Hi all!
I’d like to use this thread to talk shop with fellow T Nation’ers who are living offgrid, used to live offgrid or plan to do so in the forseeable future. I’d like to focus on both core motivations, the transition into the lifestyle, where you’re at, what your goals are (short/mid/long term) and, of course, on lessons learned.
Against the backdrop of what ‘offgrid’ means to you. Sure, there is the common denominator of being disconnected from utilities, but other than that, it has been our (my wife’s and my) experience that there’s a lot of diversity in how folks like to shape their offgrid life. And, last but not least, how we arrange to meet our training and food requirements. Also, I’d like to think that with where the world is going right now, the idea of self-reliance has become more appealing to the general public.
I used to be fairly active on T Nation in my mid-to-late twenties, now I’m 40-ish (I went by the handle ‘FattyFat’, but had to create a new account since I couldn’t remember my login credentials). As is usual with folks who used to lift a lot, life hits you with stuff and your priorities shift. I might open a thread in the ‘Over 35 forum’ to discuss lifting-related stuff, but this thread isn’t about that. If some old guns might remember me, feel free to reach out.
TL;DR:
- we’ve had to shift gears career-wise to bankroll our offgrid journey
- this also entailed moving to North America, which we did at the onset of the pandemic
- we sold everything, bought property, RV and equipment remotely and hopped on the plane
- immigration is tough
- we’ve been living on our property for more than 18 months
- we’re almost completely offgrid (about to disconnect from the electricity provider)
- we’re in the process of building our homestead and look forward to our first harvest by autumn
Let me kick this off with our story:
HOW IT STARTED
Throughout my 30s I’ve been fascinated with the offgrid lifestyle, but focused heavily on building a career that would allow me to earn a lot of money but also be very self-determined in the way I’d spend my time (both professionally and in private).
My wife and I don’t come from money (I grew up very poor) and worked hard to build careers that would allow us to live the suburban dream: a duplex, two cars on the gravel, mainly a life where you don’t have to worry about money and have enough time to pursue what makes you happy. Once we had reached that goal - at least the suburban duplex part - we’d been in the work force for about 12 - 15 years (my wife is younger), cut our teeth, realized we just can’t and wouldn’t conform to the corporate culture, but had been to timid to become self-employed.
We managed to hold on to our individuality and stay authentic by leveraging our technical expertise in our respective fields: basically being given lots of autonomy in exchange for making our respective employers a lot of money (I held multiple successful managerial positions). Needless to say, this came at the added cost of being very exhausting. Also, at this point in life, we had accrued enough experience to know that the German suburban duplex lifestyle wasn’t really up our alley: too expensive, too many regulations (your US building codes and HOAs have nothing on German administrative passion), nosy neighbors not necessarily sharing the same general values etc. So, we needed and wanted an out. And for this out, we had to hit certain financial numbers. And we wanted it fast.
WHY WE DID IT
In order to really pull off the lifestyle my wife and I always wanted (offgrid and otherwise), we knew we had to move to North America from our native Germany (a country and culture that we’d been feeling suffocated by since at least 2015). Germany is just too densely populated, goverment overreach and lots of red tape make it very hard to adopt an offgrid lifestyle, public safety had been developing to become a serious issue since 2015, high cost of living, relatively low wages compared to the US (at least in the highly sought after fields that we work in), shitty gun laws, a culture heaviliy characterized by obedience. There was no way we’d get children in Germany - no fucking way.
This is the point where I need to point out that Germany (and Europe in general) - surprisingly - ain’t the US. While education and healthcare used to be kinda good in Germany, the taxes are a real burden, not a lot of good is done with them and there’s a lot of government overreach. While I can back up a lot of this with facts, this isn’t the thread to delve into that beyond discussing what had motivated us to move to North America and why it’s hard to accrue wealth in Germany. I’m grateful for the education, but the healthcare system is a joke outside of treating acute life-threatening conditions. If you want to improve your quality of life and/or get effective treatment for debilitating chronic injuries or ailments, the medical system won’t be able to help you. So, for folks such as us, (STEM degrees; lots of professional experience in highly sought after fields; self-starters; can work remotely; want to build an offgrid life; gun/2A lovers; hustlers; live and let live), the (rural) US of A are very appealing. It goes without saying that someone with different values and goals in life would come to a radically different conclusion.
HOW WE DID IT
So, in early 2019 I realized that the best way for us to bankroll the whole project (immigrating to North America and build an offgrid life) - and to do it fast enough - would be via becoming self-employed. So I pulled the trigger and kept doing what I had been doing as an employee and almost quadrupled my salary. I don’t bring this up to brag, but to stress how important it had been to earn this money to give us the means to accelerate our project. And we’re so glad we did it that way, because without all that prep - and money that allowed us to save time by outsourcing, to eat price hikes and to hire local scouts (we had bought our property remotely) - we wouldn’t have been able to actually move to North America during the pandemic. We expected borders to close and knew we had to act fast, lest our immigration process would be prolonged by all the shutdowns. We managed to snag our visas just in time before the borders closed, sold our house, packed a bag, hired a contractor to sell all our belongings, bought an RV (remotely), prepped our quarantine plan with the help of a scout and the RV vendor, got on the plane and never looked back.
WHERE WE ARE TODAY
Fast forward to today, 2+ years later and we’re sitting on our property in our prefab home, off the beaten path and enjoy nature: we got our own water system (well), our septic and are about to install our PV system (still waiting for the wires) to allow us to disconnect from the utilties. We’re building our homestead (we got a large plot and expect our first harvest in autumn), have laying hens and are about to pull the trigger on getting meat rabbits to secure our very own animal protein pipeline. Income-wise, we’ve opened a company, remotely providing tech consulting services. While we enjoy running our company and feel blessed that we can pull this off, our career-gears have shifted to regard this as an income stream. There are no aspirations to grow it out. The money we’re making is good and, in the long run, we’re going to free up more time by providing software products instead of selling billable hours.
LESSONS LEARNED
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While we pride ourselves on the careers we’ve built, it had been really eye opening how much we SUCK at manual labor. Sure, I had let myself go a lot, but have managed to shape up some. But I’m not talking about general physical preparedness, only. I’m also talking about manual dexterity, for lack of a better word. I suck as a handyman. I usually have good ideas, also regarding how to solve homesteading and building challenges. And I’m definitely not prone to over-engineering. But boy, I’m so fucking clumsy. My wife is way better than me in that regard. I realize that I’ve spent my career years purely focusing on being an information worker. Luckily for us (at least in the long run), there aren’t many contractors around - and the ones you can get ahold of are very unreliable. And will overcharge you as a principle (until they’ve got to know you). So, almost no more outsourcing, gotta do all of it ourselves. Which is a blessing in disguise. If you’ve built some homesteading component yourself, you’re in a better position to operate and service it when something needs fixing.
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Something regularly needs fixing.
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Tools and equipment are expensive.
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Harvesting cute animals needs getting used to, but needs doing.
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Nobody is an island. No matter how self-reliant you’re aspiring to become, you need help. Be part of the community. While I don’t mind helping out, I’m not one for idle chitchat. While I’m good at smalltalk (part of my former career involved lots of pitching and also presales engineering), I don’t care for it much in my private life. My wife doesn’t mind. And this is how we (well, she) scored lots of good contacts that keep on proving to be useful and nice. I need to strike a good balance between being outgoing and still selective enough.
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Have backups for the most important components.
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Food prep. Learn it.
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Be fucking patient.
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Never delay important homesteading stuff.
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Logistics: living in the boonies requires more coordination regarding shopping, ordering (most companies don’t deliver to our door).
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Having your own property out in the boonies gives you so many options for energy systems work. Not a big fan of black flies, horse-flies or moose-flies, but it’s amazing how much weighted carries in the woods have been doing for me. All I need is to head out onto the porch, grab a heavy slamball or some other implement and head up my hills.
Thanks for reading.
Hit me up with any questions you might have and - more importantly - please share your experience and/or plans regarding the offgrid lifestyle.
- FattyFat
