It is finally here, after months of preparation we want to introduce the new living off the grid magazine.

For quite a few years we have had it in our minds to take the website concept and make it into a magazine format.

We are not quite ready to unveil the 'off the grid magazine' just yet. That is the purpose of this post.

We want to know what you, our readers want to see in a magazine covering this material.

First off, there is a lot of different subjects that we can cover- from renewable energy, to solar, to wind, to gardening, building, and different diy projects.

The question we are putting to you today is- what do you want to see in the new living off the grid magazine?

We will try and explain our vision for this project first.

Jane and I really want to see a focus on homestead, diy, energy production, and ways to lower or eliminate monthly bills.

For us, in our nearly 17 years of living off the grid, (we do the math and really can't believe it has been that long either?), our main focus has always been to build something once and then reap the benefits over time.

This makes your time an investment in the future rather than simply work for hire, or a trade off with the 'wage slave economy'.

First off, there is your off grid home. Build it right the first time and never make a mortgage payment- ever...

Next, build your solar panel system, do it right, and you will never pay another electric bill- never...

And finally, there is the land, living off the land has always been a very important aspect of what we do. To build up the soil in our garden, and to selectively cut our forest so it is sustainable, these are all investments in the future as well.

We know that we can grow a substantial amount of food in our garden for the coming year. We know this because we have invested time, effort, and compost to our land.

Jane and I have paid the land for years with our sweat, now it pays us. We don't take advantage of this bounty or take it for granted. We eat what the land gives us, we freeze and jar the extra, we use our root cellar to store for the winter.

And most of all, we give thanks. We are truly thankful for the opportunity to invest in our land. Many never see this their entire life.

In essence the living off the grid magazine is about exploring this focus, through interviews with folks who are really doin it, photos and videos of our own life, and your feedback.

You see, in the end it is you, our readers who have to benefit, or we have failed. To talk all day, to write all day, to take pictures and videos of it all, would be for nothing, - if you don't learn about living off the grid.

And how you can do this yourself.

How to take real world experience and apply it to your own life, to enrich it and add the joy and passion that Jane and I looked for all those years ago,

and found here, on our own little piece of a wilderness homestead.

Off The Grid Magazine

Videos, pictures, and solid diy advice, that is what the living off the grid magazine needs to be, real inspiration so that you know what is possible today.

Please provide your comments on format, content, and if you have articles to submit please do so.

I remember that moment with my son like it happened just yesterday, even though 10 years has passed.

He got home from school on what was a great looking early spring day, and looked rather upset. He definitely didn't want to talk about it.

It took a couple hours but, finally at the dinner table it came out.

"Dad, are we poor? Some of the kids at school say we're poor."

That question hit Jane and I hard.

"No son, we're not poor, we're just in debt (this was way back in 1992 before we started off grid living. We have no money because it all goes towards paying our debt.

Our son took that answer and played with it for a while as only a bright kid trying to figure out what to do can. "Why are we in debt?" he asked.

I looked at Jane, then at our son and at that moment he knew that I didn't have an answer for him.

The first time that dad didn't know the answer to one of his questions. That was hard, and it hit Jane and me at the same time.

Why are we in debt? There's no need for this 'poor lifestyle', let's look for ways to learn debt free living.

That night we set about to change things for the better. Sitting at the kitchen table that night Jane finally confided in me about how she felt about our debt.

"Do you know how hard this is on me as a woman and a mother?

I can't get all of the groceries I want and our son can't have the things other kids have. Our debt is pulling this family apart!"

love my wife and listening to her plea for help hurt a lot.

She continued, "I don't need a new car or a credit card if it means being stuck in a life like this. What do we do?

What were we going to do to change this?

The burden of this situation weighed heavy on us both and I had been denying it. Now the burden had even been passed onto our son.

We needed fast action to make this situation better.

Taking a look at our debt load I quickly added it all up and couldn't believe we owed $43,000 in mostly consumer debt. No wonder we didn't ever have any money. It all went out the door to the credit card companies.

To top it all off, our lifestyle was worse than before we borrowed money. It was much worse.

A quick search at the library about debt free living and an internet search revealed a ton of 'get out of debt' help and I was relieved. There was help out there.

We looked at debt consolidation but it looked to be just a way for us to pay off our debt to someone else, and it did not speed up the process.

We even looked at bankruptcy and credit counseling.

None of them helped.

We bought eight books on getting out of debt and not one of them taught us anything we didn't already know. Not one of them offered a practical step by step plan for getting out of debt either.

We wanted a fast plan that would be easy to follow and relatively painless to implement. We didn't want to suffer more than we already were.

It took two months of searching but we finally stumbled on a plan that looked like it might work. Our trusted friend Steve showed us a book, How to Learn Debt Free Living.

The title of the book said it all. That's what we wanted! We trust Steve and when he told us he had just paid off $67,000 in debt in a little over 4 years I wondered why he hadn't told me about this sooner.

He said, "I was a little embarrassed at our financial situation and I wanted to make sure this plan worked before I told anyone about it. It feels good."

Steve told us that we wouldn’t believe what was in it at first, and he was so right.

I quickly learned that indeed, everything I had learned about debt since I was a kid was all wrong! Dead wrong, and worse it was keeping us in debt. Jane and I knew absolutely nothing about getting out of or staying out of debt.

It took us exactly 3 years and 4 months to pay off $43,000 in debt, including our mortgage.

What do you need to get started?

• A good debt free living plan
• co-operation of all family members
• a mentor to help you through the tough times

The directions are easy to follow and there isn't any complicated budgeting or math involved thankfully. There are just straight-forward steps to follow.

Steve encouraged us to share this with everyone we know, so they can get out of debt. Every family that we have showed it to, and there are dozens now, are either totally debt free now or well on their way to getting out of debt.

Their smile says it all. The burden is lifted.

Best of all, my son doesn't ask if we are poor anymore. We have time and energy and money to do things as a family. Jane doesn't cry at night anymore because we have no money either.

We got some help that worked.

Ever since we started living off the grid we have noticed a very prevalent opinion that goes something like this - " your home is nice, but how would you ever sell it?"

We used to get kind of irritated at the question as being off the grid has given us the option of not looking at our home as an investment at all.

We built the house as our own, without any thought of selling it.

Recently it has become all the rage to flip a house for profit. Buy it, fix it and sell it.

And keep doing it until you are rich presumably.

That's fine if you really like building and want to look at your home as a business, but does that make it a home? For the most part it doesn't.

It is really difficult to translate the intangibles about living off the grid and how we look at our home differently than most.

The best we can come up with for folks who ask is that our home is a work in progress, and it has grown with us and our changing needs.

And we have built it to be permanent, in other words it is our home.

Certainly things could change and our home could become unattractive to us through outside influences. The very same thing happened to Helen and Scott Nearing with their first homestead in Vermont. It is a very interesting story told to us first by Helen.

The area had become a tourist trap and resort area and they were lead to believe that their home would be preserved as it was, instead shady real estate developers bought their home and made it part of the same resorts.

We don't build anything here that we don't want to be permanent in our homestead. Part of self sufficiency certainly is thinking things through before you do them.

Every tree that we have, every rock, every acre of land we take it very seriously that it is our responsibility to look after it as best we can.

Most of the material for our home here came directly from this property, dead and damaged trees, stone for the fireplace and root cellar (even the chicken coop and greenhouse) All came from right here.

If you look closely you will see a lot of change on our property over the years, but most of that change has been a more permanent relocation of all the material we have used.

With the addition of concrete and sand nuisance rocks have become walkways and steps even foundations.

It is all in how you look at it. Why would I build a home, or even fix one up that we are not going to live in? It just does not make sense. Is the next house going to be our home? Why not live in the one you have now?

The strange part is that lately we have noticed a change in the question, and a definite acknowledgement that our building for ourselves theory just might appeal to another owner as well, go figure...

Build your home how 'you' would want it, not how you 'hope' the next owner would want it. That is living, and certainly living off the grid gives us this option better than any other.

We spent nearly every cent we had to build our home, and even though we did all of the work ourselves, and used lumber from our own property (that we cut with a chainsaw mill) it still did not make it any easier to power our home.

You see our family is no different than yours. We are just regular people who just want to make a difference in their lives. Our main goal in setting up this project was to lower our electricity costs.

It is getting very expensive out there so we figured out a way to beat it... and now we want to show you how to do the very same thing. Jane used to call it another mortgage, that monthly bill.

And it really was, every month, just like clockwork, and even back in 1993 (our last official electricity bill was paid in April of 1994) it was still over $100. That was a lot for a family just starting out, and now we hear reports of $200, $300 and even more for monthly bills.
Why not cut those costs with renewable energy, our first choice was living off the grid, but you can also do what we have done mostly and still remain grid tied, it is your choice.

Our whole family worked hard to find free solar panels, build our own solar panels, build a wind generator, and learn to install it all ourselves. It took a lot of work but it was really worth it.

Learn Where to Get Free Solar Panels.
How To Build a Wind Generator
The best way to start is to sign up for our weekly newsletter above. Living Off The Grid is not as difficult as you think.

How To Get Off The Grid

Jane and I have been living off the grid for the past 15 years. We have faced many challenges.

Perhaps the most challenging is answering the avalanche of questions of visitors to our home-the hardest one is invariably- How can we get into off the grid living? And most of all Do you think we could create a sustainable Life for ourselves living off the grid?

The question of living off the grid can be answered for you by being honest. I tell our visitors that living off the grid with the stress of modern day life is worthwhile but not easy. We are constantly bombarded by pressures of all kinds. We either bear up or burst; we ask them how much of our chosen lifestyle is actually nourishing us as Human beings? Not much is the usual answer.

Jane and I started Off the Grid Living because of that all to frequent answer. Living off the grid is where we started.

Our Mission at Off Grid Living.

Most often we are defined and identified to everyone we meet by the work that we do. He’s a farmer, she’s an accountant, but are these choices nourishing us or simply putting food on the table.Somehow our identity is lost in the shuffle and we are no longer building our life and our character.

In his book ‘Louder than Words’, Andy Stanley defines character as “the will to do what is right, as defined by God, regardless of personal cost.”

I know that for many years I could not stand up and face that definition- I followed the crowd and did what everyone expected I should do. Go to University, have a great money-making career, be unhappy with my career, retire and do what I want with my life- albeit I would have wasted 60 years in the process.

Our Story...Our journey to Living off the grid began in 1994. I started to suspect there was a better way to live my life, that my destined path was not the normal way of most Canadians.
That year my wife Jane and I bought 20 acres of land, determined to live without the monthly mortgage to the utility company and live a healthy sustainable life. But how? Off the grid living?

First off, our dream was to build our own home. In keeping with our sustainable goal we used logs and stone from our own acreage, felling the trees ourselves, picking and choosing from dead and damaged Spruce, Pine and Cedar.

We used our own chainsaw sawmill to make rough cut lumber from the trees right where they fell with only minimal damage to the surrounding bush. Why go to all of this trouble? The answer we discovered a few years later when we walked through the forest we had harvested to build our home. It was still as we had found it, fresh and healthy, the forest had grown back to replace what we had used.

Our original thoughts proved to be correct: If we were to have a sustained growth of trees in the future for lumber and firewood and animal habitat then we had to take personal responsibility for the growth of the forest. It was up to us. Our lives are built in and sustained in much the same way.

Stopping global warming and climate change has to be handled in much the same way. If we wait for governments to make changes we are not long for this planet... better to take the responsibility for your own actions.It Was Up To Us !

Get started now Living Off the Grid.

If we were to live off the grid we had to do it ourselves. When we began to take control of our own life a funny thing started to happen, the land and our life began to take a clearer form for the future. We had a purpose!

The decision to take responsibility for our own choices also extended to our choice of a power source to run our homestead. We chose a solar off grid system with solar panels and a small wind generator over grid hydro for many reasons, but the main one remains that the sun is a renewable, sustainable resource. By taking responsibility for our power choices we have built sustainability into our life and our lifestyle.

The Off the Grid Choice...

Our lifestyle confuses some of our visitors who are tied into the dependent, disconnected lifestyle that so surrounds us. Simply put, our lifestyle is as sustainable as we choose to make it- for all of us. We are all a reflection of those choices.

In the years since we built our homestead it has become our purpose, our goal, our mission to promote sustainable living through our online magazine Off the Grid Living.
Another example from Rich Warren, In his book, ‘The Purpose Driven Life’ Rick Warren explains perfectly our passion for the subject of sustainability when he said, “Another word for heart is passion. There are certain subjects you feel passionate about and others you couldn’t care less about. Some experiences turn you on and capture your attention…these reveal the nature of your heart.

The first telltale sign is enthusiasm.” Our enthusiasm for sustainable living using renewable energy is contagious. Every visitor to our home is left with the sense that living the lifestyle we have chosen is possible for them- living off the grid is something they can do. It doesn't matter if you live in Canada, the United States, England (UK), Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, or anywhere in Europe or Africa or Asia or South America, Off Grid Living is a choice that you can make.

It is hard work sometimes living as Jane and I were intended to live, but the joy is in the fact that we could go on, endure if you will, any major blowout of industrial society.
When we run out of fossil fuel we will still be able to feed ourselves and produce our own power- we have achieved a state of sustainability in our life.

Not only would we endure, and provide for ourselves quite nicely, but we would also be nourishing ourselves and our need for security, community and family- All things necessary for a sustainable lifestyle off the grid.