Like most aspiring homesteaders, we moved off-grid to cut expenses and find a simpler life. We were hoping to work less, and spend more time in the garden, but we hadn’t planned ahead for a few key expenses.
Property taxes
Depending on where you live, property taxes can be a serious burden. In our town in Central Vermont, the annual property tax rate is 2.59%. That means we pay the town 2.59% of our home’s value every single year.
To make the math simple, let’s say it’s 2.5%. That means that even if we didn’t have a mortgage, we’d have to pay the town the full value of our home every 40 years just in property taxes.
With annual tax increases, which have happened every single year we’ve lived here, it’s more likely that we’ll pay the town the full value of our house in closer to 30 years. It looks like even if you don’t have a mortgage to a bank, in our town at least, you have a mortgage to the town.
If you’re building your own home, there are a few things you can do to reduce the assessed value of your home and thereby reduce your property taxes. For the most part, assessments are calculated based on statistical criteria, such as square footage and number of bedrooms and bathrooms.
Plan for 1 somewhat larger bathroom rather than 2 or more as is common in houses these days.
Feel free to build on extra rooms, but skip built-in closets. A bedroom, at least in Vermont, is defined as a room with a closet and anything without a closet is an “office” or “den” regardless of whether or not your kids are bunking there.
Be efficient about your floor plan, and minimize square footage wherever you can.
For your land, some states have reduced property taxes on agricultural land if it’s registered and protected.
Vermont has a “current use” program, that reduces property taxes on land that’s kept out of development. To enter the current use program, you need 25 contiguous acres for agricultural use, plus 4 acres of “homesite” around your house that can be developed.
That’s a total of 29 acres of land at minimum.
January full moon. So beautiful it looks like daylight, doesn’t it?
Dependable Internet
We planned to finance our off-grid lifestyle with remote “on-grid” work. That can work wonderfully, as you get the benefit of the lower cost of living in a rural area but still are able to pull in independent contractor wages from high cost of living areas like New York City.
There’s just one problem. To work remotely, you need dependable internet.
What happens when an ice storm covers your panels for a week? Or maybe your off-grid power is working great, but power’s out in the rest of the state so your internet provider isn’t up and running.
For the most part, you want to choose to be indoors working for pay when the weather’s at its worst. Unfortunately, that’s when your internet is most likely to be down.
If you need internet to bring in income, try to locate your homestead within a reasonable drive of a town center where you can find a cafe, library, or co-working space with reliable internet.
Better yet, try to match your off-grid lifestyle to off-grid work.
Take up selling jams or soaps, tap trees, and produce your own maple syrup. Work towards removing your source of income from the grid and you’ll be happier in the long run.
Generator Time (Fuel & Maintenance)
Since we still had “on-grid” income sources in our off-grid home, there were some days when we really needed power. In the summer, during gardening season, you have more power than you can use, but when you’re inside in the dead of winter trying to make a living things get stretched a bit thin.
Until we really learned how to manage power well in the winter, we needed a lot of generator hours to keep ourselves up and running. With a lot of generator hours, obviously, you’re using a lot of fuel, which is expensive, but more importantly, you’re putting stress on your generator that leads to breakdowns.
While you’d like to be able to fix everything yourself, if it’s your first generator experience, maintenance can be harder than something more simple like a lawnmower.
When the power’s out and the generator won’t start, that means the internet’s also down and you can’t exactly pull up a youtube troubleshooting video. Until you really know your generator, expect to spend more than you’d like with a local generator service company.
Thoughts?
How about you? What are you budgeting for moving off-grid? What do you think others might have forgotten?
RKM
Whether moving off grid or not, two other costs that increase very quickly, home insurance, and medical insurance, I had budgeted 10 percent a year, sometimes it is 20. Or 25 percent. Always reevaluate coverage and reshop if possible.
Ashley Adamant
Agreed. Thus far, our homeowners insurance has only gone up 1 or 2% per year…but health insurance is all over the place. That one in particular is really hard to plan for.
PL Packer
I recently accepted a severance package that will put me into retirement 2.5 years earlier than I had planned. I’m selling my property that I had planned to homestead and will downsize from 5 acres to 1/2 an acre. I will be living in a pole building with living quarters, have a garden, chickens and the landowners (my daughter and SIL) raise pigs and beef so I just buy 1/2 a pig and 1/4 of beef. My goal is to be debt free after my property sells and I get the new place built. I will have minimal electricity, pellet stove for heat, the electric Co-Op for internet and gravity fed water supply. I’ve thought about solar panels, at this time they are cost prohibitive, I wouldn’t see a return on my investment.
Holly
I have just recently started reading your articles and have found them not only informative but quite entertaining. As my husband and I are both engineers we have given great thought to going off the grid. Reading your experiences brings many things to consider that most people don’t think about. I completely agree with you in the aspect that off grid living is a complete lifestyle change. If we go off the I am totally getting that whirlpool tub. Thanks for the tip.
Lora Bertelsen
We are looking to advance into the off grid foray. We hope to purchase 20 acres and provide a group forum for people to stay at our place in their own RV or at one of our 3 private double queen cabins. We want to provide a place where we can all learn together in a group to promote collaboration and hands on experiences as we also have 4 quite large greenhouses, outdoor amplitheater and indoor conference lodge with commercial kitchen…. to throw into the mix! any ideas, or suggestions for us?
Ashley Adamant
Your place sounds wonderful! We originally planned to do something similar to what you describe, but we quickly realized we’re way too misanthropic for that many humans. A great idea though, if you love company. Since we’re pretty insular here, I don’t have great suggestions for you. I do have some friends who have a wonderful educational farm setup, and you might check them out (http://www.dacres.org/)
Darlene Tryon
Where are you located? At this day and time we HAVE TO move away from cities.
Admin
I agree. We live in Vermont.
robert talmadge
i use a thermoelectric generator to produce electricity to run internet connection and lights. wood heat makes basic electricity while panels are covered.
happy new year.
Ashley Adamant
Interesting! I’d love to learn more about yours, is it homemade or some kind of commercial model?
Elena
I was curious about the thermoelectric generator from the above comment. I did a bunch of digging and found a small company in Vermont that makes thermoelectric generators for wood stoves: https://www.tegmart.com/
They have many videos, but here’s one that explains the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O3FlujxXCw&ab_channel=TEGproThermoelectricGeneratorExperts
I’m wonder how much they can power in practice… Maybe it’s enough to power an internet router, but I’d think you would need a reasonably sized battery bank to be sure the internet could stay on continuously. I’m curious if you think this set up would be helpful to you.
Ashley Adamant
Wow, that’s crazy, I’ve never heard of them. I have seen portable small wood-burning camp stoves that have integrated generators (BioLite is the brand I think), so it makes sense they’d make something bigger. I’m sending the links you gave to my husband now so we can both check it out. Thank you!
Steven
I have two comments. The first would be that if you are considering going off grid before going all-in I recommend buying your land and an RV. I live in Central Utah in an area where a lot of people are living off of the grid. We have a lot of people that sell their homes in the city and go all in on building Off the Grid. As many people on these sites point out it is a definite lifestyle change. Over half the people that move down here want to turn their new home into the city they just moved out of. These people are ultimately unhappy dissatisfied folks. Typically they are upside down on their investment and unable to move back to the city. If you are serious about going off grid buy a piece of property buy an RV and spend every single moment that you can on the property for at least a year before liquidating your assets in the city. If you make it through four seasons and still like it then go for it. You will have a much better understanding of what you are getting into. Even things as simple as local politics can be a deal-breaker for living out your days in happiness.
Ashley Adamant
Excellent point.
Gail Penrod
There were several things I wish we had budgeted for before we began our homesteading adventure. But I think the biggest most single item would have to be a tractor with a scoop and an auger. We have so-so Internet through a satellite company, and we keep an eye on the amount of our electric usage so as not to drain our batteries, but the biggest frustration has been not having a tractor that can help us with the very large projects. Digging post holes for fencing by hand or with a small two-man auger is exhausting beyond description. Not having a scoop on a tractor to move gravel, move bales of hay, move compost from the compost bins and a million other things is horribly time-consuming and physically wearing on the body.
It is taking us years longer to get all of the projects done because we didn’t have a tractor. We had read somewhere that if you don’t use the tractor for at least 500 hours a year it’s not worth the expense. We thought we would follow that philosophy and not buy a tractor and in hindsight we’ve decided that what we read was clearly wrong and we regret our decision.
Ashley Adamant
We absolutely love our tractor, and it’s allowed us to do things that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. We used to split all our wood by hand (5 to 6 cords a year), after hauling it out of the woods by hand. A great workout when you’re in your 20’s, but it doesn’t leave much time for doing anything else. In the first 2 years of homesteading here on this land, 80% of our work time was spent hauling or splitting wood!
We got a tractor 4 years in, and though we don’t use it anywhere near 500 hours a year, it saves us easily 500-1000 hours a year in manual labor. The backbreaking heavy stuff that wears you down and doesn’t leave you fit for doing fine work elsewhere…as you say, moving gravel by hand, digging fence holes, etc.
I’d say you don’t have to use it 500 hours a year, but if you’re going to spend 500 hours a year doing it because you don’t have a tractor, and you could do it in 20-50 hours with a tractor, then it’s definitely worth it!