Top 10 Best Careers for Living Off Grid
Living off the grid is a great feeling of independence, limiting or removing yourself from services like water, gas, electricity, food, and sewer. For many, it’s a way of relieving themselves from the weight of the world, while living life more freely and purely. This way of living is becoming more popular and with good reasons.
There are different levels to living off grid
A complete self-sustainable home means that you have totally removed yourself from any public and private utilities and are supported internally for every need. Now, there are many different levels to “living off grid” (a term coined by this movement).
Like I said, you can completely go off grid or choose to remove certain public and private utilities along with the grocery store or just simply limiting yourself from one or more of these services.
I have read a lot about “going off grid” and what I have learned is that it’s more recently being defined as wanting to limit your reach into this modern consuming world, and there are numerous reasons for doing this. So, by making a change here and there to become more green or to limit waste or to have alternate energy, you are becoming part of this movement. This way of living has many advantages to homeowners.
Some of the advantages that a homeowner reaps from living in a self-sufficient home entail:
Lower Bills: Whether you are completely living off grid or have made some changes here and there to be more sustainable, your monthly bills will be effected in a good way. You will be looking at water, energy and food differently from the normal world. Read on to get a better understanding!
Increased Property Value: Buyers have taken note of houses that have made changes in this direction and rate them higher in property value compared to the normal modern homes. The health benefits and cost-effectiveness make these houses more attractive.
Healthy Living: Self-sufficient homes or homes that have made progress toward receiving more of their food needs from their property, in the way of raising animals and gardens have many health benefits. Imagine fresh chicken from the yard and eggs while also nourishing your garden with homemade manure from the chicken droppings. And have you thought about the lower stress levels that come with being away from neighborhood and city noises? This way of living feels like you are in a constant calm state. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of hard work, but it’s worth it.
Three Main Ways to Help Create a Self-Sustainable Home
Source of Water
Having an independent water source can definitely cut down or remove your water bill. You can have a well dug or you can dig your own well. You can collect water in storage barrels from your well or collect water from rain and consume it as a renewable source. Having water sources such as these will help lessen or eliminate the meter charges.
Natural Energy
Natural energy substitutes paid electricity. Solar panels do have an initial cost to them, but is surely worth it in the end. Solar energy has no maintenance charges and provides clean energy that’s healthy for the environment. Wind turbines are a great energy source, as before there is an initial cost. You can cut most of that initial cost by building it yourself. Water wheels are another source of energy by converting running water to electricity. These options may have you earning a pay check every month from the electric company. If you produce more energy than you can utilize, the electric company will buy the excess.
Your Own Food
Having your own vegetable garden is one of the joys that come with living off the grid. You can also keep your own dairy and chickens for milk and eggs. You don’t need to have it all, but starting with a small section will help you avoid the hustle of having to shop for groceries. It also makes sure that you are consuming fresh food devoid of chemicals.
Top 10 Best Careers for Living Off-Grid
Progressing toward the off the grid lifestyle means you are corralling and eliminating your bills. Not just your utilities, but personal, mortgage, credit card and auto loans as well. One of the advantages, and the best advantage for me, of off the grid living is the ability to stay home. Making more and more money shouldn’t be a need or a passion anymore, but making money to sustain you and your family is still essential.
Below is listed ten ways for those progressing toward the lifestyle of living off-grid to make money. The good thing about these jobs are you are working from home.
1. Start a Youtube and Other Social Media Channels
You could easily carve a niche for yourself on social platforms. Many people would love to see your day to day activities. Like I said, this way of living is becoming more and more popular. What would be great is if you started recording early in your journey and let people watch how you progress. With more people clicking on your videos and watching the more money you are going to be making.
It doesn’t matter where you are in your journey or even if you have made it completely independent, people will love to watch you collecting eggs, butchering and storing animals, planting seeds in your garden, harvesting the crops or the many, many other labors in your life.
2. Selling Products
When it comes to selling, the opportunities are numerous. Ebay or Etsy are good sites to sell homemade products or you can combine this with other methods of making money, like from your social media channels. You could make soaps, jams, paintings, wood carvings or gather farm produce and sell them. People love homemade stuff. You could record the process of making them and upload it to your channels and then offer them for sell. Adding the production process on video will add another layer of irresistibility to your products. You could also reach out to local businesses. There is a good chance restaurants will want to buy some of your local fresh produce.
3. Writing Articles or Blogs
Writing articles or blogs online is good solid money. Some sites you could write for are hirewriters.com and textbroker.com. On some sites you will start out by submitting a sample of your writing so they can rank you. Once you have your ranking you can begin to start looking for what people want written. If something looks good, click on it and it’s yours. Write it in the allotted time and submit it. Once it is accepted by the customer you get paid. I have written for people and I do know that if you do a decent job they are not going to decline the work. Then move on to the next.
4. Blogging
Blogging has been a way people have made money online for a while now. So it is tried and tested with the results very positive. You can blog about things you know or do some research and blog about what you learn. Blogging itself doesn’t make you the money. That is the content that brings people to your blog. To earn money from your blog you can put google adsense on it. Those are ads put on your blog by google and when someone clicks on it, you make money.
When you do get a following you can also create a paid membership. Meaning you will have content on your blog that can only be seen by people who pay to see it. Have some of your content for free, then charge a small amount for premium content. Make all your content good and engaging.
You will need to have your own website and hosting. Don’t worry it’s not that expensive or hard to set up. Click on the image below to get started.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is basically selling other peoples products for a percentage of the sale. Like selling your own products you could combine your social media channels and blogging to incorporate into it other peoples products. Make sure the product relates to what your content is. People who came to your content is interested in the subject matter of the content, so find infoproducts or physical products that complement your content. A good place to find products for your site is on Clickbank.com. It’s an affiliate network with many people and companies listing their products for other people to help sell them for a very high percentage of the sale. Most of the time 75%.
Most of these products include banners, sale ads, email swipes and other materials to help you sell their products. Because when you win they win! You can pick out what would look best and be more convertible for your content.
You also can find other ways to promote their products. You can purchase ad space on other websites or create ads on google or bing. There are many ways to get the word out online and have people buy the product. If you see that google or bing ads are bringing in the sales, you could substitute their products for yours and sell your own.
6. Virtual Assistant
A virtual assistant is an independent contractor responsible for many different tasks for businesses. These businesses hire virtual assistants because they have a busy schedule and it is cheaper for the company to pay you directly for a certain task instead of hiring a full time employee. Tasks handled range from marketing, managing their social media platforms or their emails and many, many, so many other tasks. These kind of jobs can be found on sites like Upwork, People Per Hour and Amazon mechanical turk.
7. Host Events
You can also host guests at your home for a fee. I know some of us wanted to get away from the noise and gatherings, but I think you can handle it for one day or a couple. Going by the size of your land and the features present, you can choose to hold functions like birthday parties and weddings. People are looking for off the beaten path and out of the way places.
The good thing is that such events don’t require a building, if you have one that’s a plus. As long as you have tents and chairs, the space is fit for most gatherings, like corporate retreats, festivals, clubs.
This can still work if you have a smaller space. The only difference is that you’ll need to focus on smaller groups. Small groups are more manageable anyway, so just check with the potential client to see how many guests are expected.
8. Customer Service
This is a job from home, but you will have a boss and scheduled hours, though they are flexible hours. You can find part time and full time work and most of these jobs have benefits. Usually including 401k, paid time off and medical insurance. Companies started hiring people to work from home in areas of customer care representatives, reservationists and hospitality even before covid-19 was a thing. Covid-19 just really sprinted companies into doing this more. You can make pretty good with the average pay per hour being around $14. This is a great way of sustaining your lifestyle and still be able to keep up with what needs to be done around the homestead. You can find work on Indeed and other companies like this and also by typing into your browser, companies that hire people to work from home.
9. Doing Voice Over
You don’t need to have a great speaking voice to do this. People want this as another route for their book to make money and audiobooks are big. Check out ACX.com. Once you sign up you can begin looking for books that are wanting someone to do the audio. The pay is usually $50 to $200 per finished hour. Note: a finished hour of reading and recording will take you longer than an hour. How much longer depends on you. For me it took about 3 hours. Also you will see some book authors willing to share royalties with you. This could be good if the audiobook sells good or not so good if it’s a bomb. To do your recording I suggest audacity. This is a free program that a lot of professionals use. I use it for youtube videos and audiobooks, it does a great job and it’s free.
10. Phone Call Reviewer
This is a unique job that pays you through Paypal, so you must have a Paypal account. The job is pretty easy. You listen to recorded phone conversation and list it in a category by answering a question at the end of the listening. You begin with having to list the conversation into only two categories. As you gain experience you move up and make more money. The job doesn’t pay much, between $1 and $4.50 per hour and they pay weekly. It is extra money.
I hope you gained some insight from the article. And if you haven’t consider moving in the direction of living off grid, give it some thought. Thank you for your time.