Urban Self Sufficiency NZ

This blog post is written from a New Zealand point of view and things may be slightly more different where you live, so this post is only intended for educational purposes.

Living self-sufficiently does mean living with less, but there are things you can do and invest in to make it easier and to reduce your expenses long term.

Because we have such unpredictable incomes which vary hugely seasonally (My business earns half it’s annual income over 8 weeks in late spring, and then winter income is almost non-existent), this means we have a few weeks with a large income, and then low incomes the rest of the year. We use the income from these busy few weeks to invest in things that will lower our base expenses over the quiet season.

Your base expenses will vary, but this is your non-negotiables which must be paid even if you had the lowest income you can think of. It includes things like housing and debt repayments, but doesn’t include things like a gym membership which you absolutely love but could be cancelled if need be. It is the bare minimum of what you could get by on.

Investing in self-sufficiency does also include decreasing some of those non-base expenses – those nice-to-have expenses if you want, but those base expenses is the place to start.

What are my base / bare minimum expenses?

This is something you will have to calculate yourself. Sit down with your budget, and work out what the things you MUST pay are. Don’t include anything that is a nice-to-have. Hopefully you’ll never need to live off the bare minimum budget, but it’s good to know what the minimum amount of cash per week (Or fortnight, or month) that you would need to survive is, and where this goes.

Include:

Housing, food (but no takeaways), minimum debt repayments (But not extra repayments), bare minimum of running a vehicle if you need one, bills like rates and insurances, tithing / donations (At the smaller amount you’d expect to be donating on the bare minimum budget)

Why would you want to do this?

Think of investing in self-sufficiency as kind of an insurance. Especially when reducing base/ bare minimum expenses. If you lost your job, and you needed to get by on less. If you had an accident and could no longer work. If you got sick or diagnosed with a terminal illness. If the cost of things rises so much you can no longer keep up.

But not only is it an insurance, it also gives financial freedom in that you don’t have to work as much because your life doesn’t cost as much.

What to start with?

This is a personal decision and depends on what works best for you. What will give you the most savings. However, usually any debt repayments come first as this will give you the biggest savings. Start with whatever has the highest interest rate. Personal debt tends to have the highest interest rates. Followed by cars, followed by houses. NZ student loans with no interest are not worth paying off faster as you won’t receive any savings by paying it off faster.

What you decide to start with also depends on how much you can afford to spare at a time. If you have $50 spare to fund something, you may be better off putting that into planting a fruit tree than paying down debt faster as the fruit tree will take a few years to establish. If you happen to have a bulk payout of $5,000, you may choose to put that on your mortgage or invest in solar panels, or split it into one fruit tree and the rest on the mortgage.

So what can I invest in to live more self-sufficiently?

1. Pay your mortgage off faster

This is the obvious one. By paying your mortgage off faster when you can, this will reduce your future minimum repayments. Housing is often the biggest expense, so reducing this is a great way to be able to live more self-sufficiently, and be less reliant on income.

If it’s an option, this could even mean down-sizing and shifting into a smaller, cheaper place for you.

2. Invest in power generation

This means things like solar panels. A big up-front investment, but this will reduce your power bill for years to come.

If you have the space and a natural flowing water source, you can also build a small hydro setup for a very low cost.

3. Fruit trees and berry plants

After housing, food is generally the biggest expense.

And fruit trees don’t have to be purchased!

Sure buying fruit trees from a nursery can be very worthwhile as they are already 3 year old trees for sale usually, and they are grafted meaning the fruit you get is guaranteed to be the parent fruit. But you can also grow fruit trees from seed!

Some fruit trees don’t grow true to seed, meaning some grown from seed will not give you the exact same variety as the fruit the seed came from, and some may not produce fruit at all. However if you have the time it can be a great experiment to grow fruit trees from seed. They will often be happy in a pot till they start fruiting if they are well watered, so you don’t have to commit to planting until you know the fruit off it is good. Heritage varieties of fruit are much more likely to grow true-to-seed.

You can also learn to graft your own fruit trees instead of just growing from pip.

Berry bushes and grapes propagate very easily from cuttings. Generally I pop all my prunings into a bucket of water over winter, and in spring plant out whatever has rooted. This is a great low-effort way to get more plants if you know someone who already has berry or grape plants.

Buying from a nursery does give you a 3 year head-start on growing your own for fruit trees, so if it’s within budget it is usually worth the price. Especially with the rising cost of food!

4. Food growing setups

However you want to grow your food, getting this set up means less expenses in the future. Whether it be raised veggie beds or straight in the ground, invest in and work towards your ideal setup.

This includes things like improving your soil through adding compost and mulch.

5. Cooking & food preservation tools

Things like a pressure canner, dehydrator, freeze dryer.

And not just to enable you to preserve your harvests, but also to help with cooking too. So things like a pasta maker, tortilla press or coffee grinder as well.

Do consider things like whether there are consumable parts and how much electricity is involved in running it. Sometimes it is better to purchase an older second hand item that will last and is more easily repairable, than a new one that has more breakable parts. Non electric versions can be handy incase there is also a power outage and to keep power costs down, but electric versions are often simpler to run so can mean you will be more likely to use it.

6. Insulate your home

Power is a huge cost in winter. And by investing in insulation, you’re saving by not needing to pay as much in heating.

As we’ve slowly worked to insulate our home, we’ve noticed that it’s gone from having ice on the inside of the windows, to almost not needing to heat overnight as the fireplace can heat the whole place up!

Here in New Zealand there are great subsidies available for insulating depending on where you live and if you have a community services card or health conditions in the house. We actually got our ceiling insulation topped up for free in our house!

7. Skills

One that’s not often thought of, but it’s not just physical things to invest in. And it’s not just monetary investments.

If for example you have the skill to make soap and no longer need to buy it, this is a huge cost saving for both day to day living, and in times of low income.

If you know how to do your own maintenance on your vehicle, this will save needing to pay someone else to do it every time.

These skills are not something you have to make use of all the time. If you’re busy you can buy something you would usually make – the important thing is having the skill to do it when needed.

You can either pay for workshops to learn these skills, or you can teach yourself via trial and error while learning via free content available online – like YouTube videos.

Being free to invest in if you teach yourself, this is something that you can do no matter your spare funds right now. But paid workshops are a great way to also get that knowledge faster and from a more reliable source. The workshop fee will more than pay for itself! Plus paid workshops are a great thing to ask for as birthday and special occasion gifts if you have enough ‘stuff’ already.

7. Community

And the most overlooked one of all – building your community.

Find your people locally. You will have people you can barter with, share skills, and enjoy life together with.

Where are you on your journey? Anything you would add?