Homestead Pros and Cons: Is Being a Homesteader Worth It?

Homesteading cons

1. The expense of getting started

The first and biggest con is the expense. It's extremely expensive to find a decent property to homestead on. You're going to want a little bit of acreage with some water coming through it, and that's not going to be

cheap.

We were able to get around that by buying a fixer-upper house. 

We fell in love with the land, the forest, and the possibilities, but the house was a wreck. It took about a year to fix it up. So that's one of the big cons is the barrier to entry, the cost of purchasing your homestead. 

2. It's a lot of hard work

The second con I wanted to talk about is the work. I guarantee you it's more work than you are anticipating. 

Even having a few animals, it's a ton of work with building projects and caring for the animals every morning. 

It's also a lot of work caring for a large property. If you're like most beginning homesteaders and you're working full-time and trying to homestead, you have little free time because you're always working.

3. Having animals

Having animals is a pro, but it's also a con, especially if you get goats like we did. I'll make this one short and sweet. Don't get boy goats. They're insane. They don't do much and don't produce anything. I don't know what we were thinking. We'll leave that at number three. 

4. You're in the middle of nowhere

Each of these cons has a flip side. So this con is you're out in the middle of nowhere. You're out here all the time, day in, day out. It can get boring.

At our old place, when we lived in the city, we could go to a movie or a restaurant five minutes away if we wanted to get out of the house. Here it's a half hour away. The nearest home improvement store is an hour from here. The nearest hospital is 40 minutes away. 

It's expensive living in the middle of nowhere. The commute and the gas get expensive. Most homesteads are going to be in the middle of nowhere. 

5. Maintaining firewood stock

We deal with a lot of firewood here. We've got our outdoor wood burner. We burn our own wood from our properties, so we don't have to pay for propane.

Keeping firewood stocked up is a ton of work. Cutting wood, splitting wood, stacking wood, and stoking the fire twice daily is a tremendous amount of work. 

So those were some of the cons. Now let's talk about the fun stuff—the pros. 

Homesteading pros

1. The solitude 

One of the biggest pros is you're out in the middle of nowhere. Again, there are two sides to every coin, and I mentioned this as a con, but being out in the middle of nowhere is incredible.

We have 20 acres here. We can do anything we want because we live out in the middle of nowhere, and nobody is around for miles, literally. 

It's also nice being in nature and being able to see the stars at night. 

We've got lots of trees; there's deer and wild turkey around. Being out in nature, secluded, is one of the big pros of being a homesteader.

2. The food

We've still got a lot of work to do, but we've got farm-fresh organic eggs every day, which is fantastic. We got raspberries in the summertime and planted a bunch of fruit trees. Our garden provides cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots. Being able to control your food is one of the big benefits of being a homesteader. 

3. Money

You should think about how to be a homesteader and make some money from it. We treated our homestead from the beginning like a business. The first thing we did was start our YouTube channel, bringing in some revenue to our homestead. 

The other thing we did with our homestead was we were lucky to find one that is a two-family. When we first bought our house and had to fix it up, we lived in the upper unit and fixed up the bottom. 

After about a year, we had the bottom fixed up, and then we decided to rent the top out on Airbnb, which just took off. 

We also recently got our dog kennel up and running, which we built on our homestead and made money from boarding dogs.

4. The animals

We love animals. There are some bad things with the male goats that we got, but there are also some good things with animals. We've got two dogs, and we've got two cats. 

We have chickens, the hardest-working animals I've ever seen.  

We open the chicken coop door in the morning, and they're foraging through the ground all day. That fertilizes the ground, then it grows nice and green, all while they are producing amazing farm fresh eggs for us. 

Mistakes we made

If you're a new homesteader, slow down, think things through, do your research, and don't let your excitement allow you to make foolish decisions like we did. We bought things we didn't need and paid too much for a lot of them. 

Another mistake we made was with our garden. We screwed up our garden the first year. Most of it didn't even work because the soil was so sandy. It was tough.

We've since met our neighbor down the road, a farmer, and he's like, "Oh, yeah, we got sandy soil here. You need to do this to deal with it." We should have just talked to somebody like that sooner. They've been dealing with this for generations. 

Instead, we tried to figure it out ourselves and wasted time and money.

Homestead pros and cons

Homesteading can be very rewarding if you're prepared for the homestead pros and cons. Plan, take your time making decisions, and enjoy the adventure. If you're considering becoming a homesteader, leave a comment below.