9 Ways AMISH Families Make Money Without a JOB

🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com There is a number you have to come up with every month, and you know exactly what it is. You have worked it out at the kitchen table more than once. That figure has to appear or the whole thing comes apart, and the reason the plan sits in a drawer is that you cannot see where it comes from once you stop going to a job. So you go looking for the answer, and what you find is a man telling you to start a channel. I am not going to tell you that, because I cannot do it and would not know how. What I can tell you is how the families around me live. This is not a new problem in Lancaster County. Our ground got dear and our families stayed large, and two generations ago a great many households here had to work out how to live off a place that could no longer feed everyone by farming. They worked it out, and the answer is not one thing. It is not three things either. My grandfather taught me this in a bad year, and he did not explain it, he made me count. I was about fifteen, the cash crop had gone wrong, and he walked me round the place after supper asking the same question at every stop. What did this bring in this year. Eggs. Milk. A little timber off the back. Two heifers. The hay off the far field. Repairs he did for other men in the winter. Eleven things, when I counted them. Then he named a man down the road who had lost his place the autumn before, and asked me how many that man had. One. Never let one thing be the only thing that feeds you. Two rules come before the list and matter more than anything on it. A dollar saved beats a dollar earned by more than people say, because the earned one is taxed and the saved one is not. And pick the income that is busy when your land is quiet, which is the thing everybody means by flexible and nobody actually says. The nine, in the order I would do them: A trade you carry to other men's places, and why showing up on the day you said beats being good A shop on your own place, and why selling a thing beats selling hours Repair work, the most overlooked money in the country, and where to get broken machines for nothing Custom work with equipment you already own and that sits idle most of the year The stand at the end of the lane, the honesty box, and what it really teaches you Value added instead of fresh, and the arithmetic that decides whether land pays at all Plants and seedlings, the smallest start and the best return of the nine Teaching what your hands already know, and why the money is not the reason Renting out what you already have, including the one almost nobody thinks of Then the part most videos get wrong: these are not nine options to choose between. They are a sequence. The trade and the repair work pay this month. The shop and the land businesses take one to three years to be worth anything. The trade feeds you while the slow ones grow, and nobody starts at the end. The plain limits. Not one of these is a living on its own, and four or five together is. Markets fill up, and if three women already sell soap at yours, do not be the fourth. Reputation takes two or three years and there is no shortening it. February is thin, so some of what comes in during June is not spendable in June. And frugality has a floor, past which saving another dollar costs you two hours that are worth more than the dollar. Licensing is in there too. There is usually a dollar figure under which small jobs need no contractor's licence, and the moment you process food rather than sell it as it grew you are into your state's kitchen and labelling rules, some of which have teeth. There is no scheme in any of it. There is simply far more money in selling a man a course about homestead income than there is in most homestead income. Tell me in the comments which of the nine you could start this month with what you already own. And if you are new here, tell me roughly how much ground you have as well, an acre or ten or a hundred. Next time I want to go back a step, to buying the ground in the first place, because there are things to look at on a cheap piece of land that will cost you more than the land did if you miss them. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #Homestead #OffGrid #HomesteadIncome #SelfReliance #AmishWisdom #SmallFarm #SideIncome #Frugality #ValueAdded #FarmStand #Homesteading #OldWays #RuralLiving #Skills