If you’ve only seen Chris Martenson’s free and public content... There is so much more for you to discover and experience.

My wife Patty and I lived in a major metropolitan area in central Florida for a number of decades. After having raised our children and growing tired of the heat we decided to move north. Added to this was an inner feeling we had that society was subtly changing, things were getting more complicated, the food and distribution networks that we all rely on were becoming more susceptible to systemic shock.

We thought long and hard about what and how everything was connected, our quality of life and what we really wanted in our 50s and going forward into our later years. I was in the technology arena, my wife in the construction management industry, and she had a fair amount of public service with massage therapy and the “soft arts” so to speak.

As we thought more about this, we realized we really didn’t want to be in a city anymore, especially in an area where it seemed people were constantly accelerating their lives, they were mean and nasty and getting more so. Add to this our uneasy feeling that as Peak Prosperity says “the next 20 years are going to be much different than the last 20 years,” yet we didn’t really understand 36 short months ago what the possibilities were. We just understood that we needed to make a move out to a rural area.

We decided to move to the mountains of North Carolina. After many months shopping for a homestead on a budget (not easy, I saw every nasty, moldy foreclosure in three counties!) we fell into a functional home on a beautiful 15-acre tract that has two running streams, one of them with a source within 50 yards of our property, so it’s clean and fresh.

With about five acres in pasture (unusual in the mountains) and the balance in woods, we felt this was a place we can really work on and call home for the long run. I enjoy working outside, and my wife as well, on those things she’s picked up along the way. She is a super “help-mate” and I for her as well—we’re a good team!

On the property when we arrived was simply a small one sided livestock lean-to and a 2,100-square-foot off-frame modular house—about 10 years old, it was in great shape with a little bit of deferred maintenance. We had to throw some money into the maintenance issues, and a lot of elbow grease, we started to develop a “survival plan” to increase our chances for future comfort and resiliency.

On a shoestring, we started to systematically liquidate a rental property, our 401(k)s and some savings, turning all of it into developing resiliency for the long run for ourselves and our family (not that any of them seem to paying much attention to the issues at hand...).

I fenced in five and a half acres; we purchased a handful of Boer meat goats and started breeding them two years ago. This year for the first time, we had a dozen babies and actually put 150 pounds of goat meat (from last year’s crop) in the freezer, yay!

We also put in place three or four raised beds, Patty started doing straw bale gardening with great success, and we also are working on a larger garden. Patty learned canning and “puts up” some great stuff. We supplement that with a couple of “Aero-Ponic” garden towers, which have been tremendously successful in avoiding disease and insects, we even had fresh salad lettuce and assorted greens and herbs throughout last winter (a test) with a small greenhouse we put up about a year ago from Shelter Logic.

Also on the subject of protein, we built a small pole barn 9’ x 15’ to “test out” raising white New Zealand rabbits. Six cages and we started a breeding program learning to care for these animals last fall.
We’ve been poking along with it now for about 10 months and have had only one litter, but we’re ready to process the first ones here in about three or four weeks, and are now thinking about starting to supplement our “technology” base income with a meat rabbit operation—maybe 20 to 30 does to start with. This will take a larger barn and we’re looking into that now. This will also call for an FDA-approved processing facility so we can sell the meat to the public—not all that complicated, it will probably be a small 12’ by 8’ shed with the proper requirements.

Also two years ago Patty had always wanted to do beekeeping so she started that out and she’s grown from one hive to four hives this year with a good harvest of money last year.

Early on about a year into it we incorporated an 80-hen chicken house, building it under the back of our house, utilizing the deck as a ceiling and building to avoid predators. It works great and we have fresh eggs that we sell around town and have harvested some of our own chickens using YouTube videos. You can learn anything on YouTube!

We are also contemplating a couple of more revenue pillars here, one of which will probably be raising livestock guardian dogs—we love these animals and would like to share them with the world.

Additionally, we are going to be “bottling up” what we’ve done here in the last 36 months and rolling out our own unique brand of self-reliant/ resiliency workshops “on property” for others to learn from us how we’ve done this and that they can do it too!

We also put in a number of off grid features and functionality, it would be very difficult living without power but at least we would have the basics—food and water.

I’d like to thank Peak Prosperity and Chris Martenson’s early videos about the economy and environment etc. Much of this was what drove us to do more research and understand the risks and the need for self- resilience and increasing our ability to provide for ourselves on an ever (now) accelerating basis.

Hopefully others will take heart, the first step is always the hardest—you must realize if you lived like us, that life was not what it seems, and you just simply need to leave town, go to a new place, either find a job or get involved in something that you can do on a part-time basis or perhaps band together with others. There’s a new paradigm occurring as most of us know, and it’s not always comfortable, but you have to drive yourself to be goal oriented and hit those objectives as quickly as possible so that at least you have food water and shelter.

We’d be glad to field questions, just let me know how we can be of service to enlighten others to move forward!

In 2007, at the age of 52, I got my degree in safety engineering and my base pay went up to $80K a year. With overtime pushing that to $100K, and I still was not making enough to live in the NYC area. I loved my profession, yet I was miserable because I was working 60-hour weeks, with 20 hours of commuting. And I was very worried about the economy; I’d seen in the ’70s what a downturn could do to the city. As a futurist and part-time science fiction editor, I saw so many converging negatives: resource depletion, overpopulation, factory farming, antibiotic resistance, and aquifer depletion. I decided I had to leave the overpopulated area. In the event of a disaster like a Carrington Event or a currency crash, with eight million people plus as many surrounding the city, the greater NY area would be a death trap.

Then the 2008 crash hit, which intensified my decision to move. Had I not met someone with the same concerns, I would have moved to the Midwest, but I met a man with the same non-consumerist lifestyle and concerns. In 2009 I married him, moved to SC, and joined Peak Prosperity. He had a paid off house, and land for a big kitchen garden. He put his retirement monies all in cash. I took the tax hit to use up my IRA to make our home as resilient as possible.

We insulated the house (including window shades), added solar powered attic fans, a few solar panels, and repaired his solar hot water. We put in an airtight wood burning stove and a skylight for a dark indoor area. We put in a large raised-bed garden, edible landscaping, and planted fruit and nut trees. We put in a well, water- and electricity-saving appliances, and installed screen doors and repaired or replaced window screens, and built emergency supplies. Some of our preps were skills: I got a CCP and became a master gardener and studied permaculture. We learned to can and dehydrate food. We made a point of meeting our neighbors and helped my son move here, where he plugged into the local society by marrying the daughter of a sheriff. We joined a local church where the members take care of one another. As each one of these things was accomplished, we felt more secure about an uncertain future.

Are we in a perfect place to handle things if TSHTF? No: we could use more land, and the area is a little too populous, but I’m worlds better off than I was in NY. We are on the edge of farm country and surrounded by people who are courteous and pretty much share the same self-reliant values. If the power goes out or the banks close we are light-years ahead of our neighbors.

It was hearing Peter Schiff being interviewed on NPR that woke me up in 2007.

I wandered onto The Crash Course a bit after that. I moved to Vermont from downtown Boston and set up an online company distributing Vermont-made products nationally.

The building came with part ownership of a 200-gallon-per minute mineral spring whose overflow had powered a 24-foot waterwheel behind our building. (We’re setting up a hydro-power project next.)

Over time we did quite a few things:

• Added 86 solar panels
• Solar hot water
• Rooftop spring-fed vegetable gardens
• Interior wood-fired boilers for heat and hot water

A few years ago I bought a neighboring two-acre 1700s colonial and moved my friends Marc and Lisa onto it to start a micro farm. Marc lived in Moldovia during the collapse of the Soviet Union and worked in a chicken processing plant there during that time. My deal with them was to come be my tenant/neighbor and I’d invest my capital in setting up a farm for them.

I also bought more of my neighbors’ houses as they moved and set them up as Vermont vacation rentals. However they also double as housing for my extended family, if things in the world go off the rails.

We basically have a compound with everything we need for years of hiding in plain sight. Also a lot of this is what we got off your site postings. Love what you do. Keep up the good work.

We began to understand the scope of the problems after 9/11. My husband Marc had just started a new job at AT&T in New Jersey. Fast-forward about two years and Marc quit because he was asked to increase his security clearance. This meant NSA work and he didn’t want that. Marc got a new job, we moved to Somerville, MA, and I left my hometown of NYC and transitioned to working freelance. We were ready for a change—the Iraq War had started and I felt numbed by how unconcerned people seemed. But Marc was let go after less than a year, and I was pregnant. I couldn’t imagine continuing to get new jobs and moving wherever they told us to. We started home-based businesses: Marc is a speech technology consultant and I am a medical writer. We needed a place where we could live on less income. So we moved to Seattle, where Marc owned a house.

Parenthood is hard. Our son was born with so much spirit our world shifted on its axis. On top of this strain, I went back to school to study public health. We were almost unbearably busy and overwhelmed. We were coming to understand the interconnected “3E” story, but lacked the time to truly prepare beyond food storage and purchasing some gold.

Also, we were not a social success in Seattle. We were learning dire things; people thought we had extreme opinions. We lost some friends. It was a very emotional time, full of frustration and a sense of loss. But we also made some friends. For example, Marc met Michael; they were both former Mormons and had a lot in common. Michael is a handyman, and eventually he became our roommate. He doesn’t pay rent, but he fixes things, and helps with cooking and cleaning. It usually works well.

After 10 years, when there was no more we could do, fix, or grow at our home, it was time to leave Seattle. We wanted land and a place with a stronger sense of community. We moved to Vashon, a 37-square-mile island on the Puget Sound between West Seattle and Tacoma. It’s only accessible by a 20-minute ferry ride. We got here in September 2013 and bought a beautiful place on eight acres. It’s divided into four lots, so we have the flexibility to build, and it’s set up for agriculture.

Things really started rolling late last year when Michael and I took a two-week Permaculture Design Course (PDC) on Vashon. It was run using gift economy, and I met my new local tribe. Here’s just one story of how life has changed: A new PDC friend had a pregnant cow, but no pasture. We had a pasture. So we entered into a cow-share relationship, and now we share a cow and a calf. We also have chickens, goats, and a big new garden.

Related to our jobs, it took a while, but Marc and I are successfully self-employed. We work virtually, with very low overhead, with several income streams. Our extended family now includes our second son, my biological mother, and friends—new and old—who are making our home theirs for at least part of the year. They are helping us turn this into a sustainable place and hopefully a small community.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how Americans will live together in the future—we’re a nation of failed communal living experiments, so what will we do when we are forced to cooperate? These days, I think of my current life as a real-world workshop on communication issues important to our next (probably downscaled) iteration.

To close, I’ll say that everyone in our family is on a sharp learning curve. It is exhausting and stressful, but there is also a lot of joy. There’s no way to come to terms with these issues without learning something about gratitude. I’m very grateful.

We were living in the sustainable urban community of Takoma Park, MD, when research for my job brought me across The Crash Course and, then, to what became the Peak Prosperity on-line community.

Our house in Takoma Park was outfitted to the best of our sustainable resilient/abilities complemented by many applicable municipal services but our appreciation of evolving circumstances was constantly enhanced by Peak Prosperity and attendance at a retreat hosted by Chris, Becca, and Adam. Our minds and imaginations had become fertile ground.

A friend had told Meg about Broomgrass after meeting the founders at a Maryland Green Festival and so when Meg and I found ourselves in Berkeley Springs, WV, for a birthday celebration, we decided to spend a couple of hours touring the property with Lisa, one of the founders. Meg and I didn’t have to say a word. We looked at each other as we departed, and a glance and a shrug told us we were about to embark on a new path.

We had visited a 320-acre, communally owned working organic farm nestled in the Shenandoah Valley less than two hours from Washington, D.C., and Baltimore; 16 one-acre lots owned by individual residents, 304 acres owned and managed by the community. So far, there are chickens (broilers and layers), a small cattle herd, hops, barley, corn, bees, and even a commercial hay operation. There is a large community, deer-fenced garden, but each household typically sports a robust garden. We own a barn and extensive equipment, and any resident can contribute a project as part of the “farm plan” at any community meeting. Plus, Broomgrass is situated in a rich agricultural valley and surrounded by a robust CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) network of farms.

Being life-long urban, suburban dwellers, Meg and I will be advancing a plan to “farm energy” by capitalizing solar panels on the barn to provide energy back for partial operations. As I write this today, our quarterly meeting is being held and one resident proposed a small passel of hogs to move in rotating forest-based paddocks. Meg and I are considering trying an acre or so with oats, then corn, to derive two annual harvests.

We sold our house in Takoma Park and that financed our buy-in and the building of our home here. Lisa and her husband Matthew are the founders; both are young, innovative, preservation specialist LEED- certified architects and Lisa designed and helped build our house. All homes must be geothermal, use an approved well and septic system, and house all HVAC systems internally. Ours will get solar as the finishing touch—we made the move April 1, 2015—a propitious day, eh?

The value of this story is that there are entire communities evolving driven by the tenets that Peak Prosperity pioneers, evolves, and advances. Matthew and Lisa did extensive research and legal and financial exploration to structure the best tax and preservation options for a sustainable agricultural community.

As one might imagine, there are many avenues to take in a discussion of this new experiment—especially as the community grows. Right now, there are seven homes, five year-round households, two original lots for sale, and two or three lots for resale as owners have changed their life plans.

Dramatic changes require many adjustments. Livelihood, relationships, family, and many considerations loom when making life transitions. Shoot, think of Chris’s own story and Becca’s initial thoughts.

Chris, Becca, Adam, Peak Prosperity, and the PP community stimulate thought, advance possibilities, and suggest solutions in the framework that Chris explores, analyzes, and dissects. Thanks Chris, et al. The adventure continues...

My journey down this path began early. I was born in the early ’70s and seemed to pick up on the environmental and energy concerns of that decade. My father would say such things as, “Use all the lights you need, but if you aren’t using them turn them OFF.” These ideas became my baseline understanding of the world.

Early on my goal was to be an artist for a living. I was realistic enough to expect many lean years of income with this career choice, and I would probably never be rich. So I planned from the beginning to keep my cost of living low, and where possible, direct my spending toward lowering future expenses.

I bought my home while still in college. I actually feel a bit sorry for my realtor who spent two years helping me find the place. His commission was very small because I was looking at the lowest-priced properties available. What I bought was a small, old mobile home on 1.5 acres in a rural setting. My monthly mortgage payment was significantly less than the average monthly rent at the time. I worked hard to pay it off in nine years, thus eliminating my largest monthly bill.

Along the way I invested what I could in transforming the thermal nightmare that was the mobile home into an energy efficient abode. This involved the normal things of new windows, efficient lighting, etc. It also involved less normal modifications. I built a shell around it to form an attic and 12-inch thick walls creating the space needed to super insulate.

Another major project was creating a small passive solar, earth sheltered building. Primarily this was to be my art studio, but it also doubles as a storm shelter. It became a project for learning how to put together a small photovoltaic system. Recently I was able to get a second, larger, off-grid photovoltaic system installed to power my whole home, eliminating another monthly bill.

I started gardening as soon as I moved to this property, slowly learning and expanding my abilities. I installed a couple 1,500-gallon cisterns to collect rainwater mostly for garden use, but also as a backup water supply if needed. Lately I’ve been working to establish more edible perennial plants/trees. I should also note that I spent a couple years learning about edible wild plants in my region, especially those that grow on my property.

I did achieve my goal of becoming a professional studio artist. As expected, there were many very lean income years. Even now as a “successful” artist my income just barely qualifies for middle class. I think I still fall short some years. However, due to my efforts to create a low cost of living, and investing in things that lower my future expenses, I have an extremely high quality of life. Money hasn’t been a real concern for many years now. I may not make huge sums, but what I do amply meets my needs.

I didn’t set out to live a more environmentally friendly life. Nor did I start down this path in fear of a major economic collapse. Yet I discovered that living a lower-impact lifestyle saves money as well as environmental resources, and offers me more resilience as our economies decline. All the while I’ve been increasingly empowered to direct my time, and live my life, as I desire.

About 20 years ago I was unemployed and easily qualified for the government assistance I depended on to feed my daughter. After a certain amount of desperation and help from Robert Kiyosaki’s books, I learned about the financial rules that we all live under in this country. I learned how to arrange my affairs within these rules to keep more of what I earned. Long story short, I ended up making a good living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the technology industry. I married an attorney that worked at a prestigious law firm in downtown San Francisco. With my newfound wealth, I bought expensive cars, expensive home theaters, expensive vacations, expensive dinners and expensive hair-cuts. I was deep in debt and really living paycheck to paycheck. I was working long hours and playing hard because I felt I deserved it.

Once I learned about the problem with our society’s “Three Es,” I realized how unsustainable my lifestyle had become. I was happy that I finally had money in my life, but what I really wanted was financial security. I learned that if I saved 10% of my income per year I would need to work 10 years to take one year off. I made a plan to save 70% per year and work only if I choose to. First goal was to pay off all debt with the ultimate goal being no monthly payment commitments on anything. My wife and I sold our German luxury cars and bought sensible cars for cash. We canceled cable TV and all unnecessary monthly bills. We paid off all our loans except our house and her student loans.

The second goal was to get our lifestyle in order. We had suddenly realized how much stuff we had collected and made plans to reduce the amount of stuff we owned. We sold only the most expensive items, the rest we donated. We donated lots of stuff, dozens of car loads to the local Goodwill. We reduced the amount of our belongings so much that we could now move from a 2,400-square foot home in San Francisco to a 500-square foot mobile home in a trailer park 15 miles south.

The move drastically reduced my cost of living and after the move, I only needed 30% of my net income to live; the rest I invested and saved. After watching a few documentaries on the difficulty of making ends meet after retirement, my wife and I set a plan to be secure in our retirement. We assumed we would not get anything back from what we’ve paid into Social Security, but the hard part here was not knowing what the economy will be like in the future. We dare not depend on a return from any single investment, so we diversified. We bought several investment properties in a different state. My partner and I grew our business substantially while I also regularly bought gold. Now the risk of having a retirement income is split between a small business, tax- deferred retirement accounts (cash), Social Security income, gold, and real estate.

My lower cost of living, and the security of having several potential sources of retirement income, has made both my wife and me feel secure enough to seek out new careers. We both made plans with our jobs to work far fewer hours. With meaningful help from Adam’s book Finding Your Authentic Career, I now spend at least three full days per week working on alternative fuel ideas for combustion engines.

I know there’s much more that can be improved with my finances. Each month I must pay rent, I must pay utilities, I’m exposed to bank account confiscation, and more. But I couldn’t be happier with my progress and I’m proud of my new-found freedom. Even with a completely off-grid Earth Ship, financial resilience is a requirement for happiness.

We came to homesteading from two different angles. Becky, my partner, was a nurse practitioner for 27 years in metro Boston. In 2012, she left suburbia and bought a farm in western Massachusetts, surprising even herself with this decision. The farm is called “OMG Farm” short for “one more gamble.” Becky had grown increasingly appalled at the broken industrial food system in America as she treated patients, and she envisioned growing as much of her own food as possible, because of the obvious health benefits compared to a conventional diet.

By the time I met Becky in 2012, I had several years of obsessive reading under my belt, ranging from Dmitry Orlov to Joel Salatin to Wendell Berry. I had decided that I wanted to try my hand at a small-scale beef herd, and to start doing more things that had real world practicality instead of the more abstract things that have earned me a paycheck.

I think it’s accurate to say that Becky came at homesteading from more of a positive angle—things like making local connections, learning about growing food and permaculture. My motivation was more out of a desire to be better prepared for some systemic failure that I felt was bound to happen. (This sounds like a joke but it’s true—Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, rested on my bedside table for almost a year.)

So about two years ago, I got six cows and Becky was kind enough to invite them to live on her farm. She invited me to live at the farm, too, but not for another year or so. I also helped get some bees set up on the farm (I wrote the “Beginning Beekeeping” article on the Peak Prosperity site, and this is a major love of mine). Some things we share:

• A fascination with natural systems and low-input farming (ask me about dung beetles!)
• Creativity and repurposing
• Paying attention and taking time to observe what’s happening on the farm
• Most of all, I think we both value simplicity and desire a simpler life—we fuel our masonry heater with wood cut here.

So both of us have made the choice to work part-time, and use this extra time for things agricultural. We’ve made several attempts at repurposed structures: last winter’s hay-bale chicken house, while not an abiding structure, fulfilled its design goal. I’m planning a simple lean-to for my now-larger herd to use as a winter shelter, exploring ways to reduce the hay bill, and actively trying to use grazing to improve the pastures and increase fertility and productivity. Becky has done an amazing job with the garden and a huge variety of fruit and nut trees.

On my day off (when I’m not at the part-time job) I typically work 10 or 12 hours, do a lot of brush cutting, scything, and fencing. I watch cows a lot, too. It’s great for blood pressure. I have an awesome farmer’s tan, and have never felt happier. Even more important, I think my focus has shifted from waiting all the time for some big shoe to drop to appreciating the amazingly rich life I have here with Becky.

We’ve led a blessed life. In 2005, as our youngest was visiting colleges, we discovered that another was on the way. This was our first experience in being confronted with truly unexpected change. It went swimmingly and our baby brought chaotic joy while our newly empty-nest friends flitted off to the islands. Life was still very much the idyllic American Dream. Our careers as a lawyer and an advertising writer were fun and rewarding. We loved our home, our friends and family, our leisure, our work—everything. Sure, the economy was sometimes weird, but this was America, so we didn’t worry at all.

Oddly, neither of us can recall a moment, incident, or situation that led us to take note of anything asunder. All we recall is my husband (not a shopper, ever), running to a couple of milk crates’ worth of Dinty Moore Beef Stew®, canned mac and cheese, tuna (of course), jam, SpaghettiOs you get the idea. He said, “This is in case we have an emergency.” We felt invincible as we placed those crates into the closet of one of our grown kids’ abandoned bedrooms. We still laugh about that night.

Random, but so real—it was the night our life’s direction was forever changed.

Soon, in an equally strange blur that we can’t define, perhaps providence, we found ourselves looking at remote properties in our state. We started tracking credible commentaries and advice from Peak Prosperity and digging like kindergartners into fiscal policies, politicians, agendas and economics. We felt like we were starting a new line of tinfoil hats. We challenged ourselves at every turn “Should we stop this nonsense? Have we lost our minds? Would we feel better if we just stopped all of this time and resource-intense activity?” Not once could either of us say “yes,” and each week seemed more convicting than the last. And so, in the summer of 2013, my fearless husband started by hand digging a well on our new parcel of no-man’s land. Soon, leaves fell. Then snow. And then he started building, with a single loyal friend, through the most bitterly cold, record-breaking snowy winter on record. They worked at night, after long days in court, using a garage sale generator for power, and built a 1,000-square-foot, off-grid cabin that was finished in spring 2015. Now, six months later, we are about to start on our permanent home at the same 30-acre site. It’s a blessing that our property has water, we have improved food storage, seed banks, precious metals, security, books, board games, little comforts.

Yet, we fret because there is always so much more we must do. We still feel woefully unprepared for the many scenarios that seem ripe to implode. We are grateful that we will be able to at least get started and can help a few others along the way. Are we completely comfortable with the reality we are anticipating, no way. Do we sleep better at night because of the scattered efforts we’ve managed while still living in mainstream America? Yes. And if our greatest wish comes true and nothing happens, we will simply be grateful for the extra sleep that comes with being prepared for anything.

I was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey. Had the life, but didn’t know it. Left at age 13 with Mom and stepfather. Enter the world of the DC area and fast food, both parents working and leading the good life, so to speak. No more milking cows, gathering eggs, baling hay, driving the tractor, tending the garden...all that hard work that no one really likes to do!

I am now a 64-year-old female still living in the DC area, going about my everyday life: get up, go to work, sit all day, come home, sit and watch TV. One day, my son and daughter-in-law asked me to take the self-assessment that was on the PeakProsperity.com website. So I said, “Sure.” The first time I filled it out, I disliked it so much, I actually threw it away after filling out the first page. It made me feel very uncomfortable to the point that my stomach got upset. Some weeks later, it popped up in my mind, and I tried it again. This time I got a little further, but that uneasy feeling came back, and again I threw it away.

It kept bothering me that I could not seem to be adult enough to finish it. Once more I took it. This time I got through most of it, but again grew tired of it and filed it away in a book. About a week later, I took it out of the book and decided I was going to finish it and I did. A little later the same day, I erased my answers and took it again. And I took it again until not only did it not send shivers down my spine and upset my stomach, but I felt that I was empowered by taking it.

I read Peak Prosperity most days, listen to Survival podcasts, don’t watch TV, and spend most of my waking time (when not at work) outside in a small garden, growing herbs and vegetables. I have a compost bin as well. Have to give the credit to my kids as they implemented it for me. I have some canned food stored and would like to continue to build this lifestyle. Most of my friends don’t even want to discuss what I do and they think I am crazy. They shop, get their hair and nails done and make payments on huge credit card debt.

I look forward to retirement in two years, when I can sell my four- bedroom home and move to some land with a few chickens or ducks, a huge garden along with a water source and an outdoor kitchen. I am a single person, which makes the financial part of my life a little bit more difficult, but I am financially free and I know I will continue to be that way. Thank you.

My wife and I made the decision to leave the city and find a homestead four years ago. We enjoyed only weekends for two years before moving here full time. Our site selection criteria included a location with a maximum of 70 miles out of the city (metro Nashville, TN). Abundant water resources, timber, and acreage for planting and livestock were essential requirements. God’s providence led us to a restored 1920s era home on seven acres. Since our initial purchase, we have added an apple orchard of 70 trees, now producing prolifically, two garden plots that total at least an acre, and two chicken coops with a total of 80 layers.

We drilled a well that provides wonderful fresh water to supplement our city, spring, and stream supplied waters. My wife has become an accomplished soap maker and canner, putting up at least 200 jars of vegetables last year and crafting several hundred bars of soap from nearly a dozen recipes.

Additionally, we made contact with the landowner of the adjacent property, which turned out to be the heirs of the original farm, and were able to purchase the entire additional 170 acres and reconstitute the farm as it originally stood. Currently, we are in the process of restoring the main hay barn to its original configuration and design. A nearby milk house, long abandoned, is being restored with the intention of establishing a “community store” for us to sell our produce, eggs, and soaps. We intend to make the space available to anyone in the community to bring their crafts for sale or trade. We are excited about the unfolding possibilities. One neighbor has already committed to providing restoration expertise and will be adding iron work crafts, handcrafted syrups, honey, and additional vegetables. We feel, at this point, the possibilities are endless.

It all started with Hurricane Katrina. Before her, I was blissfully unaware. It was the summer of 2005, and my wife, Denise, and I just closed on a 1.4 million dollar McMansion, 30 minutes outside of Washington D.C. The housing bubble was in full swing, although it wasn’t being called a bubble. You were more apt to hear, “They can’t make any more land.”

When Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, it caused a shortage of gasoline and diesel in the Northeast. As the owner of a landscape design and maintenance firm, this concerned me. I wondered, How could a storm in the Gulf cause shortages in Virginia? During the storm, I did what most people do when they’re concerned about the supply of a vital resource: I hoarded. I instructed my guys to fill up their trucks and their equipment. We bought a hundred extra gas cans and filled them up, too. I knew without diesel and gasoline, my crews couldn’t operate, and if my crews couldn’t operate, we would be hemorrhaging money, as fixed expenses and salaries would still need to be paid.

A few weeks later, business was back to normal, and fuel was more expensive, but never unobtainable. I was relieved to weather the storm, so to speak, but my original question gnawed at me. How could a storm in the Gulf cause shortages in Virginia? I started researching the oil market, so I could better position my business in the future. Where does our fuel come from?

How much of it do we have? How secure is it? Are there viable alternatives? The information I came across was sobering, and I didn’t want to believe it, because if what I was reading was true, my business, my way of life, was completely unsustainable. I searched for information that soothed my worry.
I searched for information that said, “There’s nothing to worry about, everything’s fine. Keep doing what you’re doing.” I wanted to believe the cornucopians, as they were called, that talked of hundreds of years of abundant oil. Deep down, I knew they lacked something. They lacked the data. If you analyzed the data, it was simple.

At the time, I was the envy of family and friends. I was 29 years old, with a large salary, and a larger house. I started to question what I was doing. Was I making the world a better place or was I just contributing to our hyper-consumptive materialistic culture? I knew the answer, but it was hard to face. My business burnt copious amounts of precious non-renewable fuel to maintain landscapes in an artificial state of immaturity. We sprayed chemicals; we planted useless ornamentals, and contributed to the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality that’s so pervasive in the suburbs. My personal life wasn’t much better. I had inefficient cars, a house that was way too big for two people, and I didn’t know how to do anything practical.

I wanted out. I wanted out of the consumerist lifestyle: the McMansion, the cars, the business, all of it. I wanted to live a more self-sufficient, self-reliant lifestyle, where I felt like I was part of the solution. Denise and I had many late night discussions of what we should do.

Ultimately, we agreed to sell everything. It took five months to sell the house, my business, and the cars. At the end of those five months, with the weight of debt and responsibilities removed, I felt...free.

With no jobs and no responsibilities, Denise and I traveled up and down the east coast searching for a sustainable place to settle. We were expecting to find quaint small towns with beautiful countryside and farms. What we found were strip malls, fast food joints, and a degraded landscape that looks very much the same wherever we went. The farms that we see on marketing at grocery stores were not the reality of the chem-ag monoculture that we saw in the countryside. We never did find that healthy, sustainable, environment we were looking for. We settled for rural Central Pennsylvania, where the soil was good and the town wasn’t too commercialized.

We purchased a six-acre hayfield, and built a simple but superefficient home made from insulated concrete that produces twice the energy it uses. We live simply and debt free.

Over the next seven years, I got my hands dirty, turning our old hayfield into a homestead that can provide for our needs. I learned all the things long since forgotten and deemed useless in our society. I learned to grow fruits and vegetables, animal husbandry, beekeeping, green building, alternative energy, and permaculture design. Denise went back to teaching, where she became a state teacher of the year finalist, and a college professor. In the summer she’s a huge help in the fields and in the kitchen.

My former life seems like a lifetime ago. As a permaculture designer and consultant, I make a fraction of what I once did, but all of my endeavors are clearly on the solutions side as I help others to design and implement regenerative permaculture gardens and farms. As a homesteader, with my own permaculture site, it is a soul-satisfying endeavor to produce abundant healthy food of the highest quality. We’ve transformed our property with 2,000 linear feet of swales, 1,500 multifunctional trees and shrubs, four ponds, 70 linear feet of hugelkultur berms, hundreds of pounds of seed, and many tons of compost and mulch. Seven years ago it was a degraded hillside cut for hay; now it is an interconnected, dynamic ecosystem brimming with life. This land, this home, will be here providing for the needs of its inhabitants long after we’re gone.

I offer my story for diversity purposes and to offer encouragement for those that need it. As well as for those at the emotional beginning that may not have the outward physical changes reflecting the internal changes in development.

Beginning in 2007, six months before the plunge in housing, we purchased our home that stretched our income-to-mortgage ratio to over 30%, just because the bank told us we could. And also because we were following culture’s set of values and not our own. If you had asked me then I would have denied it! My ego was very active as was my male testosterone-driven sense of self.

The years 2007 and 2008 turned out to be a significant time of self- evaluation and awakening, stripping away the fragile shell of culture from which I found my self worth. Before I was able to manifest any physical changes resembling resilience I first had to approach a head full of nonsense, and a consumer-driven lifestyle lacking direction or purpose.

My first steps were watching The Crash Course on DVD and reading Charles Eisenstein. (Everything he writes or says, but mostly it was Ascent of Humanity that helped the most). I then followed that up with many internal experiences for neurological re-wiring and re-educating, the major players of that being new found friendships through fully present experiences, men’s group, music, meditation and entheogenic medicine. All of which provided much needed comfort, emotional uplift, insight, and strength. This was done by intention and under the wing of one of the most beautiful and well-practiced humans beings I have ever had the grace of sharing space with. I don’t recommend doing it without this sort of presence.
After seven years in this unsustainable mortgage, we made our break leaving behind our savings in the upside-down mortgage it would have taken 14 years to get out of. Moving three times in one year, we eventually were able to buy a much smaller house at half the mortgage on a lot four times as large. Now we have a large backyard garden, compost, a coop full of chickens, a new self-remodeled house. All of which are creating many newly formed skills and increased self- confidence. Built upon a complete neurological upgrade intended for resilience and personal growth. All of my projects are done on budget and completed in time spent after work and during weekend hours. Which often means resourcing from unlikely places and materials or just plain waiting until the project can be afforded. Most often it’s the available resources choosing the project, rather than my act of choosing. I won’t go too much into the details of the physical manifestations of my work because most of the effort for me is on the emotional resilience side, which I find much more compelling.

It is never too late to change yourself and if you’re like me, especially at the early stages, it can all seem so impossible to tackle, because the changes feel too big and numerous and the world to foreign. The important thing I came to understand is nobody pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps. Everyone requires help, and it’s always closer and more accessible than you feel it is. Especially when you start asking and offering without shame. This is why my successes and failures are intimately linked and often confused. A good friend of mine would say “My answers have now become questions and my questions answers.” I have found my advantages are increased creativity, innovation and having something that is completely unique and debt free creating a wealth/skill all its own. I’m not pressed to make more money, only to free up more time in which to experience life’s many bipolar unfoldings.

“Live like this” became our mantra in 2012. Our family’s journey from ignorance towards resilience required redefining our narrative, escaping professional “success” and the chains of servitude required to achieve it. We sought to improve the quality of our life as much as defend against humanity’s risky and deteriorating condition.

With solid consulting skills, both my wife and I found single issue stories of doom laughably narrow. The Three Es and the solid analytics in The Crash Course finally helped us conceptualize the dimensions we needed to cover in building a comprehensive action plan.

A few years earlier the economic crises passed our house mostly unnoticed, except that it finally cleared our position on a 10-year waitlist to moor our sailboat on an idyllic island four hours from the city. The air was noticeably clearer there. We knew it would be a good place to recreate, and had aspired to retire to one of the beautiful waterfront homes.

We made weekly trips and stayed over on the boat to clear our heads. By May, our action plan had us trading our whopper mortgage and most of our life savings for free and clear ownership of a neglected plot on the interior of the island. It had enough land for a substantial garden and incoming geese landing on the pond during our house-hunt pretty much clinched the deal.

My wife steered us away from the gloomiest “prepper instantaneous disaster” scenarios and focused on building the eight forms of capital critical to “living like this.” We found our rural neighbors were a godsend. We hadn’t even met four of our neighbors in the city. Rural and small town life, in fact any self-sufficiency at all was new to us. Investments in community paid off. We built skills, streamlined our life, and substituted our ingenuity and labor for hired out work.

We found a new love for fewer, simpler, high-quality items built to last and increasingly less processed inputs. We bought wheat in sacks, ground it into our own homemade bread, and found it wonderful. We could at least theoretically grow the wheat ourselves. We graduated from the tyranny of “$5 suspicious ingredient bread from the store” into the wafting aromas and satisfying production of our own $0.30-a-loaf freshly baked bread. Live like this indeed.

The soil destroying, noisy vibrating “always in the shop or jammed with a rock, gas-powered rototiller” became a sturdy, silent, and rarely jammed, soil building broad fork. Instead of mechanic and oil dependency, a broad fork is both health dependent and health creating. It seems to fit the virtuous circle of our “live like this” mantra, and the nutrient dense food we grew fueled our aging bodies with surprising amounts of new health and vigor. We vote with our money, broad forks and homemade bread win.

We realized through our study of permaculture that we had just “stacked functions” and have now set about doing lots more of that sort of thing. We still have a ways to go, but feel the chains to the old narrative are broken. We are now free to live like this.