Ruggedize Your Life - our journey to financial independence, homesteading, and devout Catholic life.

The Fight for True Freedom:
We fought for our country’s freedom and worked insane hours to be able to afford a luxury home in the suburbs and build fat retirement accounts thinking we were living the American dream. We both climbed the corporate ladder: she rocketed to the executive level and I worked at the highest levels of our nation’s defense but something wasn’t right….
we lived in a huge house on 3.25 acres with a Home Owners Association that requires permission to plant a garden and forbids chickens!
we had some of the best public schools (Loudoun County, VA) in the country but we were really just sending our kids off to take tests so the school system could get more money, buy 7 year olds iPads, and teach THEIR values not ours (no economics, no life skills but plenty of meaningless memorization and backwards morals)!
we cooked all our meals at home from what we thought was good, nutritious and safe ingredients according to the US government but really we were just buying our food from multi-national government subsidized factories!
I grew up on a farm and thought I knew what farming was all about. All my life I wished I could figure out a way to go back to farming but figured it was impossible without $1M in land, equipment, and infrastructure...boy was I wrong...about all of it!
my wife grew up in a medium sized city inside a communist country and never thought she’d have more than one dog much less chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep, and goats!
bottom line, we have always been searching for something, searching for something deeper than the 9 to 5, a 401k and a nice house in the suburbs….we found that something and more than we could ever have imagined on the homestead!
See how an accountant, a college drop out and three little girls say goodbye to the rat race and the status quo and say hello to family life on the homestead the way God intended it!
See the highs and lows, learn the inside secrets and tips as we learn them, and get the unfiltered truth about financial independence, retiring early, sustainable living on the homestead, homeschooling three kids, and living a devout Catholic life when society just wants you to buy your boxed food from a big box store, send your kids off to government employees for 8 hours a day and get your morality from prime time TV!
Join us and Ruggedize Your Life!
What is Ruggedize Your Life? The standard definition of "rugged" is the ability to survive and operate reliably in harsh environments and conditions. My definition of Ruggedize Your Life is the ability to not merely survive but thrive no matter what life throws at you. This is not about being superhuman. This is about developing the skills, wisdom, and tools necessary to avoid being destroyed by life. The difference between impacting life vs being impacted by it. Come with us as we document our lives and share with you the ups, downs, ins and outs of living a life worth living.
#praytherosary #narrowgatefarm