How to Live Completely Off Grid Without Debt

Wondering how to live 100% off the grid while avoiding debt? Read on to discover one couple’s journey towards learning how to live completely off grid.

Wondering how to live 100% off the grid while avoiding debt? Read on to discover one couple’s journey towards learning how to live completely off grid.

In 2013, I was working as a graphic designer in Boulder, Colorado, and making nearly $50,000 a year. Despite my steady job, I was deeply unhappy. I felt like a chronic consumer, and my urban apartment didn’t provide many opportunities for self-sufficient living.

My partner, Jesse, and I decided to turn our lives around by saving for a rural piece of property in Idaho where we could build an off-grid home. For the next two years, we worked extremely hard to reduce our overhead living expenses and save money for a down payment on a piece of land. We spent huge amounts of energy selling Jesse’s brick-and-mortar business, building micro-businesses online, and fixing up an old house in exchange for reduced rent. No words can describe the chaos, stress, and excitement of this two-year time frame. We lived in four different houses, each worked 80 to 90 hours per week, and often plugged away until the wee hours of the morning.

We understood that starting our own homestead and building an off-grid home from scratch would help us achieve our financial goals in the long run; we also knew that we’d need a substantial amount of money to get the ball rolling. A loan would’ve worked against our goal of achieving financial freedom, so we crunched some numbers to understand approximately how much money we’d need to save before getting started.