How do you afford an off the grid homestead lifestyle? Our 5 income streams

Over the years, I saw quite often the question in the comment section, like how do we afford this awkward lifestyle? And in this video, I'd like to address that. Some people seem to think you need to be really rich to be able to afford this kind of lifestyle. And other people seem to think we don't have any living costs and we don't have any bills to pay. But the truth is somewhere in the middle. We need income. We have bills. We have a child to provide for. We have investments to make in our homesteads. But we have built a life where our income comes from multiple small streams of income instead of one conventional job. And that changes everything. The first stream is my printmaking business. I'm an artist. I carve woodblock prints and sell them online, shipping them all over the world. This work fits beautifully with homestead life. I can carve in my studio during the darker months when outdoor work slows down. The rhythm of making art and the rhythm of the seasons align. There is a point in every race when a rider encounters his real opponent and understands that it's himself. In case you're interested in seeing the collection that is currently for sale, you can find a link to my web shop in the description box below. The second stream is Jonas' woodworking and building. He spends two to three short days a week renovating and building at friends' places in the area. If you live rurally and can work with your hands, you become valuable to the local community. There is always demand for honest, skilled people who can work with their hands. The third stream is our small guest house. We run it as an Airbnb during the summer months when tourists visit Estonia. It's seasonal work, but it comes at exactly the right time. So the fourth income stream is our YouTube channel. This has been the way to connect with you guys and has been a way for me to document our journey here on the homestead. And it has been such a pleasure to do this. I haven't done any sponsorships so far. That is also an option. But the AdSense brings in a little bit. It's not that much, but every bit helps. So that's our fourth income stream. But here's the fifth and maybe most important stream. The money we don't have to spend. We generate most of our electricity through the solar system. We harvest our own firewood. We grow a part of our own food. Our cabin is passive solar design, which dramatically lowers our heating needs. Every system we built on this homestead is an investment that reduces what we need to earn. That's income too, just in a different form. I'm still collecting mulch to put on my garden bed so they can rest well and be protected this next winter. Autumn always goes by surprisingly fast and most of the colorful leaves have already disappeared. The leaves won't be returning before May. I'm also checking on my compost and feel pleased seeing all those earthworms working hard to turn it into life-giving humus for me. I've made five compost heaps this year and I think that will be sufficient for the whole garden area. So here is what's most important. It's having a diversification, having multiple income streams. So when one dries up, another one picks up. In the summertime, the guesthouse is running. Print sales might be slow, but we're eating fresh from the garden, so the grocery expenses drop. Jonas is busy with building projects in the good weather. In the wintertime, the guesthouse is closed, but printmaking picks up. People buy art in the darker months. Jonas has less building work, but we need less income because our expenses are lower. We're not driving as much. We live rurally, so there's not much to spend money on when it comes to activities anyway. The seasons create a natural rhythm. Income and expenses rise and fall together, but never all at once. So what's also equally important for us is that we, Jonas and me, we both work part-time hours because we want to be really present for for Ileana and for perhaps some future kids when they are in these early ages, like the first three years of their lifetime. It's so precious and it goes by so fast. So we want to be present for that. This lifestyle isn't about grinding harder to make homesteading work. It's about creating the space to actually be with the people we love. Here's what people don't always realize. We didn't have these income streams before we moved here five years ago. We built them slowly, one at a time. They started stacking on each other and the beginning wasn't comfortable. There were many unknowns. Would this actually work? Could I figure it out? Could we really make enough? We didn't have a plan B, so we persisted. So in the beginning years, the first few years of this homestead, we needed a lot of cash to set up all the systems, to build up our house and to just provide for our living costs. So we made sure that we had a bit of cash set aside for those first years to make the transition a little bit easier. It lessens the overwhelm that you will feel in the beginning years when there's so much to figure out. There's so much skills to learn and there's so much things that need to be done. So if you have to work a lot of hours as well to pay the bills, on top of that all, it would be really overwhelming. One thing that made this possible, the Internet. There are so many opportunities now to set up income streams that support this lifestyle. I can sell prints to someone in Australia from my forest studio in Estonia. We can host guests from around the world in our little cabin. The Internet didn't make off-grid living possible. People have done this for generations, but it made it more accessible, more diverse and more flexible. So the real question is, are you able to set up a few income streams? Are you able to grow a part of your food yourself and reduce the grocery expenses and the bills? And are you able to develop a skill set that could be valuable in a rural community, like building or welding or any handiwork that's so necessary in these rural communities? And there's always a need for that. Could you maybe provide some kind of online service like consulting or selling art or being a teacher online? Because that sort of a thing is also something that fits nicely into a homestead life. It's not about being wealthy and it's not about not needing money. These five streams, the printmaking, building work, the guest house and YouTube and the money that we don't spend, they weave together into something that works. It's not perfect and it's not always comfortable. But I think it's sustainable. And that's what matters when you're building a life and not just chasing a dream. Thank you very much for watching. I'm wishing you all a very beautiful day today and all the best to you all.