Less House More Resilience ... (00:45)
Hey there, thanks for joining me. Laura here. Boy, I have to first just say that I think it's important now to note that I'm recording this on Monday, March the second. This is the Monday following the beginning of the Iran war. And I think that context is going to be important for what
I have to say today, if you are new here, I am working around a resilient wealth wheel concept that I've put together to help us think about wealth in a more comprehensive and multi-dimensional way. I will have a link in the show notes so you can grab the worksheet. But if you haven't caught the topic so far, I have covered
couple on this resilient wealth wheel exploration. So go back and listen to those episodes.
So continuing our conversation around multi-dimensional and resilient wealth, I thought it would be good for us at this exact moment to talk a little bit about self-sufficiency and redundancies. Just to help you frame up my background or the way that I come to this topic, I thought it would be...
helpful to go back and give you a little bit of history. Sometimes when we hear people talk about certain topics, we make some assumptions about how they're coming to this particular viewpoint. And so sometimes that can make us accept or dismiss what they have to say based on what we assume about their, their belief system or their background. So I thought it'd be helpful to
unpack a little bit of my story in order to help frame up how I'm coming to my ideas around self sufficiency and redundancies at this moment.
So I grew up in what some people call a high control religion. And this upbringing instilled in me a very baseline.
respect for and reverence for authority, designated institutions and systems. So my young life coming up all the way through my really late teen years, I was really saturated in this notion of certain
authority figures, systems, and institutions having the loudest voice and the most authority.
and the most righteousness, shall we say. And I think what this did for me was taught me to ⁓ dismiss or repress or ignore my own voice in favor of the voices of those who were the designated people with the information or the
opinion or the idea that was set in front of me as being the rightest. And so throughout my adulthood, I carried the same respect for structures and institutions. I left my upbringing and went into the United States military.
which traded one authority structure and system for another. So while in the military, I was trained and taught to have respect for the chain of command as well as the United States government, as well as military leaders. And so this was a direct
from one structure to another.
It was following 9-11 while I was in the Air Force that I started to question whether or not I personally agreed with the Iraq war at the time and whether I believed the reasoning or justification that was being presented. You remember back in these days,
there were, you know, three channels, a lot less information that we could draw from to make our own conclusions. This was a time when dissent was left maybe more on the fringes because it didn't get play on any screen anywhere because it was really early days for internet and social media wasn't even
you know, invented yet. I was, I spent, you know, three months deployed in service of Operation Enduring Freedom. And following that, my time with the military was coming to an end, my enlistment was coming to an end. So I chose not to continue on in that path, feeling that
Perhaps I didn't have the trust in the systems and that I didn't believe in the ⁓ war machine that I was in service of at that time. But the military served a very important role for me and that it allowed me to launch my adult life and it allowed me to get some distance from the high control religion that I had been.
saturated in as a young person.
from there, I guess I settled in more to, some level of confidence and shall we say optimism about the way that we could have leadership that might be in service of the people or the greater good and that we might be able to eventually live in a world where people and human needs
and problems could be solved. And so I would say that that that honoring of structure and institutions stuck with me for a really long time. And like I said, I was a pretty optimistic person about the future just really believing in hard work and and my own work ethic and
believing in a system that would allow me to get to some level of comfort and happiness if I kept at it.
Of course, there were bumps along the road and different organizations and situations that made me doubt things from time to time. I remember sitting in my first 401k enrollment meeting following the Great Recession and really being completely confused as to why I would take some of my paycheck
and invest it in a system that had just caused so much devastation because people were behind the scenes cooking the books and using creative financial strategies to further their own ends and harm so many. I had bought my first house in 2007, right before the
crash of the great recession. And so that definitely taught me a very important lesson about housing and home equity. But it also taught me about trust in systems and institutions. But I kept on, I kept doing the thing and churning through the requirements of our capitalistic system, going to work every day, working hard.
trying to make things better for myself and be mindful of those around me.
So when Eric and I got further along in our relationship, Eric would bring questions to me about assumptions that I had, maybe many of us have about things that have played out in our history. And I was very dismissive of his questions, just like I had been dismissed in my questions ⁓ for my whole life. ⁓ This sort of belief.
in the systems and institutions was still deeply in me. And so I didn't feel like it was allowed or appropriate to question these things. And what if you did accept that you'd been lied to? Then what? So I think in this moment, we are all realizing, to some degree that maybe the things that we think are
true or certain are maybe not so guaranteed or maybe not so true.
And so as you're on this journey somewhere in that it is an opportunity, an invitation for us to start listening to ourselves instead. And this is what my tiny house journey represents. Of course, I've talked about this before. It was a coming home to myself, a rejection of the notion that I should spend 30 years paying for.
a very expensive roof over my head just because I was told that that was the status and that's what I was supposed to do. And so in rejecting that I chose a debt free lower cost housing option and therefore listen to myself and what was actually true for me and what was important to me. And what was important to me is less about square footage and more about time freedom and more about freedom to spend time in nature.
and more about being gentle with the earth.
And so in this moment, we all have an opportunity to start to listen more to ourselves and thinking about ways that we can take care of ourselves. If the systems and institutions that we have had so much trust in falter or fail in some way.
So our most basic needs are met by systems and supply chains and organizations that we may think will always be there and will always continue their service uninterrupted. But we have seen so many instances where this isn't always the case and
even without a particularly pessimistic outlook, one can extrapolate that this is likely to happen more. And so to the extent that we have resources and ability, which goes to all of the other areas around the resilient wealth wheel, we have this opportunity now to start thinking and putting energy around self sufficiency and redundancies.
Now, when I say self sufficiency, I do not want to continue to play in to the independence narrative that we have in our culture around "I can do it all myself and I don't need anybody else." When I say self sufficiency, what I really mean is sufficiency that isn't quite so reliant on institutions, systems and supply chains. So it really is about
narrowing the radius of where we get the things our most basic needs. So self sufficiency may look more like a neighbor or within your community, decoupled from perhaps a mega billion dollar corporation or decoupled from your local energy supplier or decoupled from
your utility. So self sufficiency is how do we take care of our most basic needs in a way that is less fragile.
we all know, there are lots of things that we bring into our life that aren't necessarily needs. They're more like wants. So when we think about self-sufficiency, redundancy, I really want to dial it in to exactly what we need in order to continue to function and, and live, in the most basic and healthy way, of course. And so we're talking about really basic things here. Shelter.
water, food, air, maybe some clothes to wear around. as we think about these most basic needs that we have, then I've talked before on the living environment episode about how our living environment actually is tied in so much to this idea around self sufficiencies and redundancies.
Many of us are unaware of the fact that we shed more water off of our roof than we consume from our utility. so capturing that rainwater.
which in many places around the country is quite sufficient for household water needs, would be one way of being redundant. Here in our tiny house, we have rainwater catchment. Unfortunately, we are not able to catch as much rainwater as we use in a year due to the size probably of our storage not being able to capture
the rain when it comes in large volumes instead of on a regular basis. But I'm working on expanding that storage capacity and so hoping to increase the self sufficiency on the water front So guttering one's house and collecting rainwater it's not a huge project. Gutters are
relatively easy to install, even if you don't have a lot of skill in that regard. Ladder safety may be the most critical part of that. But I think that thinking about a secondary water supply, whether that's water being delivered or catching water off of our roofs, like just being aware that our that water is literally the key.
to everything since our bodies are made up so much of water and we can live for not very long without water. So the water redundancy or self sufficiency would be, I would say number one place to look and make sure that this is an area that you have some backup.
Of course, there's lots that can be said about food. I think we saw in the relatively recent past in the pandemic, a lot of people returning to gardening. We've certainly seen that in other crisis points in the past. And if we go back to our childhood, a larger percentage of us spent time gardening with maybe elder family members. My grandmother put in
one huge garden every year. We spent all summer snapping beans and canning and all of those things that aren't that far away from my own personal experience. Back in the mid 2000s, I lived in a condo on the second floor, so I didn't have actually any ground available to me. But I grew pots of
Pots of vegetables down the stairs on the way out and actually you can grow quite a bit in a small space currently in my tiny house because our greenhouse is still under construction and it's still a little bit winter here. I have my lemon lime tree that is preparing for its future in my greenhouse as well as some trees that are we're gonna plant that are coming up and thinking about
maybe a sprouter, is something that provides fresh greens to you all the time. Certainly in a small space, there is probably a little bit we can do in order to start increasing our own self-sufficiency in the food space, even if we don't have any available yard.
Food growing is a relatively inexpensive and locally sourced thing that we can work on. Seeds, of course, are not terribly expensive. You can often get them at a local seed library, which those seeds may be more adapted to your local climate. We can make our soil by using the food scraps that we're throwing away into the landfills.
I won't go into all the details of any of this because there is gosh so much content out there to learn how to grow some of your food yourself using limited resources.
growing potatoes in straw, right? There's just so many, so many ideas out there. And I think that these are things that we can increase our skillset around and build up competency because it takes time to learn how to do these things. And it takes time to find time to work on them as well. Recently in the last few weeks, I have acquired a sourdough starter.
and started baking every week. So this has added another task into my routine, but I feel pretty good about being able to produce two loaves of bread that generally last us about a week and doing it with the grains that I have stockpiled a little bit here. Speaking of stockpiling, I have been
very resistant in the past to the notion of having any sort of extra food supplies. I really was very dismissive of any notions around prepping as I felt like that that was only fringe fringe people who were doing that and were stockpiling bullets and rice and beans and so
It has ⁓ taken some humility for me to accept that the world is not so guaranteed and that the supply chains are not so guaranteed. And in the moment where we experience another shortage like we did in the pandemic, it would be good to have some extras around.
I am not alone in this. And if you're thinking about this, you are not alone in this. This is actually becoming more and more a topic of conversation that I'm seeing people engage in because the truth is that we can all sit by and be very trusting of supply chains and yet we can still suffer if they falter.
So if we want to do a good job of listening to our own voice, we might want to tap into what we feel in this moment and take some steps. And this doesn't have to be buying $10,000 of ready-made meals. It can be just deepening our pantry, adding more to our closets than we have.
had in the past and making sure that we have some basics on hand.
It's not going to obviously carry us for a really long time. We are not going to be able to stockpile the food that we need for the rest of our lives, but we can create a bridge for ourselves to a point where we go, are able to go back to our supply chains or we're able to increase our ability to grow our own or that sort of thing.
So the self-sufficiency, as I said, definitely don't want to talk about that in terms of independence and isolation. I want to talk about that in terms of gathering resources in our community and, dare I say, having difficult conversations with neighbors and other people in our community where we might be able to share our self-sufficiency and trade resources.
So maybe your neighbor is already collecting water off of their roof and you are able to grow a little bit. And maybe you have a handshake agreement that you're going to be able to help each other out if things get difficult. I think this is actually the best way is to figure out how do we build those relationships right now that are able to sustain us in a difficult time. And by the way, we can make some friends.
for her really isolated and lonely lives.
So the water and the food and the air we breathe and the shelter we live in are all really critical things to just keeping going in difficult times. so thinking about the ways that we can bolster our ability to have these most basic needs if things become less reliable and also thinking about
those redundancies, multiple ways to get these most basic needs taken care of, kind of goes hand in hand. Self sufficiency is in and of itself in the way that we have lived our lives, a redundancy to the system that has really sustained the vast majority of us. And so ourselves are our redundancy, We are our backup plan.
to Walmart and grocery stores or co-ops or farmers markets or Costco or wherever you shop and wherever you get your water from, we can be our own backup plan.
So in this moment, let's all have trust in ourselves and find ways that we can make sure that our own backup plan of ourself is getting the resources needed in order to come to our aid if things get more challenging than they are at this moment.
So what does this self-sufficiency and redundancy look like in my life? Just giving you example of the things that I am working on. I mentioned earlier that the rainwater collection is not sufficient due to the size of the cistern.
I have calculated how much water that we use here in our tiny house because it's very easy to do because we have a 1200 gallon cistern that collects rainwater and I know that we run out of water in about a month. So if you do the math on this, typically we have about a thousand gallons in our cistern. We go through about 33 gallons a day in this house, which by the way is way lower than the average household.
use of water. And this is an important thing to know that in times that are difficult, we may be less greedy with our resources. We certainly have learned how to conserve water while living in this sort of environment, it does take a little extra effort for us to refill that cistern on our own. We have to tote water. And so
that has made us conserve water more. so with 33 gallons a day that we use for washing and drinking and dogs and all the things, I have a pretty good idea of how much water we need, obviously. So trying to expand our water catchment.
⁓ is something that we're working on by building out the studio building that we're working on. We'll have more roof to catch more water. Meantime we're catching a lot more water at Eric's shop where I am rain water irrigating my orchard, my food forest that I am working on. And that rainwater actually we think of also as our fire prevention. So we have it hooked up.
also so that it can be used to defend our house, our perimeter in case of a fire emergency. Wildfires are becoming more and more common and larger, so we wanted to make sure that we have water resources for that purpose as well. So that's a redundancy in that I'm using that rainwater that we're catching off of that larger roof, both for garden
and four defense from fire.
I am working on a food forest on a small area that I feel like is in the best place to collect natural runoff. And so I have been building soil both by composting as well as collecting local resources. I've been collecting manure as well as sawdust from a local sawmill.
and trying to work on increasing the fertility in the soil so that I can start to grow perennial food crops on this little plot of land where hopefully I'm able to collect the most amount of moisture also. As I mentioned, I've got my lemon already started that's going to go into the greenhouse. So we're building
⁓ greenhouse building that will hopefully support us with some winter growing when the sun angle is correct. so the redundancies that I am working on are really those basic things that I talked about earlier, food and water.
And so all of this is just really designed for us to reduce our dependency on the supply chain. The supply chain, of course, as we all know, is getting less and less affordable all the time. And so the more that we can find ways to take care of ourselves and the more that we can do to support ourselves and those around us, then the more resilient that we will hopefully be.
as we move into the future. So those are just a couple of the ways that we are working on things here. It has no doubt added some extra tasks to my weekly schedule. The bread baking, the picking up of food scraps from the local restaurant, all of these things are adding to my workload. But I think that in the long run, these are investments in a more resilient future for us.
I hope that this was motivational or inspirational in terms of helping you maybe jumpstart. We can't do everything overnight, but just like normalizing the view that in fact things are at a place where it does actually make sense for us to think about our self-reliance.
or our mutual reliance on other people in our community to shrink the overall range of distances from which we're getting all of our resources to think about redundancies for the most basic needs that we have and to listen to our own voice about what is going on around us and to take actions that make sense for us to
build resilience for ourselves in the future. We have spent our whole lives convinced that somebody else, some other system, the government, the supply chains, that they're right and that they're going to take care of us. the reality is starting to look a little more fractured and a little different than that. And so it's okay to just be honest with ourselves.
and to start looking inward for the answers that we need.
More coming up on the resilient wealth wheel. You can grab the worksheet at thetinyhouseadviser.com. Thank you for being here. Let me know what you are doing in order to build up some self sufficiency and redundancy.
