Farming/Homesteading as a Retirement Strategy | Homesteading | Farming

From smallfarmnation.com When people think of retirement, they often think of golf or travel. But what about homesteading or farming as a retirement strategy? In this final episode of season 1, I’ll share with you how we and many other farmsteaders are thinking very old-school about retirement. Several years ago as we prepared to transition from sprawling urban life to our rural farmstead, Liz and I were filled with excitement about growing our own food and being immersed in nature.

Yet, during that period of intense change and learning we also spent many hours discussing, of all things, retirement.

At the time the idea of retirement was many years away for us, but in our “former” lives we at least understood what the plan was, so we rarely thought about it.

The plan back then was simply to keep working until we were, I don’t know, 62 or so and then let a 401K or pension plan fund the rest of our lives, perhaps with a little help from social security.

But moving to the farm meant that there may be no pension plan and for many people it means converting a 401K or other savings into hard assets such as land.

And then, just as we were moving to the farm the “great recession” of 2008 hit.

Just like you, we witnessed the economic hardship forced onto so many people as a result of reckless lending and investments by major lending institutions and equally reckless government spending, which required government bail-outs and central banks intervention to prop up global markets.

After that experience, our confidence that pension fund obligations would ever be met had eroded anyway, so we began to consider thinking of retirement planning, and homesteading, in a new way.

Or, actually...an old way.

You see, the concept of retirement is actually quite new. It's an outdated concept that's collapsing, and I explain why in this episode.

Grab some coffee or tea, pull up a chair and listen in as we invite you into our world of modern homesteading.