Timothy Yordy

A regular reader of this blog brought it to my attention the other day that articles like the one I did about Dandelion Jelly run the risk of losing my audience of would be entrepreneurs. I feel that I should clarify why I occasionally do articles about leading a self-sufficient life.

There are a couple of different approaches that people can take when attempting to get themselves out of the rat race. The first method is the one that I believe most people employ. That is to try and generate enough income through self-employed means to maintain their current lifestyle. This is often not so much a conscious choice as it is a subconscious continuation of current lifestyle habits.

Another approach to getting out of the rat race is to strive for a self-sufficient life. Meaning that you grow much of your own food and perform most home repairs yourself. This of course often applies to energy consumption as well. The idea here is that if you are more of a producer than you are a consumer then you require less income to support yourself. A self-sufficient approach to life isn’t for everyone, I myself certainly don’t aim for total self-sufficiency. Allow me for a moment though to make a case for it because I believe that it is becoming far too much of a lost way of living.

Let’s start with home energy since that is a hot button issue at the moment. If sky rocketing heating oil and natural gas prices don’t have you thinking about alternatives then I don’t know what will. Your ability to affordably heat your home is currently being held hostage by terrorist nations and our own government alike. If you don’t believe me just write your senator and ask him or her why we currently have a ban on drilling for new oil in our own nation when there are vast oil reserves off of the coasts, up in Alaska, in the Dakotas, and elsewhere. You do have options though with commercial and home brewed solar systems, wind generators and micro hydro-electric plants that can be easily made at home.

Your food supply. How many meat and vegetable recalls have we seen in the last couple years? Far too many for my liking and I don’t expect the situation to improve as corporations continually push for quantity over quality. A vegetable garden is fairly easy to maintain and you will end up with higher quality more flavorful and more nutritious produce than you can buy at the supermarket. Fruit trees once they are established will give you decades of free food. Keeping animals requires much less space than you might think and unless you are living in an apartment you could quite easily keep a few chickens for meat and eggs. If you have an acre or more to work with a few pigs and a cow is not out of the question either.

Home repairs. There will always be a long list of plumbers and electricians willing to clean out your wallet for minor home repairs. So this is not an issue of market availability. It’s an issue of not spending money on even minor repairs that you could easily learn to do yourself from a couple decent books on the subject.

As I said, I don’t plan on becoming completely self-sufficient. These things can be very time consuming after all and I enjoy doing other things a bit too much to commit myself to milking a cow twice a day for several years. I would encourage you though to at least learn some of the concepts of the self-sufficient life, you may find yourself applying them more often than you think. And if you are the paranoid type that envisions apocalyptic nuclear annihilation scenarios then you definitely want to learn to fend for yourself.

So for those of you who only come here to learn business concepts and strategies I hope I don’t lose you on the self-sufficiency topics. Stick around you might be surprised at what you can learn while I’m learning it too.

My wife and I haven’t needed to buy jelly for a full year now as we produce our own from fruits we grow and some we buy from local growers. Our son has moved into the peanut butter and jelly sandwich season of life however and I feel that our current production level is not sufficient to support his appetite. So I decided to look elsewhere for sources of jelly and it turns out that those pesky yellow flowers that pop up in your yard despite your best efforts to cleanse them from your property are actually quite tasty…or so I’ve heard. I plan to find out for myself. There are several different uses for the various parts of the dandelion plant but the first one I’m going to focus on is making dandelion jelly.

This is the recipe we used from Prairieland Herbs. I’m not posting it on here because there are dozens of different recipes for Dandelion Jelly available on the Internet and this is our first attempt so we have no way of judging whether or not this recipe is better than another. I had originally thought that I would leave some of the largest flowers alone so they could go to seed and then I would gather the seeds to plant them in rows next year for easier harvesting if I indeed did like how this all turned out. But gathering the flowers only took me about 20 minutes and so I really see no point in wasting valuable garden space with them next year.

I recently asked myself a question: If self-help books actually help people then why are there so many of them? I believe that there are two main reasons why there is a never ending stream of self-help books dealing with finance, fitness, relationships, spirituality and so on. The first reason is that what these books actually are is one person’s personal experience with something that worked for them and depending on the reader’s circumstances and/or personality the advice given might not produce any favorable results. The authors of these books of course claim that anyone can be successful in exactly the same way they were.

The second reason I think that self-help books are often ineffectual is that the reader simply does not follow through with the good advice being given. Self-help books are often littered with various simple exercises to try and get the reader to put into practice the things that are being discussed. I know for myself personally I tend to read non-fiction books in the same way that I would read fiction books, straight through. I often make mental notes along the way and tell myself that I will go back to that exercise later and then never do.

So I encourage you to slow down when reading self-help books and actually do the things that they advocate. You may be surprised at the results. What if that book you’re reading actually changed your life for the better? What if you put into practice everything that the book you are reading is advocating? Supposing that the book you are reading is of any value then your life would be richer because of it and you could stop spending all that money on self-help books and actually go out and live life. Now that I’ve preached at you, it’s time I actually go practice it.

Well the time has finally come for us to do our spring planting and it’s not a moment too soon. I think we started our plants indoors a week or two earlier than we should have. They’ve gotten quite large in their little peat pellets. Our lasagna gardening that I had mentioned in a previous post doesn’t appear to be working quite as planned. We’ve got weeds poking up in several places. I think that this is mostly due to us not doing it properly more than a problem with the basic premise of the idea. It appears that most of the weeds are simply poking up through gaps in the cardboard. We probably should have overlapped it a bit.

I’ve written a post on this topic once before but apparently it needs reiterating because somehow most of America missed the message. Last year Internet scammers took in more than $247 million dollars.

I want to be self-employed, I want to work at home, I want to have more time to spend with my family but these scam companies that promise you the world will never give you anything and in almost every case take something from you. Several months ago I decided to research the “work from home” arena on the Internet. I spent about 5 hours one day browsing and digging and trying to discern something legitimate in this industry. After all of my searching the best that I could come up with was that 99% are harmful and the other 1% are a waste of your time at best. The most insidious of these websites are the ones that claim to be debunkers of the fraudulent sites and then they usually recommend “the one trustworthy site they’ve found”, which in the end is just another scam site.

It probably doesn’t need to be said but if something is too good to be true it almost always is. The part about the Internet fraud industry that angers me the most I think is that the people who are most susceptible to this kind of thing are generally those who are down on their luck or feel desperately stuck in a soul crushing job and by losing money to these scammers they have only tied themselves to their current job a little more.

Surely, I thought to myself of all these opportunities a couple of them must actually be legitimate. Lies, all lies.

If you truly want to be financially sound, if you truly want to work from home then please stay away from these “opportunities” at all costs.

As I become increasingly interested in the idea of self-sufficiency I am taking an ever closer look at where my money goes. I came to a startling realization today when I realized just how much of my money ends up in the hands of the oil companies.

Between what it costs me to heat my house and what I spend on gas throughout the year I am probably spending about 20% of my yearly income on oil! And that is just what I spend directly on it, that’s not even beginning to scratch the surface of indirect costs from other goods and services.

Like millions of others I am definitely feeling the need to begin to look elsewhere for energy. Nevermind the fact that the US has more than enough of its own oil but we can’t have it because the politicians are afraid of the environmentalists.

There are a few other options out there that I am researching. I’ll let you know what I find out.

I admit it, I’m a big fan of MacGyver. I grew up watching the reruns on cable and recently purchased the first two seasons on dvd. I always appreciated his resourcefulness in the face of danger. Well when it comes to self-sufficiency hopefully you can find a little bit of MacGyver inside yourself. Sure you may not be outwitting East Germans or “state of the art” computer systems from the mid-eighties but I’m sure there are plenty of things in your daily life that you could be tackling yourself if you tried.

Just this morning  the metal frame around one of the lenses on my glasses broke. I went to the store and ordered new glasses but I won’t have them for a week. So I decided to try soldering them back together. I’ve never sodered anything in my life but for some reason I have a cheap solder gun and some electrical solder. I was able to successfully put my glasses together with what is at least a temporary fix. This little MacGyverism didn’t save me any money but it did save me some inconvenience.

Something I haven’t really touched on so far in this ongoing blog journey of mine is the topic of money management. Every day you hear news reports about America’s growing debt and people being tens of thousands of dollars in debt to credit card companies and not being able to pay their mortgage and now expecting the government to help them out. The majority of the people that fall into the categories that I just mentioned obviously have no concept of managing their money and spending within their means. To achieve independence from the rat race and independence from relying on others to do everything for you, you must take care of your money. You must know where its coming from and where its going. Make a balanced budget and stick to it. Utilize the budget to explore areas of excess spending that can be trimmed back or areas to potentially make some extra money.

At my previous job my boss, who made two to three times what I was and his wife brought in a good deal of money too, was always complaining about money issues and not being gable to pay the bills. Between the two of them they were both bringing in more than 100k! There’s no excuse for this kind of poor fiscal planning. I’ve seen so many examples of people who make a great deal more than I do but have nothing to show for it simply because of their spending habits.

If you find yourself in this kind of situation then read these next few lines very carefully. You can change course. You can turn your fortunes around but you have to be willing to do the work that gets you financially fit again. The best advice I can give you is to go buy a copy of The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. The book will impart wisdom to you that you may be lacking and help you find a way to get back on your feet.

Okay we are bad gardeners, I admit it. But we can change really we can. This year we are trying the concept of Lasagna Gardening. Wherein you lay wet cardboard down over the area you are planning to use for your garden and then you cover that in layers of organic material such as compost and other things. This in turn smothers all the grass and weeds underneath and leaves you with a rich medium to plant in on top. That’s the idea anyway. We’ll see how it works.

This year we are planting a lot more variety than previous years. All part of my pursuit of self-sufficiency.

An area that I’ve been looking at more and more lately is the idea of self-sufficiency. Before global trade became so readily available, nations were forced to be self-sufficient. Now everything is outsourced to someone else. America depends on terrorist nations for oil and communist nations for food and goods. And look at the messes it makes?

The same concept applies to individuals and families. If you depend on other people for all of your goods and services then you are at the mercy of whatever the market conditions are. I don’t plan on being able to be entirely self-sufficient but getting away from being TOTALLY dependent is a good goal to have I think.

Something that we are getting into is growing our own fruits and vegetables as much as possible. And from that making our own jellies and preserves. This past year we made enough jelly to not have to buy any for a year. We did have to buy some of the fruit from local growers though because our own production hasnt matured enough yet. I say if it tastes better, is better for you, and is cheaper, why not do it? If you have kids it can also be a great thing to teach them agricultural principles.

Another way I’ve been pushing a little more towards self-sufficiency is doing minor car repairs. I’ve done some minor stuff in the last year or so that didn’t take very long to do and cost a lot less than taking my car to a mechanic.The flip side to this issue is how much of your time is all this taking up? And could that time be better put to use elsewhere? These are questions that the individual needs to answer for themselves. Timothy Ferriss, the author of The 4 Hour Work Week, advocates outsourcing everything to better free up your time. And this idea does have some merit but if you can do more for yourself at less cost than having people do things for you then you don’t need as much income to support yourself.

Take for example someone who is making $40,000 a year working 50 hours a week for some big corporation. Now what if that person took a job making $30,000 a year at 40 hours a week but spent ten hours a week doing things for himself that he previously paid someone else to do? It could be growing some food yourself, walking your own dog instead of paying someone, your own home and car repairs, or any number of things that you pay someone else to do because you simply don’t have the time. I submit to you that taking care of your own life instead of expecting someone else to take care of it for you is much more fulfilling than working yourself to death in order to make millions for someone else.