Off-grid living isn’t simply about escaping modern life. It’s about freedom and family. In this conversation with Jeff, we take a practical look at the daily realities of off-grid life, the role of community and financial freedom, and how simple systems and adaptable skills make this lifestyle sustainable long-term. Jeff describes off-grid living as a spectrum, so if there is any part of you that wants to be slightly less reliant on the grid than you are now, join us for this informative episode!

In this episode, we cover:

• What off-grid living actually looks like in daily life: power, water, heat
• Some specific challenges of off-grid living, from raising chicks to storing food without reliable power
• A look at the role of community and shared resources over total self-sufficiency
• Why off-grid living is more accessible today than it has ever been
• An aspect of off-grid living that we don’t talk about enough– freedom from the financial “grid”
• How bartering and alternative forms of currency can strengthen your local community
• The simple systems that make off-grid living sustainable long-term
• Why it is important to gain skills, adopt a problem-solving mindset, and stay flexible when modern solutions aren’t available
• The incredible impact of raising your family close to land, work, and responsibility

Thank you to our Sponsors

McMurrayHatchery.com | A wide selection of poultry breeds and supplies to assist you with raising your flock

Nutrimill.com | High-quality small kitchen appliance products that function well, are easy to use, and promote healthy eating

About Jeff

Jeff Burkinshaw is the author of Gridlessness – Finding Freedom Off-Grid and creator behind the Gridlessness Youtube channel. 

Jeff and Rose and their 5 girls have lived the off-grid homestead lifestyle since 2007.  They’ve explored all aspects of home and homestead construction, self-sufficiency, homeschooling, hunting and fishing, wilderness adventures and generally living like millionaires off-grid.

Jeff is an electrical engineering technologist with professional experience in utility scale power systems but has a deep personal interest in small scale micro-hydro and other off-grid power systems.

Resources Mentioned

Grab a copy of Jeff’s book here: Gridlessness: Finding Freedom Off-Grid

Connect

Jeff Burkinshaw | Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | X

Homesteaders of America | Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Pinterest

What Off-Grid Living Really Looks Like (and Why It’s More Accessible Than You Think) Transcript

Amy Fewell Welcome to the Homesteaders of America Podcast, where we encourage simple living, hard work, natural healthcare, real food, and building an agrarian society. If you’re pioneering your way through modern noise and conveniences, and you’re an advocate for living a more sustainable and quiet life, this podcast is for you. Welcome to this week’s podcast. I’m your host, Amy Fewell, and I’m the founder of the Homesteaders of America organization and annual events. If you’re not familiar with us, we are a resource for homesteading education and online support. And we even host a couple of in-person events each year with our biggest annual event happening right outside the nation’s capital here in Virginia every October. Check us out online at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. Follow us on all of our social media platforms and subscribe to our newsletter so that you can be the first to know about all things HOA (that’s short for Homesteaders of America). Don’t forget that we have an online membership that gives you access to thousands—yes, literally thousands—of hours worth of information and videos. It also gets you discount codes, an HOA decal sticker when you sign up, and access to event tickets before anyone else. All right. Let’s dive into this week’s episode.

Amy Fewell Welcome to the Homesteaders of America Podcast. I have a new guest with me this week. I’m not even sure if you actually talked about this topic yet, the topic of off-grid, but welcome to the podcast, Jeff. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, thanks for having me. 

Amy Fewell Yeah. So Jeff, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? I know who you are. My family started watching your YouTube channel a couple of years ago, and we’ll talk about that a little more in a minute, but why don’t you tell everybody who you are. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Sure, real quick. Me and my wife and five girls have been kind of living an off-grid homestead adventure for, well, a long time, like almost 20 years. And we’ve been on this particular property… It was just a chunk of raw land. Didn’t even have a road to it. So it was super exciting to walk in here and set up little pop tents and then start building a house. And so, 15 years later, it’s like a… I don’t know. I would call it like a beautiful estate now, but it’s still very small and cute, but it’s a proper homestead with gardens and animals and it’s all off-grid. So we’re primarily solar power, we collect rainwater, we do some funny things to make life good off-grid. I think we share a lot in common with the bigger homestead community, just certain things are a little more challenging. You know, raising chicks under heat lamps. Very difficult, right? Keeping things from freezing in the winter, we have to do some different stuff. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, and you’re in Canada, right? So you’re extra cold in the winter time. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, yeah. Northern British Columbia. It’s kind of snowy here at least six months of the year, mostly frozen. 

Amy Fewell Fun times. Okay, so my family, like I said, started watching you guys, I don’t know, maybe a year and a half, two years ago now. And the funny part,  I wanted to say this, hope you don’t mind. We were watching your girls on YouTube and all the things that they do, and my husband turned to our oldest son, who’s 16, and he goes, “You need to find girl like that.” And so I, you know, being the founder of Homesteaders of America, I was already checking out your website. I think I even asked you to speak that year when we found you, but it just didn’t work out. And I went to your website and you had this disclaimer on your website about your girls. Like, don’t ask if you can marry your girls or something like that. It was a really funny thing. And I thought it was hilarious. It really cracked me up. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah. Well, I mean, we had so many people, you know, mostly joking, but some serious, like they wanted to date my daughters and I’m like, you know what, I’m not into arranging internet dating for my daughter. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, that’s crazy. 

Jeff Burkinshaw So, but yeah, they’re five beautiful girls and they’re doing all the outdoor stuff. We do a lot of hunting and fishing and backcountry adventures. I mean, raising the girls has been a huge part of what we’re doing. It’s a lot of why we’ve done it this way. And now they’re like growing up. Two are married. 

Amy Fewell Oh wow! 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, so we still got three girls at home, but yeah, we’re right at that next stage, I guess. 

Amy Fewell Yeah. Next level, right? That’s awesome. Okay, so you have kind of an advantage off-grid because you do some engineering stuff, right? Like you love working with things and building things. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about that? How that’s aided you being off-grid. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Sure. I mean, right out of high school, Rose and I got married like almost right away. I went to tech school and studied electrical engineering technology, and immediately started a career specializing in utility power systems. You know, the grid. I work on the grid and live off the grid.

Amy Fewell Right. That says something, right? 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah. And so for 10 years, I was employed by a utility. And since then, almost 15 years now, I’ve been contracting and doing, you know, a lot more different things. But still, I’ve kind of kept my finger in that utility power system kind of world. And at the same time, I’m an enthusiast for small power systems, right? Like my own off-grid system and we’ve got friends with micro-hydro systems. I’ve made some YouTube videos about those that are really popular. I mean, micro-hydro is kind of magical. It should be popular. So that’s my background. I mean, you don’t need to be an engineer or a technologist to set up a solar power system for your off-grid house. It’s very easy now, but I do tend to kind of geek out on some of the technical things. You know, we’re working on this wood gasifier right now so we can run a backup generator on wood gas, which is another one of those kind of holy grail things for people who want to be self-sufficient. And yeah, I just like those kinds of technical challenges. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, I think that’s cool. My husband is an electrician. So whenever he has watched your videos, it’s always been stuff you’ve tinkered with and things you’ve built, so it’s kind of fun for him to look at that stuff. Okay, so you mentioned heat lamps for chicks. I know people are gonna ask just because you mentioned that. How do you do heat for chicks off-grid? What are some things, normal things that people on grid find really easy to do that you find a little bit more challenging off-grid. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, there’s some things you just can’t do or you can’t the way you used to. So, you know, we had previously raised chicks the normal way with heat lamps. And when we got here—and the first couple of years—we didn’t have hardly any solar power at all; it was very minimal. And when finally installed like a proper system, it’s still pretty modest. And so we planned to do it when we had the most sun. So actually March here, it starts to get really sunny. And so we did that a couple years. It was still a lot though. And we moved them, of course, into the best spot we could in our shop. And so what we did was a few years after that, we actually just made an arrangement with friends, we’re like, “Hey, why don’t you guys raise the chicks for the first month with your heat lamp,” because they had grid, “and then bring them out here, and then we’ll raise them.” We had like a pen and we had all the outside infrastructure set up. And so we actually just kind of partnered with friends to raise chicks, and that just worked better. I have another example: the first couple of years when we didn’t have much power at all… We literally had like one of those little RV kits from like Costco or something, like it was tiny. It just like kept a phone powered. But for those first couple years, we kept a deep freeze at a friend’s house in town. There’s no practical way to have a freezer out here, especially one that was valuable, you know, full of meats. And so for a couple of years we did that. The limitations are real off-grid. You know, so those are kind of like extreme examples where we basically just couldn’t do it, and we found another way. We found, you know, friends to work with. And I would recommend people like, hey, it’s okay to rely on friends and family. Like they can rely on you for things. We can rely on them and that’s okay. I’d way rather rely on friends and families and community than like a grid system. 

Amy Fewell Yeah. So what do you guys have on your homestead as far as animals and gardening? Tell us a little bit about that. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Okay. Specifications is what you want. 

Amy Fewell That’s right. 

So we’re on 40 acres, but we bought this place with friends and so we split it. And so our nearest neighbors are on the 20 acres kind of right beside us. And outside of that, we have no neighbors. We just don’t have neighbors. We’re just surrounded by forest. We can drive to someone else’s house in like 20 minutes or something. So it’s a long ways away. On our 20 acres, typically we’ve got chickens and ducks and we raise pigs every year and we’ve got horses and the girls ride them non-stop. And we’ve either had a herd of goats or milking cow all the way up until… We actually just sold the milking cow this summer and butchered the steer, so at this moment we actually don’t have any milk or meat animals. We have this little cabin, and a shop was really important because without heat, and you want to start a vehicle in the winter, we needed a warm place and so the shop was a priority. The house burns wood for heat and it burns wood for cooking. So Rose has a wood cook stove and she loves it and uses it basically exclusively. And let’s see, what else? Yeah, so the solar power system, it’s only about 3600 watts, which for a house and a shop and a bunch of people is pretty modest. We were early adopters in lithium-ion batteries, and so we’ve got about 15 kilowatt hours of Simplify lithium-ion batteries, and they’ve been amazing. We’ve had them for about 10 years. And yeah, I think I mentioned we collect rainwater for our domestic use here. We have some different water systems for gardens and for animals. 

Amy Fewell I don’t know. I mean, that sounds like a lot. You guys have done a lot and that’s really cool. I’m listening to all this and thinking, what inspired you to go off-grid? Like was there one moment, or one thing, or just something that you guys were like, “Yeah, we’re gonna do this”? When was that moment, and why? 

Jeff Burkinshaw You know, from the very beginning, my vision was to like, get out of town and get a big piece of land. Rose and I both grew up down in the lower mainland by Vancouver. And so in the suburbs of Canada’s, I think, second largest city. And owning land down there was just not… Like no one owned land down, right? You could maybe own a house and now you can’t even do that. And so that was just in early 2000s. We got out, we went to like a tiny little town, 12 hours north and ended up buying our first five acres. And that was amazing. We started learning right there, and we haven’t stopped since, about kind of like rural systems. But it was only a couple of years later and we’d made a lot of progress but there was like the dream property. It was a half section, 268 acres. And it just was like covered with moose and elk and deer and have a view of the ridge and had 90 acres of Timothy pasture. It had a quarter section of timber and it was just amazing and we bought it, but it was off-grid. And at the time, it was kind of like, well, that’s just what you got to do. It’s like if you want a big beautiful piece of property and you want to be able to afford it, you have to go off-grid. And for me, I don’t mind a technical challenge. So I was like, oh, let’s figure this out. And that was in 2007 when, you know, building a solar power off-grid system was not nearly as easy or as cheap as it is now. Like right now, it’s like, anyone can do this. 

Amy Fewell They make it easy for you, yeah. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, you can order online and there’s lots of knowledge and there is so much product availability and you can start with a tiny little system like we did, like an RV system, or you can get a cabin system, or you can go full deluxe. But right now, it’s super easy. And so back then, we were kind of like early adopters, I guess, and we had another very small little system. And we started learning. And that’s kind of what happened. We ended up moving twice more before we got here. And we were looking specifically at that point for off-grid, because we knew we could get something magical at a price, you know, that you could afford. 

Amy Fewell Right. Yeah, so this isn’t your first property off-grid then. You’ve had some experience before you got here. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, we had a little test run. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay. So tell us about your book. You have a book that just came out, right? How long has it been out? 

Jeff Burkinshaw Just four weeks, I think. 

Amy Fewell Oh, okay, all right. So tell us about it because I know a lot of people are gonna be interested in that. 

Jeff Burkinshaw So, where do I start? I’m not an author. I’m literally on YouTube so that I didn’t have to write a book. I’ve told people that for years. And this last year, kind of everything came together and I was actually—I’m still recovering from a back injury that really kind of laid me flat. And I was like, man, I’ve got to be productive somehow, right? And people have been asking—I mean, for years on our YouTube channel—they’re like, how did you get here? How did you start? And of course, the more cynical people presumed we started with a trust fund or something. And so it was an opportunity to kind of tell the backstory. And so I started right at the beginning and went all the way through it. So how we started in town as teenagers, and how we got out, and how he bought our first place, and the things we learned, and some of the financial aspects, and then some of technical aspects, and just some of whole, you know, kind of the stories about raising a family off-grid, and outdoors and homesteading and learning. You know, we didn’t learn a lot from my parents’ generation, but we remembered a few things from my grandparents, you know, about gardening and butchering your own meat. And so, so much of it we’ve learned. And I just told the whole story. So, I mean, I’m kind of excited. Like, I don’t know, people seem to like it. And I think if anyone’s ever dreamed of just getting out, leaving the city, or going off-grid, or homesteading, like getting a family milk cow, all of those things, this is just our story of how we did it. 

Amy Fewell Yeah. So would you say that people can kind of not just read your story, but learn through your story through this book? 

Jeff Burkinshaw Oh, I think so. I mean, that’s my hope. Like, it’s not a do-it-yourself book. It’s not a “this is how you do it”. But it’s kind of showing people like, hey, over the last 20 years, we’ve learned a ton of stuff. 

Amy Fewell Yeah. 

Jeff Burkinshaw And you can learn from our mistakes. I definitely give some specific warnings about a particular type of off-grid toilet technology I would not try. I’m recommending don’t try this. 

Amy Fewell That’s a good thing, yeah. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, and lots of things that did work. And one of the most common questions is like, how do you afford to do this? Tell me what the finances are, how do you get work? How do you make money? You know, it’s obviously not like a 30 second answer, right? But when you read our story, I talk about all that. I talk about the financial aspect of it, and it is hard to buy raw land. And I talked about how we did it. And we didn’t do it perfectly every time. This is our fourth rural property, our second off-grid property. And you know, we made some mistakes that people I hope can learn from too. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, that’s awesome. Because, you know, I think probably one of the things that we lack in the homesteading community specifically is more off-grid information from people that have been doing it for a long time. And, you know, we have a lot of companies that sponsor people that talk about off-grid stuff, you know, but it’s not like… Where are the people who are in it? And they’re not necessarily in it to say, “You have to live this way,” right? It’s just an option. Like, if you wanna live this way, great. Here’s how to do it. And so it sounds like a really good read. Sorry for all you people who wanted to talk about it on YouTube, you have to read the book. But that’s really interesting. We will link that information in the show notes below for you guys to check out and purchase it. So what do you love about living off-grid? Like what is one of the things over the years that has been your just overall favorite thing about living this way? 

Jeff Burkinshaw Well, it’s obviously core for me. I think it is for a lot of people. I think we inherently, as humans, want to experience nature. You know, like the beauty and the wonder of nature, like being in the mountains, being by a river, being in the forest, like the birds, the quiet, right? The sunsets. And, you know, winter’s harsh, but it’s, I don’t know, it’s magical. When it gets really cold here, below minus 20 Celsius—I don’t know what that is Fahrenheit—but the trees actually start cracking. So if you’re out in the night and it’s totally quiet, they actually freeze and crack and you can just hear them in the distance. So there’s just so much wonder when you get out into nature. But also, I love the idea of being closer to the things that are actually necessary for us. You know, food and shelter. Like we built our own house and it felt great doing it and it feels great living in it and raising our own food. Like it feels great. It’s very rewarding work. And I think a lot of people might relate. Like in my kind of career life, I was very specialized. And so I could do work that was valuable in monetary terms, but it’s kind of like, what am I even doing? Like, it’s so distant from putting food on the table. It’s very abstract. And sometimes you can find it hard to get, you know, real job satisfaction from that. Do you know what I mean? It’s so different than, you know, collecting eggs in the morning from your chickens. You’re like, man, we’re keeping these chickens alive and they’re giving us chicken eggs. And we’re gonna eat it for breakfast. It’s very rewarding. 

Amy Fewell Yeah, we always say here in America, like the Industrial Revolution—and I’m sure that’s it for most places in general—it really took the family away from that. It took us away from homesteading. It took away from just enjoying nature and doing what we were created to do and being with your family and working alongside of your family. And so what about your girls? Are they embracing this life, especially the ones who’ve gone off and gotten married? Or is this something they’re like, “No, I’m not doing this.”

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, I think, you know, that’s another thing that we can look back on now and be like, well, right or wrong, at least we can see what happened—because it’s been so long now that we’re starting to see kind of all the fruit of raising a family this way. And I mean, I would say in general, I think it’s been fantastic for the girls. The oldest two, like I said, are married, and our oldest is living in her own little off-grid house. She married a cattle rancher farmer, and, you know, she’s raising some little kids now. And so they’re living their own life, but it’s not too dissimilar. Like they didn’t run off to the city or anything. And then our second oldest, who just got married this year, she married a guide outfitter. So they spent the summer further north than here, out in the mountains, guiding for Stone sheep and mountain goats and elk. And so, you know, we don’t know exactly where they’ll end up because as a guide-outfitter, you actually travel around a bit to different regions, but they’re looking for rural property. And yeah, I don’t think any of the girls are running off to the city. Like, they’ve seen it. We’ve gone down to the city. I kind of lived like this dual life as a contractor where I would take jobs sometimes into remote little towns and the whole family would come with and Rose would homeschool and, you know, we’d make new friends and explore that area. But sometimes that was in the city, like we went downtown Vancouver into a high rise and we like camped out there. So they’ve kind of seen it all. And yeah, I think they’re all kind of choosing to be up here. 

Amy Fewell That’s a super cool life to grow up in, to be able to see both worlds. You know, not a lot of kids are doing that. It’s either/or, not both/and. And so, it’s really cool that you got to equip them for both lifestyles, not just one or the other, and then they can, you know, adjust accordingly. 

Amy Fewell We’re taking a break from the podcast so I can tell you a little bit about this year’s sponsor, Murray McMurray Hatchery. Murray McMurray officially started his chicken business in 1917. He had always been interested in poultry as a young man and particularly enjoyed showing birds at the local and state fairs. He was in the banking business at the time and sold baby chicks through the bank to area farmers and hobbyists. But now, we know Murray McMurray as one of the top homesteader’s choice hatcheries here in the United States. They have all kinds of birds, from show birds to exotic birds to meat birds, because who doesn’t want every kind of chicken or poultry possible? They have ducks and all kinds of options for you. Here at Homesteaders of America, Murray McMurray Hatchery has supported homesteaders for at least the last eight years (or as long as we’ve been around) and beyond, since 1917. Make sure you check them out at McMurrayHatchery.com to get your orders in for the year. 

Amy Fewell Okay, off-grid questions—probably that I know people will have: we have learned in homesteading that off-grid can mean different things for different people, so what does off- grid mean for your family? 

Jeff Burkinshaw Okay, so we’re off of a couple grids. So there’s the power grid. That one everyone agrees on. So we’re of the power grid. Although if you’re a skeptic, you’ll say, yeah, but are you 100% solar? And I would say, if we needed to be, we could be 100% of solar. But the reality is in winter time, we hardly get any sun up here. So we use a backup generator. So in the winter time if we don’t get enough sun, we run a little gas generator, like a little Costco, one of those yellow things, right? And we just charge up our batteries. I made a video on this because there’s so many questions about like, what is truly off-grid? What is truly self-sufficient? And it’s a gray scale. Basically, you know, no one’s totally off-grid. You’d be a caveman and you’d have to use sticks and stones to hunt food and stuff. So everything in between is like a gray scale. What I would encourage people… And they can look at what we’ve done and they can say, “Yeah, I like that. That’s what I want to do,” because it comes with a certain lifestyle or they can say, “No, I want to go crazier. I want to be like closer to caveman where society could crumble and I wouldn’t notice.” It’s like, go for it. Or you could just be a little bit more kind of off-grid or self-sufficient than you are. So anyways, back to our circumstance. So we’re off the power grid. We are off the water and the sewer. We don’t have any water or sewer from the city. Uh, we don’t have a natural gas line, so we can go fill up propane tanks if we want. And the big grid no one talks about is the financial grid, the world market of banks, and we’re off of that grid in the sense that we’re debt-free out here. A huge part of our story was kind of pursuing freedom from debt and we achieved that and we told that story in the book. And so that thing does not have us captured and it’s amazing. 

Amy Fewell So let’s talk about the financial thing real quick. Because did I see you guys making coins or something at one point? Was that you?

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, making silver coins.

Amy Fewell Yeah, okay, so talk about that a little bit. What was kind of your goal with that? Are you still doing it? What’s going on with that? 

Jeff Burkinshaw So, well, let me start with the debt-free thing or let me plug the debt-free thing. It was a goal of mine. It always took up a little piece of my brain where I had to worry about making payments. And we just kind of weren’t getting ahead. So we kind of went drastic. We moved out onto this cheap piece of property. We lived in a pop tent and we quickly built this little cabin and it’s very humble. It only cost like $25,000, you know, that was 15 years ago. And so it’s not fancy. And slowly we added some things to it. Like our Blaze King is $5,000. That’s almost 20% of the price of the house. But so we did some drastic things, but we had no mortgage and we had no big property tax and we didn’t have insurance, like expensive insurance or anything. That just like changed our life for sure. I could take more risks. It kind of coincided with me being able to quit my job and start contracting, which is riskier, but with more reward and more flexibility. Anyways, fast forward, we got into gold mining and prospecting in the last five, six years. We’ve got some gold claims. It’s one of the things we do all the time is try and go out there and dig up some gold. And so, you know, I just kind of got interested and I started learning about precious metals. And a couple years ago, I got really pumped about silver when I realized that silver was a precious metal that you could actually afford to have. 

Amy Fewell Right? Oh, yeah. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Because it’s so hard to like own a gold coin and you don’t give your kid a gold coin for Christmas because it’s thousands of dollars, but you can give them silver coins. And then I realized, like, hey, they don’t make like an actual… Like I wanted to actually use this for transactions, not just to stack in a corner somewhere. I’m like, let’s start using some silver. Like I’m going to start paying the kids in silver. You know, if they were doing some extra chore, and I’d be like, “Hey, I’ll give you an ounce of silver.” And then I started giving them to grandkids for Christmas. And then I’m with my friends and neighbors, I’m like, “Hey, can I buy some hay, but like with silver?” Like I’m just trying to create like this little kind of backup economy. And what I realized was there’s no quarter ounce silver coins. And the reason why that was important was because like an ounce, well, right now it’s pretty near $90 Canadian. So whatever that is, $55 American I’m guessing?

Amy Fewell Yeah. I think it’s near $60 right now.

Jeff Burkinshaw So, I mean, that’s the smallest denomination when you want to like, you know, pay someone. And so I thought, oh, we need quarter ounce coins. And so we started buying like ingots. And we came up with a little process where we melt them all down and we re-pour them and then we roll them out and then we punch them and then we made up some dyes and we strike them and we sell quarter ounce coins. And what’s interesting is there are some on the market, like you can find other ones but they’re just pretty uncommon and pretty expensive. And so we are producing the actual cheapest quarter ounce coins that we can find on the market, we’re matching that price. And for that price, I don’t actually know if I’ve made any profit, but I’m paying the girls. Like it’s the girl’s job to make the coins. So it’s like, “Hey girls, we got like another bunch of orders for silver.” And they can go out there and work for 5 or 10 hours or like a couple days and they strike out .999 pure silver coins, quarter ounce. 

Amy Fewell That’s incredible. So this is really funny because we just had a group at our house. We have fellowship meetings here and we were talking about a different currency. Like we talk about all of this off-grid stuff, you know, off the electric, off of the sewer and all of that, but we don’t want to touch the financial part of being off-grid, right? Cause that’s a little bit daunting. And so it’s really neat that you are finding a way to do that. If other people wanted to do that, what would be your recommendation on getting started? 

Jeff Burkinshaw If other people want to use silver like to start… 

Amy Fewell Well, first of all, let’s say somebody buys silver from you or from somewhere else—that was the first question—like how do you even pay for something like normal? Can you take it to the store? Not really, you know, so how would you start adding that to your community at first?

Jeff Burkinshaw I mean start where it’s super easy. Start with friends and family and neighbors—people that you’re close to that you don’t mind, you know, they already know you’re kind of excited about silver. You know, we’ve got good friends and they are farming and we buy hay from them, you know, we’ve interacted that way before, right? Bought and sold stuff. And so it was pretty easy for me to say, “Hey, can I pay all or part in silver?” And he was like, “Yeah, that’s cool.” People have been pretty receptive when I’ve asked them. They’re like, oh yeah, cool. And when you’re talking to people you trust, that whole issue of what’s it worth is not really an issue because you’re a friend or family that you trust. It’s like, well, here’s the market value. What do you think about this? But it’s kind of like a barter. It’s just that what you have is going to be a lot closer to an understood value because there is a market value, right? And then go from there. And some people know a lot about the price of silver and they know what they’re getting into. Some people just think it’s cool. And like what I would hope is that, you know, you could kind of establish little relationships where they have silver and I’ve got silver and they’ve got silver, and it’s like, hey, if we want, we can trade with silver. And it’s just way easier than bartering. It’s not as easy as cash and e-transfers, but it’s an off-grid economy. 

Amy Fewell Okay, you talked about having some gold claims and stuff like that. That’s not something I hear a lot of people talk about. What’s the process of that? Tell us a little bit more about that. 

Jeff Burkinshaw I mean, every jurisdiction is different. So every province and every state probably has its own kind of rules. But in general, if you’re just using a gold pan, you can go out and look for gold in a creek. And there’s lots of videos. My friend Dan Hurd has got like the most popular, you know, gold prospecting channel on YouTube. He’s got thousands of videos on how to do it. So that’s what got me hooked. I found it was very easy. You need a gold pan, which you can buy for like $20. And you can go out and like swish dirt around and find little specks of gold. And then from there, once you get hooked like I did, I ended up learning about our provincial system for claiming—you know, they’re staking a claim, which is all done online up here. There’s actually no stakes anymore. You just like click some buttons and stuff. 

Amy Fewell Okay. 

Jeff Burkinshaw And so we were able to stake some claims. You can also usually buy them. So people are selling them on marketplace or you’ll see them posted places like people will sell a claim. I’ve never done that. I’ve ever bought one or sold one. And I’ll just say like word of warning, people can ask whatever they want—that doesn’t mean it’s worth that. Doesn’t mean there’s anything there. But when you stake kind of virgin ground or like unstaked ground, in our experience here in BC it’s a pretty nominal fee, and you get the right to prospect and then you can use a few more tools. So we use a high banker which is a little sluice, and just a little Honda pump and a little sluice so we just shovel in there and it collects all the gold in the riffles.

Amy Fewell Man, that’s really cool. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, it’s wild because it’s like we’re extracting gold like right out of dirt like it’s amazing. 

Amy Fewell Right. Yeah, I did not expect this conversation to take that turn, but that’s really cool. 

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Amy Fewell Man. Okay, so this is really neat to me. So you use bartering, like bartering off-grid, and you’re traveling a lot… Or are you still not traveling anymore? You said you were doing contracts. Are you still doing those things? 

Jeff Burkinshaw Yeah, for quite a while now, my “work for money” has been very flexible or erratic. It’s not like your normal career anymore, and it’s kind of the way we want it. So sometimes we work a lot and sometimes not a lot. And the girls have never been tied to a school schedule. And so our life has, you know, in the fall, we usually devote, you know, months to hunting, harvesting the garden, you know, butchering our domestic animals, filling freezers, and they hardly do any schoolwork, and I usually try not to work a lot. And then in the winter time, you know, they can buckle down, get a ton of school done. I might take more work. But the last three years, we’ve been driving down through your wonderful Western states, which I’d never really visited before, but we were blown away. And we loved it so much the first year, we’ve done it three years now, but we’ve gone down through the States and even into Baja, Mexico, and just kind of overlanding, like off-grid on the road. You know, we’re pretty decent at camping, and taking a few things we need. We can live in a tent and Rose can cook with a little propane cooker, so she brings a little kitchen with. And so we’ve been traveling that way, which has been amazing. We’ve met so many great people, different types of people, seen different places in the States and in Mexico. So we’ve done that, and we have done some international traveling, again, because we could. We’ve been down to Guatemala a handful of times and we started off, you know, doing some kind of humanitarian type of volunteer stuff, but then you make friends, and so you keep going back. So the girls have a very broad perspective on the world, which I think sets them up great for life.

Amy Fewell It does. 

Jeff Burkinshaw They know we don’t all live this way. Like we do for sure. They know that it’s not all like living in Vancouver. And, you know, the people we’ve met and made friends with down in the States, like you get different perspectives from all of them, and especially the developing world, you learn to be very grateful. 

Amy Fewell That’s really valuable for them in life and making decisions and just how you treat people too, right? They see everyone lives differently. It’s really cool. Okay. Well, I think I won’t ask you any more questions because you probably answer a lot of them in your book. So, I always give kind of the end of the show, an opening to you. Like if there’s something that is just burning inside of you you want to say to this community, or something you’ve just been curious about that you wanna share with us, now’s your time to do it. And I will leave the floor open to you. 

Jeff Burkinshaw Well, what I would love to do is just encourage people. Like if you’ve ever dreamed of doing something different, like if you want to get out of the suburbs or get out of the city, I would say you can. Like it is possible and we did it and we didn’t start with a trust fund and we didn’t start with a lot of knowledge at all. We’ve learned the skills, we’ve struggled through the financial aspects of, you know, moving out here, and it’s been amazing. Like if you’ve dreamed about it being amazing, it can be amazing. Like I often tell people that we’re living like millionaires off-grid. And to be clear, we’re not millionaires. And to be clear, YouTube does not pay tons of money. Our finances are pretty darn unexciting. However, our lifestyle is fantastic. Like we raised our kids together and we have a good relationship with our kids. And I think it’s directly related to the fact that we’ve spent a lot of time together and we enjoy a lot of, you know, activities together. We all like hunting and fishing and different things that we can share with each of the girls, right? They’ve all grown up and they all kind of become their own person, but we have a lot in common. And so, I mean, I’m pumped about that. And the whole debt-free thing, if you guys can do it, it’ll change your life, because it can de-risk it, it can make you free, right? You can make choices. And like right now, you know, if you want to make more money, I can work more. And if I want more time… you know, if I want to take months off to spend with friends and family and go explore and adventure and go on a hunting trip, like we can do it. I think we used to imagine that only millionaires could do that. They could have time to go on a road trip for two months down south and, you know, go fish in the sea of Cortez. Anyways, so people can do it. It’s not that hard. You just have to make the small choices that lead you there. 

Amy Fewell Yeah. And you’re doing it, right? And it’s because you’ve prepared strategically and wisely and gotten out of debt and done all these things and it is possible. And it didn’t happen overnight either. I mean, you made that very clear in the beginning. It’s been years in the process, but it is possible. And now you’re eating the fruit of your labor of getting to where you are now. So I think that’s super cool. 

Jeff Burkinshaw And to reiterate, it’s the golden age of being off-grid. You can have a solar power system and you can have Starlink. Which means you don’t have to forsake friends and family and community like you had to 20 years ago. And so it’s very easy to go rural and there’s lots of different ways you can make money, you can travel or you can work online or whatever. And so, yeah, you got no excuse. You just gotta do it. 

Amy Fewell That’s right. Just get it done. That’s right. Awesome. Well, Jeff, I loved having you on here today. This was a whole different conversation than what I normally have, so I really enjoyed that. You guys, don’t forget to check out his book where he’s talking about this and even more: his whole story and things you probably need to know about living off-grid. We will link all of that in the description below and anything else we talked about that you might want to check out. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and all of those things and share with your friends who want to be off-grid. You guys can do it, and go in together on land and do all those fun things everyone always talks about. All right, Jeff, thanks for joining me today, and maybe we’ll have you on again soon. 

Jeff Burkinshaw That would be fantastic. Thanks, Amy. 

Amy Fewell All right. Thank you guys and happy homesteading. 

Amy Fewell Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to this week’s Homesteaders of America episode. We really enjoyed having you here. We welcome questions and you can find the transcript and all the show notes below or on our Homesteaders of America blog post that we have up for this podcast episode. Don’t forget to join us online with a membership or just to read blog posts and find out more information about our events at HomesteadersofAmerica.com. We also have a YouTube channel and follow us on all of our social media accounts to find out more about homesteading during this time in American history. All right, have a great day and happy homesteading.