Homesteading isn’t always wonderful.
You try to give your animals the best life possible.
Fresh pasture, comfortable shelter, lots of love. But sometimes the inevitable happens, and you find yourself with sick animals, or broken infrastructure, or something else that goes wrong that you never saw coming.
Over the last few years we have experienced
- storm damage to infrastructure
- freezers breaking and meat spoiling
- a well pump dropping dead
- animals escaping
- sick animals due to parasites
- sick animals due to infections
- sick animals due to poisonings
and more! Just this last month my Lab was suffering from lyme disease. NONE of these problems did we expect, and we had to deal with all of them!
How can you be sure you are ready to handle the problems you didn’t see coming on the homestead?
Make sure you have an emergency fund!
Money fixes most homestead problems.
Sick animal? A (sometimes expensive) visit to the vet and medication can usually help. Tree fall and break your fencing? A new chainsaw chain, some gas, and new fencing materials will need to be purchased.
While an insurance is nice to have, some of our homesteads are not big enough or producing enough to merit spending the money on an insurance company’s coverage.
But that doesn’t mean you cant protect your family from things going wrong.
An emergency fund is the perfect way to make sure your homestead is ready for things to go wrong.
I like to tack a 10% figure on all of my enterprises on the farm to cover unexpected emergencies.
If I am planning on spending $1000 on pigs, build in an extra $100 for unseen problems. Going to run $500 worth of meat birds this year? Tack on an extra $50 for unforeseen problems.
The good news is that most of the time things don’t go wrong.
That extra 10% you built into the cost of your new enterprise… Don’t run out and spend it. Put that in a savings account and now you will be building an emergency fund that can help when the big things go wrong.
After a few seasons of homesteading you may find you have quite a bit of insurance tucked away for the rainy day that eventually always comes.
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