3 Ways to Save Money and Decrease Your Reliance on "The System"

When times are good, we don't worry a lot about the little things. You know, things like where our food is going to come from, how we're going to heat the house, if we'll be able to make the rent or mortgage payment...

These days, though, a lot of folks are concerned with those "little things."

I usually blog about home improvement ideas, but today I want to write about some simple steps we can all take to save money and increase our self-sufficiency. I'm starting a new site on "living off the urban grid," and I hope you'll check it out when you have time.

The benefits of saving money are obvious, but you might not have thought about the benefits of being a little more self sufficient. If you don't depend on corporations for everything, you get to live in a much stabler and comfortable state of mind.

For example, if you have a garden and some fruit trees and provide even some of your own food, then seeing the prices rise at the grocery store becomes less of a concern. If you install an alternative energy source such as wind or solar power to heat your home and provide energy, you're less concerned about the fact that energy prices may go up significantly in the future.

Okay, let's talk about some concrete steps you can take to save money and decrease your reliance on The System.

Get out of debt

We all know it's not a good idea to carry a lot of debt, especially high-interest credit card debt and car loans, and yet many of us are deeply in debt. Being in debt means being reliant on some company who doesn't know our name (and doesn't care, so long as we send in those minimum monthly payments regularly). It also means wasting a lot of money on interest.

It's hard to feel independent or self-sufficient when you know that just a month or two out of work would send you down the road to bankruptcy.

Even affluent folks are likely to have credit card debt (sometimes when you make more you just end up charging more!), so this is not a concern just for certain social classes.

For advice on getting out of debt, watch Suze Orman or Dave Ramsey on TV, or pick up one of any zillion books on the subject. Realize that you'll never obtain any degree of independence as long as you're saddled with credit cards, car loans, and the like.

Become a food producer, not just a consumer

As little as a couple generations back, it was unthinkable that a family not have a vegetable garden, and many families had a lot more. There was a time when farming was the primary job for a whole lot of people.

Today most of us don't have any clue how our food gets to our table and how heavily oil is relied upon to get it there. Just think of all the gas that gets used toting strawberries from Chile to Seattle in the middle of winter. It's likely that energy costs will increase in the future, so we could see a huge increase in the cost of food.

A big way to protect ourselves from this inflation is to produce as much of our own food as is practical. Even on small city lots, it is possible to grow a lot of fruits and vegetables. In most urban and suburban areas, you can raise chickens, which can provide your family with farm fresh eggs. In some areas you can even have goats (fresh goats' milk) and pigs. It's also possible to have your own bee hive (or hives!) in suburban and urban areas. One hive produces 100-200 pounds of honey a year (sell the excess, give it away, or make mead).

Of course, you don't have to become a urban farmer in order to produce just a little bit of your own food. Start with planting a few tomato plants or a couple apple trees. I'm a big fan of perennial food crops that come back year after year and don't require a lot of work on your part (think fruit trees, blackberries, asparagus, etc. etc.).

To get inspired, look up the Dervaes family (they produce 6,000 pounds of food on 1/10th of an acre in the middle of a California city): http://pathtofreedom.com/

Install alternative energy

There's little point in installing solar panels or a wind turbine before you have your debt paid off. This is something you should wait to do until you can pay for it outright (in the meantime, undertake whatever simple home improvements you can to make your house as energy efficient as possible).

When you're in a position financially to do so, though, it can make a lot of sense to install a means of producing alternative energy for your home. Examples include solar panels, geothermal heating systems, backyard wind turbines, and even corn or pellet stoves if you live in an area where such fuels are inexpensive.

Residential heat and energy systems such as these can ultimately lower your energy bills by producing energy right at home. In some cases, people are able to live entirely "off the grid" by combining an alternative energy-producing system with a lifestyle that makes smart use of energy.

If you take even just the first two of the three steps we've talked about here (getting out of debt and producing some of your own food), you'll be way ahead in the game. You'll need less money to live and you'll be less reliant on a system you have no control over.