Confessions of a former homesteader

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**Laura Griggs** (1:00)
The kids loved running around outside and catching fireflies, but that's all of the existence you can afford.

**Reema Khrais** (1:07)
I'm Reema Khrais and welcome to This is Uncomfortable, the weekly show from Marketplace about life and how money messes with it. I think a lot of us have had this fantasy at some point. What if we just left, bought a piece of land, grew our own food, lived a slower, more intentional life, or we're not constantly worrying about money or work? I daydream about this all the time with friends. It's a fun thing to imagine. But recently, I met someone who actually tried it. This week, I'm talking with Laura Griggs, who set out to build a life off the grid. In hearing her story, it made me rethink what it takes to make that kind of life work, especially when things don't go as planned. Then later in the episode, I check in with our producer, Alice Wilder, about her latest financial challenge in our new segment we're calling Alice Gets Her Life Together.
Laura Griggs spent 10 years on a homestead with her husband and seven children.
Laura and her husband always wanted to have a large family. But back in 2008, they were newlyweds, just starting out with strong ideas about the life they wanted to build.

**Laura Griggs** (2:13)
We realized we could never make enough money to be able to afford to raise children with the degrees that we had, because we graduated right into the Great Recession, and suddenly there weren't jobs in our field. We were really struggling. We wanted to have children. We're like, how do we do this without going back to school again? Because it costs a lot of money to get another degree, and you already spent a lot of money to get the first ones.

**Reema Khrais** (2:34)
They started to daydream about homesteading, a different kind of life, one that didn't include bosses or biweekly paychecks, a life that would allow them to be able to afford to have a big family. At the time, they had two children.

**Laura Griggs** (2:46)
If we go way out there where land is really cheap, where property taxes are really low, and we just kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, trade in your time, work for yourself instead of working for other people, so we could leave that behind us and be able to raise our children without having to make a six-figure salary.

**Reema Khrais** (3:03)
Do you remember that moment when y'all were trying to decide that? Like, do you remember that feeling of excitement that you had?

**Laura Griggs** (3:10)
Yeah, it was very exciting because it felt like we finally had an answer because we had struggled for years to try to figure out what to do because we just couldn't find jobs.

**Reema Khrais** (3:18)
What fields are y'all in?

**Laura Griggs** (3:20)
So, my husband was in ministry and I was a teacher. And I taught both in the classroom and then I also taught private lessons and then I also was the director of a non-profit. So, between us, we were working between four and five jobs, which was a lot. But all of these are very low-paying fields and none of them really provided benefits. And so, it really felt like we need to find a way to have our cost of living being so low that we can make it work without having to work five jobs.
So, my husband was raised on a hobby farm. He's like, I think we could do it in a way that you would be very frugal. You would be somewhat sustainable being able to raise things and sell things off your farm. We could be home with our young children and it kind of seemed like a dream. So yeah, it did seem like a very, you know, like aha moment or we figured this out. We're going to do this.