Farming/Homesteading as a Retirement Strategy|Homesteading|Farming - a podcast by Tim Young: SmallFarmNation.com

When people think of retirement, they often think of golf or travel. But what about homesteading or farming as a retirement strategy? In this final episode of season 1, I’ll share with you how we and many other farmsteaders are thinking very old-school about retirement.

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Several years ago as we prepared to transition from sprawling urban life to our rural farmstead, Liz and I were filled with excitement about growing our own food and being immersed in nature.Yet, during that period of intense change and learning we also spent many hours discussing, of all things, retirement.
At the time the idea of retirement was many years away for us, but in our “former” lives we at least understood what the plan was, so we rarely thought about it.The plan back then was simply to keep working until we were, I don’t know, 62 or so and then let a 401K or pension plan fund the rest of our lives, perhaps with a little help from social security.
But moving to the farm meant that there may be no pension plan and for many people it means converting a 401K or other savings into hard assets such as land.And then, just as we were moving to the farm the “great recession” of 2008 hit.
Just like you, we witnessed the economic hardship forced onto so many people as a result of reckless  lending and investments by major lending institutions and equally reckless government spending, which required government bail-outs and central banks intervention to prop up global markets.After that experience, our confidence that pension fund obligations would ever be met had eroded anyway, so we began to consider thinking of retirement planning, and homesteading, in a new way.                        
See, the thing is that this whole concept of retirement is a relatively new one.I mean, not so long ago, when we all lived in a more agrarian based society, few people ever retired.
Their daily duties just changed.As we grew up we would take over running the farm, until one day when stepped back to let our kids do the same.
But that didn’t mean we stopped working.Perhaps we would take over maintenance of the equipment or something less physically demanding, but something that required our knowledge and experience.
Or maybe we would help out more inside the home with cooking or childcare.But flat-out retirement to travel or play golf all day was the domain of the ultra rich.
And even then, most tycoons were still wheeling and dealing well into their 60s and beyond.And that was when live expectancies were barely 60, so even the rich worked until the end.
Nowadays with retirement plans tanking and pension funds bleeding out, we may find ourselves without the ability to retire once again.However, this time, we will not have the farm to feed us and the multi-generational home to keep us occupied and close to our loved ones.
For many, if they’re very fortunate they may be able to find a spot in a retirement home and sell their current homes to pay for it.But this whole notion of retirement is flawed, as many people are starting to realize.
Even the Harvard Business Review wrote a recent article titled, Why Retirement is a Flawed Concept.The whole notion of retirement as we understand it was invented by the Germans in 1889, when German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck invented the idea of retirement with the Old Age and Disability Insurance Law of 1889, which established the concept for the rest of us.
“Those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state,” he said at the time.What he wanted was to address high youth unemployment by paying those 70 and older to leave the workforce.
Made sense to many, so other countries followed suit with retirement ages around 65 or 70.And those are the ages we’ve all grown up with thinking of as retirement age.
But,

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