Most retirement strategies focus on “wealth creation” or providing you with enough cash to maintain your pre-retirement extravagant lifestyle. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it is worth knowing that there is a better way – doing it yourself – self sufficiently!
Complete self sufficiency is difficult if impossible to achieve, even if you do have abundant land, and are prepared to work damned hard! But a measure of self sufficiency is open to anyone who is interested and has some resources behind them. How self sufficient you aim for will depend on your means, abilities and the level of comfort/lifestyle you desire. It is my retirement strategy of choice but I have no intention of working my bum off after I retire, but having some fun being able to thumb my nose (to a certain extent) at the system.
If you do choose self sufficiency as your retirement strategy it is as much about reducing your outgo as maximizing your income. Every euro that you earn, you pay tax on, and the rate varies on the country and your income, but every euro that you save, you keep 100%. My parents-in-law retired some 15 years ago when interest rates were 18%, but now they are 5% and they are finding that they have much less to live on. By maximizing your self reliance, you are insulating yourself to a greater or lesser extent from the external forces over which you have no control, but can have a dramatic effect on your lifestyle.
There are other benefits from the self sufficient lifestyle -
Boredom is NOT an issue.
Improved health due to improved diet.
Improved health due to continued exercise.
Reduced exposure to effects of inflation, peak oil, strikes, terrorist actions, etc.
Increased sustainability/ reduced environmental footprint (you are more “green”).
A lot of the stuff involved in Self sufficiency is not for the “Compleat Idiot”, you do need to know stuff. To generate power you need to be able to set up solar panels or a wind generator, manage batteries and regulate your demand so that it dos not outstrip your supply. It requires more knowledge and experience than what is required to plug in to the reticulated electricity supply and turn on a switch, but the rewards are there and not only monetary ones. [If you're moving to a property in portugal there's a great likelihood that hot water is already provided by solar power, so no need to worry about setting up a system yourself!] There is also a considerable degree of satisfaction to be had by being able to provide for yourself at this basic food-and-shelter level. So … as with any retirement strategy, the time to start your preparations is now!
When you start looking at being self sufficient you start consideration of the basics like food, water energy and “other fun bits!”. There are plenty of other articles that talk about maximizing your income, so I will focus more on minimising your outgo, but in an article of this size all I can provide is an overview, hopefully motivating you to look further into some of the subjects discussed.
Food – Veggies
This is one of those unavoidable expenses, we all have to eat! But growing your own veggies is not just about saving money … it is about taste, convenience, nutrients and reducing your environmental footprint. Your veggie garden can be as big or as small as you want, or are able to cope with, and two tomato plants in containers on a balcony are better than nothing!
There are many ways of growing your own produce and perhaps the simplest is digging up part of your lawn and planting seeds or seedlings. If your soil is not what it could be, you can make raised beds by importing organic materials such as manure, straw, hay, compost etc and or good soil and then digging it into your garden, some edging material to build up the bed and there you have it. Raised beds are a bit easier to wok with and veggies love the rich loose soil, so draining is not a problem.
You may have difficulty with digging or poor soil so another easy way is to plant a no dig garden. This is based on making up a bed with compostables such as Lucerne hay and straw and chook poo (well rotted) and then planting your seeds or seedlings direct into it – as the bed rots down, lots of nutrients are released. My main argument against this is that all of the components have to be bought it, but if your soil is poor etc. it could be worthwhile.
Maybe you don’t have the space for a large veggie patch – so how about containers? They are easy to move around and a surprising number of veggies grow well in containers. A container garden can also be very attractive if you get a bit creative with your containers, drainage is assured and you can take advantage of companion planting. They do need the water keeping up to them on hot days and, again, everything needs to be bought in although recycling things into veggie growing containers is good for the environment too!
For my money, whatever way you choose to grow, organic gardening (fertilizer and pesticide free) makes the most sense. Not just because it is the most environmentally friendly and gives you residue free food but because if you are going towards self sufficiency you don’t want to be forced into buying expensive chemicals.
Some other concepts worth reading up on are permaculture, crop rotation, green manure, mulching and composting.
Animals
Animals are a bit more problematic, you need more space and they will need a greater or lesser amount of care. Chickens are probably the ideal livestock for the backyard pastoralist. They are cheap to acquire and feed, comparatively quiet and easy to house and they provide eggs, manure and hours of entertainment. I house mine in a moveable house or “chook tractor” which I then locate over my veggie beds. They clean up bugs and weeds (after the veggie cycle is completed) dig up the beds and manure them in situ. A winner all round but you must make sure they can’t dig their way out and get access to your growing veggies – they are very abrasive and where you have chooks and veggies together you wind up with just chooks!
If you don’t have enough room for vertebrates, maybe you could try insects (bees) or mollusks (snails). Of the two, snails are the easiest but you have to be able to consume the end product – escargot – or there is not much point. Bees do require some knowledge and equipment but give you honey, wax, propolis and pollination in return.
You may want to look at keeping rabbits for meat, but around here we even have trouble dispatching a chook when required, so something as small, furry and cute as a rabbit is perfectly safe. Again, if you can’t bring yourself to “harvest” the produce, you have just saddled yourself with an extra pet.
Energy
We all use energy in our lives, to cook our food, power our car and TV, even to purify our water so it is important to have some way to harvest our own energy without relying on the national grid or the oil companies (well, reducing our reliance on them anyway!)
The easiest method is direct use of the suns rays. The sun can be used directly to cook food, heat water, dry food for preservative purposes, or heat rooms. We have a solar oven which was home made and works remarkably well, a solar food drier which is also home made and works well, a commercial solar water heater and I am in the midst of making a reflecting solar cooker so that we can boil, fry and stir fry as well as bake.
Most equipment that makes direct use of the sun can be made fairly cheaply (sometimes even out of discarded cardboard and aluminium foil) by almost anyone with a few tools and who is moderately handy. This keeps the costs down and, depending where you live, it may be the only way of getting hold of some of the gear.
Electricity generation has more options but requires more investment and you need to know more to manage your personal energy supply. The easiest (but not cheapest) option is to buy a stack of solar photovoltaic panels and mount them on the roof or wherever. Then get an inverter (converts 12 volts direct current to 240 or 120 volts alternating current) and plug the panels into an inverter and then have an electrician wire your inverter back into the national grid through a meter that can run both ways. That way the power you produce goes into the grid and then you use the power back from the grid as required. This is good financially and environmentally but if the grid goes down, you’re still stuffed! [Information on selling your solar power back to the grid in Portugal at ]
To be independent of the grid you need batteries which are heavy, expensive and do eventually require replacement. You also need to know more to operate the system, but you can run on 12 volts as well as the normal AC voltage and you are independent of the system.
You can also buy or make a wind generator – an electricity generator or alternator powered by the wind. Most home made ones are based on a car alternator that is rectified to 12vdc. You can pay thousands of euros for a commercial wind generator but they tend to be more quiet and unobtrusive and require less maintenance.
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WINDPOWER WORKSHOP Author – H. Pigott Explains the structure and theory behind wind generation and how to build yourself a functioning turbine. £12.00 |
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CHOOSING WINDPOWER Author – H. Piggott Essential guide to deciding if you want a wind system, and if you do, which to choose. Updates and replaces ‘Its a Breeze’ £7.99 |
Water
Water requires energy to collect, treat, store , filter and transport to your home and is remarkably cheap for all of that! If you want to be self sufficient or more sustainable then it makes sense to harvest the water from your roof. Depending on your climate, size of your roof, size of your storage and needs it is possible to be run your house off rainwater alone. People in the outback of Australia have been doing it for many years, but to do it successfully you may need to make some changes.
Of course in Portugal, many properties come with their own water supply, so you may not be so concerned with getting a free water supply, but you will want to learn ways to reduce your water usage.
Some automatic washing machines can chew through gallons of water per wash and toilets can use 9 litres or more of drinkable water to get rid of 100ml of urine, which doesn’t make sense. There are many ways to save water such as putting bath or clothes washing water on the garden or using it to flush the toilet, or installing a dual flush – or even better – a composting toilet. [Composting toilets range from a simple DIY bucket affair to modern commercial systems that don't look much different to a flush toilet in your bathroom.]
This article has been a rough overview of how you can set yourself up to be as self reliant as possible to reduce your outgo and maximize your income in your retirement and as a by-product you may find one or more fascinating new hobbies. If you are interested I suggest you enquire further and see what possibilities suit your tastes and interests. Give it a go, every little bit helps … and it’s fun!
Nev Sweeney is a regular contributor to
]]>“Rome was not built in a day and Rome was probably not worth building. A sound self sufficient small holding certainly is” – John Seymour
Many people who make the move to rural Portugal aspire to a degree of self-sufficiency. For some a few rows of vines and a couple of chickens will suffice but others will settle for nothing less than full wine, cheese, oil, vegetable and meat production. Some are fulfilling a lifelong ambition and others a more recent dream. For me it was a little of both. I remember as a child drawing plans of farms with square fields full of matchstick cows and stables labelled “horsis” and “chikins”. But as I got older I bought into the ideals of society and soon forgot farms in my pursuit of money, motorbikes and a mortgage. Many years later I had acquired all three and, as a bonus, a boyfriend who made the first and last seem somehow less important. We started to ask “what is it all about really?” the question that leads to so many life-changing decisions.
BuildingA stop off at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales on a rain-sodden motorbike holiday brought all those forgotten childhood dreams rushing back and before long we were excitedly discussing smallholdings despite our complete lack of knowledge of animals or gardening. It was to be a few more years before we found ourselves in a position to live out the dream but here we now are with our own patch of dirt, the time to spend digging it, a great climate and supportive and knowledgeable neighbours. And what neighbours! It’s very daunting to watch them effortlessly grow all their own food, and enough for their menagerie of animals, milking goats and sheep and making cheese with one hand whilst pressing a thousand litres of wine with the other. They glide smoothly from season to season knowing exactly when to harvest the olives, when to plant each vegetable, how to prune vines and slaughter pigs without flinching and turn every last bit of the carcass into delicious food, not only enough for themselves but also for various members of their huge extended families working abroad in Switzerland and France and children in Lisbon, to say nothing of the bags, boxes and bottles of produce they pass our way. They make it look so easy. For any fellow would-be smallholders I would like to offer my warmest encouragement and a hearty pat on the back for having got this far but also a few words of warning: It is very easy to read books on animal care but very difficult to find yourself with an unwanted cockerel in one hand and a knife in the other. Gardening books will tell you when to plant a certain crop but an unexpected late frost can kill it or weeds will quickly engulf it or your animals will get to it and demolish months of work in minutes the first time you forget to shut the gate. A fox proof shed is easily constructed for poultry but if you forget to shut them in it, before dark, every single day, you might as well not bother. If you are not born to this way of life it is not easy at first. Those neighbours only make it look so because they were picking grapes and olives before they could talk and helping out in the kitchen and the fields since they were born.
StrimmingThere may be a breed of sensible realistic smallholders out there who pace themselves and get thoroughly to grips with each aspect of their new life before launching into it, people who spend years researching and working on other peoples farms before taking the plunge for themselves, who plan things carefully before carrying them out. If so I have yet to meet one. Chances are if you have gone past the stage of talking to other people and saying, “oh you are lucky” and “I wish I could do something like that” and actually bought some land then you’re probably insane enough to want everything now and believe that you can. But if you don’t want to end up more stressed than a stock-exchange market trader with a million pound mortgage then you really need to take it easy. Before you dash out and buy a hundred chickens, a flock of sheep and goats, and a rotavator and start ripping out every bit of woodworm infested timber in your house, wait! The main reason people cite for leaving the rat-race behind is quality of life but if you’re dragging yourself out of bed at six to start watering and working in the hot sun clearing brambles all day and mixing concrete and then sitting up sharpening tools before collapsing into a tent every night then you’ll pretty soon kill yourself, or each other. Start with small animals and only a few. Make sure you have suitable accommodation for them and that you can comfortably provide them with food and bedding and have the time to feed them and clean them out. Consider buying them young so that you can get to know each other. Time just spent in the company of your animals is not wasted. The more familiar they are with you the easier it will be to catch them when they get into your vegetable garden and the sooner you’ll spot any tell tale signs of sickness. Also it’s endlessly entertaining. Some days, especially starting in a new country, you’ll spend wrangling with setting up your new life, gaining residency, a postal address, insurance and the like. Treat this as time spent working – don’t force yourself into the garden with a hoe at seven o’clock at night because you’ve spent a whole day dealing with paperwork. Crack open a bottle of wine instead and appreciate the sunset.
BuildingCultivate a relationship with your neighbours. Here in Portugal they’re almost guaranteed to be friendly and helpful. They know what to plant and when, how to prune vines and olives – invaluable if you’ve grown up in a country without these wonderful things and where to buy healthy livestock. Many of them, having seen their children leave for the cities or abroad are delighted to see people enjoying the way of life they’ve been living for centuries and if you make any effort with the language they’ll try desperately to understand you and help you learn. That said, don’t be bound by everything they tell you. Although their farming methods are no doubt much more in tune with nature than your average factory farm they do use chemicals and you may have to stick your heels in to convince them if you don’t want to. Free range animals are something of a novelty and if you don’t expand on the local variety of crops then you will end up eating cabbage for four months of the year. We’ve found our neighbours to be baffled by but interested in us. If they also have a good laugh at us from time to time, well it’s a small price to pay for their support and advice.
But most of all – take time out to enjoy your new life. Eat proper food and take the time to enjoy preparing it. Stare at the scenery, catch up on reading and make time to spend with people. Don’t beat yourself up for what you haven’t got round to. Instead congratulate yourself on having achieved what most people only dream of. It’s not the Good Life if it gives you stomach ulcers.
BuildingIf you embarked upon your self-sufficient lifestyle with dreams of long walks looking for mushrooms, cosy winter nights in front of the fire and time to learn the guitar and have ended up wondering how you ever thought you were short of time when you had a “proper” job, don’t despair. Any day now you’ll get the weeds under control, your holiday let will take off and you’ll finally finish the bathroom and be able to take a wash. Until then – rest assured that you’re not alone. Plenty of other people are finishing a day clearing brambles that would have had Prince Charming pack up his sword and resign himself to a life of bachelorhood only to slump in front of an empty log basket and then think “oh stuff it, I think I’ll just go to bed anyway”. Speaking of log baskets – mine is empty so I shall go and chop some logs, and while I’m at it I should really feed the rabbits and the chickens and the geese and the goats need milking and you know I think there’s just enough daylight left to get out the cement mixer and lay the kitchen floor!
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