How to Make Up a Job

One of the great things about having a modern homestead, is the way you start to look at money and work.

Homesteading is work. Hard work.

So if you can find a way to cut down on the number of hours you spend away from home, it makes the job of homesteading a lot easier.

Budgeting is a big part of this concept. If you can live on less, you can earn less.

Jason and I used to live paycheck to paycheck, thinking we were dead broke.

No, we just didn’t know how to manage our money. Fortunately that was many years ago and we’ve gotten that straightened out!

We used the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University and it was the best financial decision we’ve ever made.

Like I mentioned in my post about hemming jeans, taking what others consider to be “odd jobs” really helps the budget in our family.

A few weeks ago I came across a great article by Lew Rockwell, entitled “The Austerity Diaries: If You Don’t Have a Job, Make One Up“.

This article has a lot of ideas for how to make up a job, and many of them Jason and I have actually done at one time or another. Such as…

Hemming jeans
Taking in prom dresses
Making quilts
Sewing curtains
Recovering furniture
Cleaning houses
Cooking meals
Tutoring
Lawn and pool services
Web design
Graphic design
Writing services
Computer building
Woodworking
… and so on!

Knowing that we can do 5-10 little jobs a month instead of having to sit in an office for 40 hours a week is very freeing. It also means that all the homesteading jobs that need to be done around the house are actually getting done. I don’t come home tired at the end of a long day at work to then work my “second job” of homesteading.

Check out the article and see if there is something that you can add in on the side to help your family homestead be just a little bit more secure.