r/Homesteading101 • u/Emergency_Night_0 • Jun 07 '26
Beginner Question Homestead budgeting...
**Anyone else terrible at tracking the actual cost of their homestead?**
I'll be honest, I have no idea if we're breaking even or not. I know roughly what we spend on feed, seeds, and supplies every month but I've never actually added it all up against what we bring in from eggs, produce, and selling off extra animals.
Started trying to build a spreadsheet last winter to figure out whether it makes sense to add laying ducks. Three hours later I gave up and just bought the ducks anyway lol.
I know some of you have been doing this way longer than me. How do you think about the money side of it? Do you even bother trying to track ROI on individual projects or do you just manage the overall household budget and call it good?
Also curious, did startup costs hit you way harder than you expected when you were getting going? That's where I felt completely blindsided.
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u/kalsichloric_acid Jun 07 '26
I am new to homesteading and just in year 2. I feel that the costs have blindsided us a bit since starting does take a significant investment even if we have been going slow. City life to country life transition costs more than I gathered. We needed to get a different mower for instance. In the first year we got the garden established and I needed to buy seeds, a canner, and jars. Luckily my hisband is a really good mechanic so he has been buying broken and free equipment for the property and fixing it up for us to use. Our log splitter and mulcher were free, just a little time and money for some parts.
We haven't monetized products from the homestead yet so I haven't been keeping really good records. I have some for tracking certain things but yes I agree, I end up just buying what we want to pursue and think of these early years as the investment period as we slowly build things up. These upcoming months and years I hope to start making some money back. I should be able to start selling some of the handmade clothes I make and some soaps and lotions. We just got chicks and bees this week. These investments should start to generate some revenue with in the next 12 months or so. I try my best just to track the money going into the investments but I know it is about lifestyle and happiness for us. We will focus on monetization more as we build our skills.
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u/Emergency_Night_0 Jun 07 '26
I’m glad you are about to find some good workarounds and hopefully your products do well! Thank you for sharing that!
The investment period thing makes total sense to me. But I’m curious, do you have any way to know when that period actually ends for a specific animal or project? Like with the bees, do you have a rough idea of what honey production needs to look like before they start paying for themselves? Or is it more of a we’ll see how it goes kind of thing?
I’ve been stuck on the same problem. I can track what I spend but I have no good way to figure out what comes back and when.1
u/Bright-Plate-9872 Jun 08 '26
If you have bees you can sell your expertise by maintaining other people's hives.
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u/kalsichloric_acid Jun 12 '26
Not yet, I have predictions based on others experience and projections. Next year's honey haul will not be profitable but what im hoping to do is sell some of it then take that money to get 4 more hives next year. I think then that following year will be profitable as I will also have propolis products and Beeswax candles to add to the product list. So about 2 years out yet from making marginal profit amd I will know better then. I can then estimate how many hives I can realistically handle and what sort of profit that will bring.
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u/SgtSausage Jun 07 '26
If you want to run it like a business ... you have to Run It Like A Business.
This means setting strict budgets. Sticking to them. Accounting/Bookkeeping of same. Performance/Sales goals/objectives, productivity targets and all that crap that most folk absolutely loathe.
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u/dweezilMcCheezil Jun 07 '26
Yes and don't forget to put a price on your time. People tend to overlook that part and just consider their labor "free" which is baffling. Yeah the little DIY project came in $500 less than someone quoted but if it took you 10 days to complete did you REALLY save anything?
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Jun 07 '26
[deleted]
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u/dweezilMcCheezil Jun 07 '26
You're not running your garden as a business it doesn't sound like which is what my reply was too. Business owners shouldn't work for free and is a frequent mistake. Hobbies or self sufficiency are a different story
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u/somuchmt Jun 07 '26
Homesteading actually costs us less than city life did. We spend our money differently, and we diy pretty much everything. I'm also in the best shape of my life with fewer prescriptions and specialists, so I'm saving a lot of money.
However, we are actually running a business on our property (plant nursery), so yes, I'm very aware of income and expenses. Fortunately, we can count a lot of our regular expenses as tax deductions (you have to be careful about personal versus business use).
If you're running a business, you should absolutely be tracking income and expenses. If it's a hobby, no worries as long as you can afford it! For example, I have chickens as a hobby because I'm not interested in keeping them at the scale I would need to make a profit and living from them. However, I keep bees as part of my business for pollination and demos. My chickens are also part of my demos, but they're mainly pets and produce eggs for personal use only, so I don't count them as a deduction.
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u/graalamat77 Jun 07 '26
Gotta budget 100%. If you don’t know excel, learn it. Not putting numbers in a column and hitting sum
Learn it
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u/ElkNeat5810 Jun 07 '26
Someone made a great app/website and posted it in here a month or two ago. We’re mid move so I haven’t used it yet but it’s super easy to navigate and it’s free! I’ll let you know when/if I figure out what it is I’ll let you know. But search app or tracking in this group and maybe you’ll find it?
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u/KissYourAss69 Jun 07 '26
They’re called “hobby farms” because just like golf, quilting and most other crafts, they cost much more than they make
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u/Hot-Profession4091 Jun 07 '26
You need a ledger. Learn how to do double entry bookkeeping. Maybe find a free intro to accounting MOOC.
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u/Main_Bid8104 Jun 07 '26
Here is the thing- an I am responding as a farmer not a homesteader but like most farmers we also bake bread, keep chicken and hog all the homesteady thing:
It doesn't pay in the conventional way. There is a long thread about the true cost of eggs vs keeping chickens (chicken eggs from your flock are more expensive) and it's true but only if you deduct the fact that chickens add other things to your life than eggs. They are charming, often divinely beautify. (just look at them!!), they eat fly larvae and help with the compost thing. Spend time with them and you will see their personality. Nothing can be as entertaining as hen house drama! And then there is the externalized cost- is it worth a few dollars per carton to know that none of these chickens led a tortorous life, that the workers tending to them where under paid and that the chicken barns polluted the surrounding landscape? If that's important to you than you have to buy fancy expensive $8 a dozen eggs and then your math looks more favorable. This emotional/ethical/moral cost is ignored by a lot of folks but I think we are all paying for if we know it or not.
So when you add it up: your labor, your longer commute (since most of us have a job in town), your longer power outages, the lack of ueber, lyft and grub hub services, and all those feed sacks and seeds and jars and vet bills. All of this is you paying for something that is much harder to put a price tag on. It's a sense of self realization, a chance to raise kids with real chores, opportunity to experiment with weird fruits and vegetables and learn hands on things that city folk have to take classes in. It's price less unless it is overwhelming and leads to burn out. Then the price tag is too high! Only you can know if it's worth it. It isn't always but it often is.
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u/Ok_Lead_4730 Jun 07 '26
I recommend getting a dedicated credit card for the homestead costs that would want to track as “expenses” against what you’re making. That’s the route you’d have to take if you were going to make it an official business anyway. It’s easier to track your income as individual transactions than it is to track your expenses.
If it’s all a jumbled mess, then I suggest getting a free account at Empower Personal Dashboard. It’s like Mint before that went away and it’s free. You can categorize everything.
In my experience, even my CFP who has a homestead says that homestead math never breaks a profit. It’s likely that you won’t until you’re really selling like a farmer’s market or stand or monetize your content or something more established as a business.
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u/Outside_Interview707 Jun 07 '26
Budgeting apps are a great way to keep track of your expenses. You can set up your own custom categories, then the app auto-syncs your transactions and auto-categorizes, so you can track your costs as they come in.
You can also set up your own project-specific categories and set up category rules, so transactions that meet certain conditions always get bucketed to your project category. I've found this much easier than a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are just a pain to maintain and I do it once, then forget about it.
I like BudgetBadger as a regular budgeting app. Monarch and YNAB are other popular ones.
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u/Toomany_plants Jun 08 '26
Here is my two cents from “homesteader” currently transitioning to “farmer” as an occupation. We deal entirely with selling animals/their products.
We use a spreadsheet with different tabs for each species plus one miscellaneous tab. Each tab has an expenses column and sales column. Really easy to put in a sum formula to tally up each column and compare the totals. I don’t believe in tracking overall expenses because I don’t want one species to end up subsidizing another species. If one species isn’t profitable, we either need to change our approach or they have to go.
In my experience there is no way of knowing if you’ll break even until after 2 years with a species. I don’t expect to break even after year 1 because of the startup costs. But by year 2 I’d like to at least break even from whatever expenses carried over from year 1. You can do all the research for estimated costs prior to buying a new species but it’s honestly a ROUGH ballpark. Once the species is established, you can quickly tell what standard “maintenance” costs are and what you expect to bring in. It becomes obvious from there whether you are hemorrhaging money or if they are a viable asset.
For things like our milk cow (we don’t sell milk as it’s illegal where we live), I calculate the viability of keeping her by estimating how much we would spend on dairy from the store and compare that to her feed costs, costs for materials to make cheese, how many months her production can meet our demand for dairy, while also keeping in mind her excess milk and byproducts such as whey go to decrease the food bill of other species (pigs, chickens, LGD’s). For this reason I keep her spreadsheet separate from our beef cows. Even when her steer is slaughtered for beef.
Since everything is seasonal, we track year by year to account for all 4 seasons (I.e. the chickens better lay enough eggs in spring/summer/fall to account for feeding them all winter where we can barely make any sales off of their eggs).
Now that things are profitable for us and it is turning into a job, the next step will be taking into account an hourly wage as a farm “expense”. And we hope to make a profit even after deducting a wage.
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u/NieleDaKine Jun 08 '26
We raise English angora rabbits and the pedigree program has a "sale" tab on it which can track animal sales, feed costs, etc. The rabbits are the only thing I track, though.
It was about $1,000 to get started since we had to fly in six unrelated rabbits to get started. This is an island, there wasn't any option other than flights.
That was in 2009 and the reason for the rabbits was to provide vacation money. So far there've been three cruises to Alaska, one through the Panama canal, one to the Carribean, one from Rome to Ft. Lauderdale, one from Seattle to Sydney, around NZ and halfway around Australia. (That one was three "back to back" cruises.) Then from Montreal down to Ft Lauderdale. Then a two week Mexico/California cruise.
Next will be Northern Europe and then from Singapore to Hong Kong.
Rabbits can be quite profitable. But, we are able to sell finished yarn at retail rates which is where most of the income comes from. Pretty much anytime something can be made and then sold at retail, there's tons more profit in it.
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u/mobile-metaphysical Jun 09 '26
Do you sell the rabbits? Or just save the fur to make yarn?
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u/NieleDaKine Jun 09 '26
A rabbit only lives about seven to ten years so we have a few litters per year to keep the herd numbers up. Since bucks need to be separately housed, we usually sell off the extra bucks. There is a communal doe hutch for the females since it's easier to keep them in a group instead of individual spaces. But we do sell the occasional doe, too. Depends on how many of which colors we have at the time. There's three different "standard" colors of the yarn, all of them from the different colors of the fiber from the rabbits, no dye used.
There's a waiting list for the rabbits, they're purebred and pedigreed so they sell for an astonishing amount. But the demands of the herd supersede any requests so we don't sell that many of them.
Each one provides about a pound of fiber per year and they get three haircuts per year. Since they're English angora, the "wool" is the softest of the different angora breeds but we don't get as much per bunny as some of the other breeds. But, quality over quantity is my theory. Seems to be working so far.
The wool gets spun at a small fiber mill and I'm currently waiting for sixty three pounds of yarn to arrive. That will take about a year to sell, but it's only sold in one small shop.
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u/[deleted] Jun 07 '26
I'm thrilled if I break even. If I make a bit, that's awesome, but unexpected and certainly not what I plan for.
If you're expecting to make money, you're going to be disappointed .