Welcome to Evening Sun Homestead.
We are a family of four living on 3/4 of an acre in the Pacific Northwest and making a go of homesteading on a budget.
This blog really started a year ago as a YouTube channel. I made videos about what we were doing on the property and how we were developing the land, but the trouble was, I lacked focus. I made plenty of videos and they are still up now. I even plan to add to the channel as we go, so creation was not my problem. The problem was that homesteading while also remodeling our 1922 fixer upper involves a lot. So much that our videos seemed very broad and without a central theme. Anything can fall within homesteading if it happens at home. Any home repair can fall within remodeling if it involves a trip to the hardware store.
Recently I started listening to Dave Ramsey and one of his associates Chris Hogan. The simple teachings and of these two brought me around again to the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) community. Anaya, my wife, actually introduced me to Mr. Money Mustache over a decade ago. At the time I was too young to think retiring early would ever be possible and had not really experienced the drudgery of year after year of work yet. MMM was just some crazy guy living in our town who was living on nothing.
Ramsey and Hogan reminded me that retirement was possible at an early age, even if you had a late start. Now at 35 I know that working for another 30 years is not how I want to spend the rest of my life. I want to walk away while my kids are still young.
So we have found our focus and our central theme, homesteading on a budget.
Anaya and I have never been frugal, we like to spend and we are good at it. In a bad way. We spend and spend until we are living pay check to pay check. Thankfully we have no debt at this time and can really focus our attention on saving but it won’t come easy.
How can we turn this home into an income generator, or at least off set some of our expenses? And is it really possible to renovate an old house without going broke?
Lets find out,