with the quote in the beginning of this post I was once told.. when I was of college age to "never buy or sell anything when you have to." Doing so puts you at a disadvantages you have to accept the price you can get
We began setting aside a small amount of money each check, any overtime, shift-diferenratals, holiday pay, ect... it adds up. And we made a wish list of things we know we would need. With this ever evolving list we stalked facebook marketplace and craigslist and slowly acquired items like stock tanks, barrels, troughs, specialty tools, bee box's, solar electric femce chargers, ext when we found people getting rid of them for cheap.... even 990ft of woven wire fence for $100. We also watched certain items on Rual King's website and even Amazon for them to go on sale.
4. We settled on the idea of letting the land, and our endeavors help fund itself and the next endeavors down the line.
After we made the LLC we opened three bank accounts, every dollar made gets divided equally into accounts designated for Operations, Profit, and Taxes.
One of the first things we built was the chicken coop... it will take a very long time to make back the money spent on the building but during most months the sale of their extra eggs covers the cost of their feed plus a little extra.
The sourdough bakery was the next main endeavor, and to this point the most successful. It has become my wifes secound job.
Honey-last year I started with one hive, cutrently we have two strong healty hives and hope to sell some honey, propolis, and wax products from them next year in addition to increasing the number of hives.
Meat chickens.- This was out first year raising a test batch and it went really well. A few of them came through the butchering process pretty enough to chance selling. Next year we will increase the number of birds we raise and maybe add turkeys.
Logging- our name is Lazywoods Homestead... of our 18+ acers 17 of it is woods. We have zero desire to log the land into fields, but to thin the forrest, to allow sunlight to hit the forrest floor so the understood can grow and pro ide food for the evental sheep and goats. We pass around the idea of a family cow... and would live to have horses but any if those are WAY down the line. But the harvesting of timber will provide a little extra funding as well.
Hogs- I almost have all the stuff to raise them...I still need to make a large feeder and asymble the waterer for them, but next year we will start that process (incidently that's what I said last year as well.
Goats and sheep. There is a fair local market for the meat of both... and dual breed goats provide more than enough milk for our needs plus a little extra to sell, cutrently waiting on the logging project.
Dog sitting. We discovered that there is a shortage of boarding kennels around us. But this project will have to wait untillbwe are in a place that allows my wife to quit work and be hone full time. Then we will build a 4 or 5 bay kennel and watch doggies for people on vacations or whatever they need.
As you can tell we picked "Good and Cheep" it's taking a while but honestly it's a good thing... we would be truely over welmed if we took all this on at once.
