You don’t need a full on farm or homestead to be self sustaining. You don’t even need a house. It’s not the easiest life, but it is much more fulfilling than relying on drive-throughs, pre packaged food, and grocery store hours. Here are just a few reasons you should start being more self sufficient.
Put your money to better use.
Being self sustaining can save you quite a bit of money. Saving a dollar by making bread or a few cents by squeezing your own juice doesn’t sound like much, but there is a great thing called compounding investments. Take that little amount you saved and watch how it adds up, then invest it and let it grow.
The average yearly return of the S&P 500 is around 10%. Imagine the money you spend on things you can recycle of make at home getting 10% per year. While it might not seem like much, putting that money into a retirement fund and adding to it can add up in a few years. If you were able to contribute $5,000 annually to investments making 8.5%, you would have a million dollars in only 35 years. I think that’s better than buying food that you can easily make at home.
If you’re interested in investing but don’t know where to start, Investopedia and The Balance has a lot more information than I could ever know. I highly recommend Charles Schwab for investing. If you use this link, you can receive up to $500 when making your first deposit (we don’t receive any money from this link, but it could help you out).
Spend more quality time with your family.
The dream is to quit the nine to five and spend more time with your family, but somehow the bills have to be paid. While you will still need some kind of income to pay the bills, being self sustaining can reduce the amount of money you need to get by, thereby reducing the amount of time you spend away from home.
Not only can being self-sufficient allow you to stay with your family more, it also creates more quality time. More needs to be done that the whole family can be involved in. Working and creating something together as a family can make everyone closer. Children can be a big help around the house and in the garden. Which takes me to my next point…
Teach your kids how to work from an early age.
We give our daughter 30 UAH (about one dollar) a week. She’s two so it’s kind of a big deal for her. Some people might say that she’s only two and doesn’t deserve an allowance, but, believe it or not, it is teaching her how to work. Every Friday is allowance day. And while she is too young to understand the value of money, she understands that she can get something if she works for it, even if it’s just cleaning her room.
Being self-sustaining means there is more to do around the house. Giving your children chores will not only give them a stronger work ethic at an early age, it can help you save time. Our girl is two and can already clean her room, wipe up a drink she spilled, and help take clothes to the washing machine.
Reduce your carbon footprint.
Being more self sufficient means you are taking every opportunity to reduce your waste. A part of this is recycling and upcycling.
Recycling is mostly about reducing what goes to the landfill. If your area has a recycling program, then take advantage of it. Read about your program and see what can be recycled and what can’t, and when you are shopping, take this into account. Try to buy loose products instead of pre-packaged (which can also save money). Instead of buying little pieces of chicken that are shrink wrapped, buy a whole one and cut it yourself.
Upcycling is taking trash and making it into something useful. Something we do this a lot with is bottles. Every glass and plastic bottle we get, we clean and reuse. Wine bottles can be used to put cooking oil in if you get a couple of bottle pourers. Glass jars can be used as cups (we don’t even buy cups anymore). If you look around at what you have, you will see how much of it can be reused with a little cleaning.
You know where your food comes from.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at a very early age. Without going into details, I’ll say the way the doctors medicated me when I was young led to problems later on in life. After a lot of research, I found out that there is a strong correlation between what kids eat and medical problems such as ADD, ADHD, asthma, and allergies. Keep in kind this is my own research, and I am pretty far from being a medical doctor.
While it is difficult to be 100% self sufficient without a pretty big piece of land, there are ways of starting in your own home. If you want to find out how to start being more self sufficient, check out our post about how to become more self sufficient right now.
So those are my 5 reasons to be more self sufficient. If you want to start recycling food you already buy, check out our post on how to grow an endless supply of herbs at home.
