When disaster strikes or a minor recession turns into a full-blown financial crisis, money is going to get tight for everyone. Even if you have a preppers larder loaded to the ceiling, living off practically no money at all will give you the best chance of surviving in the long run.
I was raised and mentored by the Greatest Generation. People who survived the Great Depression, and World War Two on rock solid principles that maximized what every penny was worth. So, I’ve taken a lot of principles I was taught and modernized them.
Keep Chickens
With the right practices, you can keep a handful of hens for next to nothing, while they give you a nearly daily supply of eggs. While some chickens lay more eggs than others, feeding them this plant will double egg production.
Mobile pens or a portable chicken coop set up in between the rows of your garden will give them forage, while eliminating weeds and bugs. A year’s supply of calcium supplements for a half dozen hens costs less than $10.
You can even add their feces to ground up oak leaves to create a high-powered fertilizer for your garden. When the hens stop laying around 3 years old, you harvest them for meat or chicken soup in the freezer.
Keep a Garden & Put Up What It Produces
Growing your own food is one of the cornerstones of living with almost no money at all. Yet, you need to be strategic to keep a truly cost-efficient garden. This includes things like:
- Growing heirloom vegetables
- Using regenerative garden practices
- Organic gardening and compost fertilizing
- Watering from rain barrels
- Companion planting
- Succession planting
- Gardening with cold frames made out of old windows
With some ingenuity, you can pickle, can, dehydrate, or freeze the excess produce.
To learn how to preserve your entire harvest and make the most of it, I recommend this all-in-one guide. It will teach you time-tested methods to ensure you have a well-stocked pantry all year round.
This is a great way to live off very little money during the winter months when the cost of living is always higher.
Cook Your Own Meals
Cooking your own meals isn’t just a great way to save money. I’m not talking about replicating fancy meals you see on TV cooking programs. I mean downhome old school cooking.
When I was a boy grandma forced me to learn how to cook in ways that turned cheap humble ingredients into something delicious. Some of the top options I use to this day:
Schweinhaxe is made from slow cooked pork shanks that you can fry, roast or smoke after braising them tender, but I love to smoke it!
Chicken dumpling soup can be made from simmering chicken bones, skin, and scrap meat. After straining add some vegetables and make dumplings from flour and egg.
Related: What the Amish Ate During the Great Depression
Bone marrow on toast was my grandfather’s favorite meal and very nutrient dense. You can get beef long bones from a butcher for free or next to nothing. Roast until the marrow is like spreadable butter and put on toast.
Headcheese is made from simmering the head of a pig or braising hog jowls and setting it with some gelatin. You can then cut it into slices for weeks works of sandwiches.
Learn What You Can Forage in Your Area
With a little research and local know-how, you’d probably be surprised at just how many forage foods are available in your area.
I’m not just talking about springtime morel mushrooms, or if you have the golden luck to stumble upon a hen of the woods.
Even if you aren’t comfortable with your mushroom identification skills, the humble dandelion is 100% edible at different times in its life cycle. The greens before it flowers are just like arugula. You can even dry and grind up the roots to make a decaffeinated drink that tastes a bit like coffee. Wild berries grow all other the place in certain parts of the country.
If you’re unsure about what grows in your area, The Forager’s Guide to Wild Foods will definitely be of great help. This book will show you how to identify plants, let you know which ones are edible or medicinal, and explain how to use them. It is filled with high-resolution, full-color, full-page images to make plant identification easy and accurate.
Butcher Your Own Meat
One of the best ways to feed yourself on very little money is to buy and butcher a whole chicken. You can usually get one at the grocery store for around $6 to $7, which is much less than if you bought the family pack of chicken, where you’re paying for the labor and packaging.
You can carve the chicken up into two breasts, thighs and drumsticks. Then use the wings and the rest of the carcass to make chicken noodle soup. For $10 all-in with veggies and noodles, you can feed yourself for the better part of a week off that single chicken!
If you have a Sawzall, and you know some of the local farmers you could really take this to the next level. A lot of farmers need to cull their herds in the winter. Some will even sell pigs and goats.
For years my buddy and I would buy a 260-pound lard hog off a local farm on Thanksgiving weekend for $100. Then we’d spend all of that Friday and Saturday breaking it down into its primal parts.
Related: How To Make Delicious Lard With 2 Years Shelf-Life
If you can find a deal like this, and you have the skills, you can feed yourself for an entire winter. However, you will need about $20 in salt and sodium nitrate to preserve, or freeze it all.
Hunt & Fish
Depending on where you live and the prevailing state laws, hunting and fishing are another great way to feed yourself with almost no money at all. You do have to be mindful of the local laws and regulations. DNR officers have the stealth skills of shinobi assassins, and you don’t want saving $15 by not getting a fishing license to end up costing you $200 in fines.
Even if you don’t have the tackle or experience to catch walleye, pike, trout and big bluegills, there are tons of other so-called “Trash Fish” that can make a great meal. This includes carp, paddlefish, and bullheads. If your area allows limb lines and trot lines, you can easily feed yourself a catfish a day for the cost of a pack of chicken livers.
Hunting tends to be more seasonal and is most viable in the fall or early spring. If you don’t already have a gun or a bow, the initial investment cost might be a little too high. I once met a homeless guy who bought a duck hunting license, then prowled the local Mississippi Park catching ducks by hand.
Become a Master of Discount Dollar Stores
Bulk stores can help you save money per unit but are often priced out of reach if you have almost no money at all.
Yet discount dollar stores have a lot of staples of reasonable quality priced between $1.25 and $2.50. A bag of rice and some canned chicken can fill your belly for $2.50 with some rice left to spare. A dozen tortillas for $1.25, dandelion greens and a fire-roasted catfish from the river can make some surprisingly good fish tacos.
Related: 25 Survival Items You Should Get From the Dollar Store
You can also use discount dollar stores to buy in bulk. Freeze-dried bricks of coffee, bags of rice, dried pasta, alfredo sauce, spaghetti sauce, hot sauce, honey and calorically dense peanut butter can all be bought without limits at a per-unit price that’s often better than the big bulk store.
Discount dollar stores are also a great place for utility items like candles, duct tape, zip ties, string, rope, cotton shirts, bags of ice, vitamins, oral care items and even feminine hygiene products.
Get Good at Bartering
One of the best ways to live without spending money is to trade for basic things you need. Eggs and vegetables grown organically have high trade value. Even old lead-acid batteries and scrap aluminum can be traded to scrap metal dealers. Firewood that’s been split and seasoned is an extremely hot commodity for bartering.
The options are endless. You just need to be a good negotiator and understand the value of items you have but aren’t necessarily using.
If you need to reduce your financial footprint during hard economic times, the first step is to find cheap ways to feed yourself. Discount dollar stores will give you access to cheap staples, and a home garden will provide you with tons of fresh vegetables.
Knowing how to work with the animal proteins available to you is also key to living with almost no money. Fishing is a great way to keep protein in your diet for next to nothing. A single chicken that you break down yourself can feed you for a week.
A freshly killed deer on the side of the road or a hog you barter from a farmer looking to cull his herd can give you access to tons of super-cheap meat. Knowing how to cook all these things by stewing, smoking, and slow roasting will help you make nutritious meals out of seemingly discount cuts.
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Assuming one is debt free, you don’t address paying taxes and, if not off grid, utility costs. Nothing really new here that a seasoned prepper doesn’t already know.
America is not debt free only to the illegal freeloaders coming here as replacement Americans, you have been lied to these past 3 years.
Until the border wall is up and we drill for new oil, we are not free, the liberals are borrowing money from the Chinese. Who get a pass to bring in a Chinese national invading army on Chinese farmland on American soil.
Many people including preppers voted for the other guy because of mean tweets now X, then for another 4 years of commonsense business leadership.
We have what people who have studied history a lite dictatorship in many blue sanctuary states including the mother of all the DC Swamp deep state.
Who in their right mind is willing to sellout America and destroy our finances to let in the whole world across the southern border without going through legal channels?
Biden and cohorts have done what Europe did a few years ago with the Islamic illegals. Now the EU is considering becoming more conservative to rid the undesirables that their progressive political structure let in.
America has the same going on. We have illegals, terrorist groups, Hamas, Hezbollah running drugs, sex traffic and terrorists coming through the borders.
Covid Plandemic was initiated by Dr Fauci by our alphabet deep state agencies to see how far they could experiment in mass hysteria. They did their plan well, to this day we have people wearing mask that do nothing. Hospital masks used in operating rooms are to keep blood spatter and body fluids from the medical staff. And the medical operating staff from drooling saliva into an open surgery of the patient.
Yes the opposition will try again to scare people or try another plandemic maybe for this 2024 upcoming presidential election.
Only time will tell if we can survive these progressive liberals in charge who have done a great job destroying America.
God please help America.
The dollar stores are nothing more than Chinese cheap garbage outlet stores. The 99 cents stores went out of business in California recently.
Mega box stores fared well during Covid as these were tied into selling cheap and moderate priced Chinese junk that breaks before the manufactures warranty ran out.
American business and manufactures are given a second look. Many current products are higher priced even with better quality standards. The living wage scam is what makes these products high priced. That Bidenomics, paycheck to paycheck workers have a hard time deciding between Chinese junk and American made products.
These union wage protesting scams don’t help a struggling economy right now. We need to go back to entry level jobs as a starting point to learn job skills for the next increase in wages as done before the Covid plandemic mentioned.
True, but then not all of us are seasoned preppers. I for one appreciate the tips!
Not to mention medical bills from you triple bypass that medicare doesn’t pay for.
How to live with almost no money at all??? Try living on social security.
While I agree that to a normal prepper most of this is basic 101 but not everyone that read these subjects are seasoned preppers
It also helps to own your home or car outright and avoid debt! We own a home where taxes are low and the cost of living is low. An added benefit is places like this are far from large cities!
Those in charge will find a way to increase our property taxes to force us to the streets. Your gas powered car they will tax and fee us while placing regulations on where to park the car.
Came out to California for a visit, unbelievable what Sacramento Lib’s are doing to the remaining people who can’t afford to move out. They sure like to give illegals a big free ride with American citizen benefits, many Americans can’t qualify for.
In California they are placing bike lanes in place of gas powered vehicle parking. They reduce street parking by painting reduction areas of curb parking. Some new condos don’t have gas vehicle parking, you have take mass transit and walk the rest of the way or bicycle like a Chinese citizen in Peking.
Those new jobs reported are going to the illegals that aren’t getting a free ride in some states. The existing American Blacks, Mexican and even Whites are not getting badly needed jobs the illegals are getting.
So what is the solution? There is no real better economy regardless of what expats and liberals say. If America is that bad, why are illegals, foreigners and terrorist coming from the open borders. Can’t believe what progressive liberals say anymore, they lie.
How much more American farmland will be sold to balance the debt owed by America. For the money borrowed by our Anti-American politicians who never asked us taxpayers in the first place?
I also live in Ca. I worked in construction. One of the things I did was keep track expenses to work at a job. Parking, gas, travel time,vehicle maintenance. One job was down to $8.50 an hour.
The idea of living in Sacramento may reduce time and expense to work there but don’t forget the high rents and property values. A no win situation.
I’m retired now and have more time to save money. I do my own lawn care and home maintenance. I’ve cut cost of travel by planning 2-3 destinations in the same area. I have time to cook a dinner vs buying fast food.
Gas powered cars vs electric? Ride a folding E-bike in the rain, in a business suit and 35-105 degree weather and the idiot drivers. Sacramento sucks!!!
Congratulations!
Reality Check
unless you plan well , pay off all your debt ( as the bible says , own nobody , no one nothing but the debt of love as from God, who is Holy and pure Love , NOT lust love or selfish love
Giving to the needy , Not the lazy, greedy , slothfull
then Managing your resources well
if you make 100k then yu plan to invest , purchase , make provision to save back 20%
no credit Card debt , and no house debt or land debt
Taxes are a different story , you must pay , as per the bible , render unto God what is Gods , the heart , soul, essence of loyalty
render unto ceaser or the gov what is thiers , Money, what every has thier name on it .
any debt is total debt untill completely paid in full .
as the bible says : you were bought with a price and blood sacrafice , Jesus Christ
Live Free , as though you are not under the YOKE of Bodage , debt is bondage
remember companys, gov. others dont have a conscience or reverence or fear of God
so consider you option s as you plan , pay off as quickly or methodically as you can .
what you have you can manage , what you owe can be taken at any time you default on your obligations
so plan well , consider options, and dont be afraid to get rid of what you really dont need
anything with debt .
Think like you have principle s , and integrety , not lavishness
Yes and the bible also says work not eat not!!
Norbert Johnson
11:42 AM (1 minute ago)
to support
I know about living with almost no money… I did it all my working life.
1. Join the National Guard/Army Reserves and seek MOS of Cryptologic Linguist which can give an active duty time of 2 years when combined with Basic training and time between transfer from Basic to AIT +leave time. It qualifies you for all VA Benefits as a Veteran
2. Work for minimum wage. Part time/Full Time
3. Take all the free training via the National Guard /Reserves
4. Take advantage of all medical benefits of VA as well as all other programs
5. Cash in on Educational benefits and other benefits from the state for Veterans
6..If Mobilized don’t fight it and stay in the Reserves until retirement at 30+ years
7. Take a Civil Service Job even if only part time. In 5 years you are vested for retirement at age 60
8. After retirement from the National Guard/Reserves, Join the Texas State Guard..”it pays $173.67 per day of activation”
https://tmd.texas.gov/pay-benefits
8. Purchase unrestricted land to place a Micro (Tiny) Home. Benefit is that land can cost as little as $500 for 10 acres (I did that with a Bid on EBAY!) Since off grid, all services must be self contained and maintained. (it doesn’t cost as much as you would expect) My land is only 900 ft from a state highway and has 5G coverage! That $500 also purchased a Seasonal Creek that flows through the property And rain catchment can be set up as well.
Therefore, live within your means and you will have a good life. Further, if you follow what I did, you will see higher monthly income than when you were working. Also, all the other stuff suggested will further assist your Thriving with little money.
If you have chickens that aren’t bred to only lay for 2 or 3 years you can have them for 8 or more still laying. I have 8 year old birds and they are still laying. They lay every other day. Saving your own seed from your Heirloom vegetables saves you tons of money. Learn how to preserve and store your food in several different ways like canning, freezing, dehydrating, salt curing, smoking and cold storage and remember don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Chicken is significantly higher in my area. A 5.79# whole chicken cost $16.15 two days ago. Still less expensive than buying pieces parts.
1. How to live with almost no money at all? Ask someone who is living on a small social security check.
2. How to live with almost no money at all? Try living like people did in the 1800s. Today is much different than it was in the 1800s because of the elites who expect all the rest of us to live like them.