Off Grid Bartering
If you’re planning to become self-sufficient, bartering is a key skill that can help you along the way. Not only is bartering fun but it also helps you live off the grid, stop being reliant on money, acquire things you need and much more. In this article I’m going to be providing you with a full overview of the benefits of bartering and how it can help you.
1) Bartering Reduces Your Reliance On Money
Homesteading is all about self-sufficiency and being able to provide yourself. While producing your own food, energy and cleaning supplies helps you to become a lot more self-sufficient, if you’re reliant on money for certain things, you can never be completely independent. By learning to barter, you remove the need for money and in doing so put yourself in a position of complete self-sufficiency where you can get anything you need, regardless of your financial situation.
2) Bartering Is Fun
Aside from the practical benefits, bartering is also much more enjoyable than traditional cash exchanges. Instead of just finding what you need and then swapping cash for the goods or services, you get to be creative, decide what you can offer in exchange for the goods or services you desire and then negotiate with the person who holds these goods or services. Coming up with ideas of what you can barter and making the deal is a unique and fun experience that you don’t get when exchanging money for goods and services.
3) Bartering Helps You Develop Strong Social Bonds
If you buy goods and services using money, you don’t develop a bond with the seller. However, bartering exchanges are much more dynamic and memorable and once you start bartering, you’re likely to have some great conversations and develop some really strong friendships as a result.
4) Bartering Is Good For Your Homesteading Community
One final benefit of bartering is that it supports your local homesteading community in a way that money cannot. While money is partially about the exchange of goods and services, there is also the profit element and this does not serve the local homesteading community. Bartering, on the other hand, does not have a profit element and is instead purely focused on providing people in the local community with the goods and services they need.
If you’re not bartering already, I hope this article has shown you why you should consider it. Not only will it help you greatly on your journey to complete self-sufficiency but you’ll find once you get started, it’s quite addictive. So next time you get the opportunity, give it a try and see how you fare.