There’s a version of off-grid living that looks great on Instagram.
You buy some land. Put up a few solar panels. Grow your own food. Stop paying utility bills. Spend your mornings looking at mountains instead of traffic.
Then there’s the version where you wake up, look at the weather, check your battery percentage, make sure there’s fuel for the generator, check the water system, and hope yesterday’s storm didn’t break something.
That’s the version I wanted to talk about.
I recently sat down with James Wigglesworth, co-founder and CTO of PocketSmith, to talk about what it actually takes to build an independent life. James and his family have spent roughly a decade living functionally off-grid in New Zealand while he helps run a global software company.
And what stood out to me is that his story isn’t really about escaping society.
It’s about building options, redundancy, and control over the things your life depends on.
That applies to electricity and water.
It also applies to your income.
What Does Off-Grid Living Actually Look Like?
James and his wife originally lived in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city.
As they started thinking about the next stage of their lives and potentially raising a family, they realized the conventional path wasn’t particularly appealing. They didn’t want an expensive house in an Auckland suburb just because that was what they were “supposed” to do.
Eventually they found a property near Thames, on the Coromandel Peninsula.
Calling the original structure a finished house would have been generous.
It had no bathroom. The power system consisted of only about 600 watts of solar panels. They had to figure out water, wastewater, electricity, and nearly every other basic system themselves.
Ten years later, they’re off-grid for power, water, and wastewater while still living close enough to town to reach a well-stocked grocery store in about 15 minutes.
That distinction matters.
Off-grid doesn’t have to mean isolated.
You can reduce your dependence on centralized infrastructure without moving four hours into the wilderness.
For a lot of Entrepreneur Expat readers, I think that’s a far more realistic goal.
Start With Resilience, Not Perfection
One of the biggest mistakes people make when thinking about self-sufficiency is assuming they have to go from completely grid-dependent to completely independent overnight.
You don’t.
At my office and home here in Mexico, for example, solar covers a significant portion of our electricity consumption, but we still have grid power available.
That means we get some of the advantages of independence without designing the entire property around the worst three cloudy days of the year.
James’s system had to evolve the same way.
His family has gone through multiple generations of batteries, eventually moving from lead-acid batteries to lithium iron phosphate. Their power needs also changed dramatically as their family grew.
A tiny electrical system may be fine when your main concern is keeping a laptop and some lights running.
It’s different when you add washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, electric cooking, children, home offices, networking equipment, and all of the other conveniences people expect from modern life.
Today, James has around 56 kWh of battery capacity and uses electric induction cooking, but the family still keeps generators available for stretches of bad weather.
The goal isn’t some purity test where touching the electrical grid makes you a failed homesteader.
The goal is having more choices.
The Reality of Living Off-Grid: You Become the Utility Company
When James described a normal morning at his house, one phrase kept coming up:
Resource checking.
How much charge is left in the batteries?
What does the weather look like?
Is there enough generator fuel?
What’s happening with the water supply?
Is everything operating normally?
When you disconnect yourself from a utility company, you also take over part of the utility company’s job.
That can sound like a downside.
But for someone who enjoys understanding how systems work, it can also be incredibly rewarding.
James has automated more of that process over the years. Earlier systems required custom monitoring and software he built himself. Today he uses Victron equipment, which gives him significantly better monitoring and automation out of the box.
That evolution is probably the right model for most people.
Start small. Learn the system. Then automate the repetitive parts.
Electricity Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle
Solar gets most of the attention in conversations about off-grid living.
Water and wastewater are arguably just as important.
James’s property has access to spring water, which solves one major problem. But having water available is different from having a reliable household water system.
You still have to understand filtration, storage, pressure, storm runoff, and what happens when something upstream changes.
Then there’s everything that leaves the house.
His family uses a vermiculture-based wastewater system. In simple terms, a large treatment tank uses worms and filtration to break down waste, eventually producing gray water that can be used for purposes such as irrigation.
It’s not exactly the glamorous part of the off-grid dream.
It is, however, one of the systems that makes the dream possible.
If you’re considering rural land abroad, this is the kind of due diligence I would put near the top of the list.
Don’t just ask:
“Can I put solar here?”
Ask:
- Where does the water come from?
- Where does wastewater go?
- What breaks during a storm?
- Who can repair it?
- What happens if that person isn’t available?
If You Work Online, Internet Is Infrastructure
There’s another piece of off-grid living that gets overlooked constantly:
Internet.
If your income comes from the internet, connectivity isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure.
James initially relied primarily on 4G service. That worked until local towers became congested, particularly during busy travel periods.
Today they maintain both cellular connectivity and Starlink, with networking equipment capable of failing over between connections.
We take a similar approach here in Mexico.
Our house and office use different fiber providers with different upstream networks, and I keep Starlink available as another layer of redundancy.
Why?
Because having “two internet connections” means very little if both fail because somebody cut the same upstream fiber cable.
Real redundancy means thinking about failure modes, not just buying duplicates.
James applies that same philosophy to power, water, and internet.
That’s one of the biggest lessons from our conversation.
Off-Grid Living and Entrepreneurship Require the Same Skill
Eventually our conversation shifted from solar panels and wastewater systems to entrepreneurship.
The parallels were hard to miss.
James co-founded PocketSmith in 2008.
Today it’s an established software business with a substantial team and users around the world.
It didn’t start that way.
James described years where the defining characteristic wasn’t explosive growth.
It was persistence.
At one point PocketSmith had only a few hundred paying customers after years of work. James and his co-founder were consulting on the side while continuing to build the company.
They kept going because they believed the product had a market.
That willingness to keep moving while adapting the plan is exactly what James says off-grid living taught him as well.
You can plan a solar installation perfectly on paper.
Then you start building it and discover three assumptions were wrong.
Business works the same way.
The entrepreneurs who survive aren’t necessarily the people who created the most elaborate five-year plan.
They’re often the ones who can say:
“Okay. That didn’t work. What did we learn? What do we do next?”
Is a Job Really Safer Than a Business?
This led to one of my favorite parts of the conversation.
People frequently tell me they want more freedom, but starting a business feels “too risky.”
James made an important distinction between risk and control over risk.
Gambling is risky, and you have very little ability to influence the outcome.
Starting a business also has risk.
But your work, decisions, sales, relationships, and ability to adapt can all change the outcome.
A job has a different risk profile, but that doesn’t make it risk-free.
A single employer may represent essentially 100% of your earned income.
For someone who wants to eventually move abroad, that concentration risk is worth thinking about.
You also don’t need to resign tomorrow and hope everything works out.
James pointed out that if he had been employed while starting PocketSmith, he simply would have worked on it during evenings until the business was ready to support him.
That’s a much more practical way to approach location-independent income.
Build before you jump.
Your First Clients May Be Closer Than You Think
Before PocketSmith could support its founders, James did consulting work.
His first clients didn’t come from a complicated funnel.
They came from relationships.
Former colleagues and people who already knew his work needed help with web development and software projects.
Some of them actually approached him.
James wasn’t earning a fortune from consulting. He estimated it was around $8,000 a year at one point while he concentrated most of his energy on PocketSmith.
But those few clients helped keep him afloat long enough to build something bigger.
I think this is enormously important for aspiring expat entrepreneurs.
People spend months worrying about Instagram strategies, websites, funnels, and paid ads before asking the simplest question:
Who already knows me?
Your first client may be:
- a former employer
- an old colleague
- a vendor you’ve worked with
- someone you’ve helped informally
- a business owner in your existing network
You don’t necessarily need thousands of followers.
Sometimes you need three people who trust you.
Location Independence Is Really About Owning More of Your Life
There’s an obvious connection between James’s business and the way he lives.
PocketSmith is self-funded.
James deliberately chose not to build a company where outside investors could dictate every major decision.
His home is designed around producing more of its own electricity, managing its own water, and reducing dependence on outside infrastructure.
His internet has redundancy.
His business can operate from almost anywhere.
Different systems.
Same philosophy.
Reduce single points of failure. Increase your options.
That’s a much better definition of freedom than simply “moving abroad.”
Because you can move from the United States to Mexico, Portugal, or New Zealand and recreate exactly the same dependencies you had before.
A different country doesn’t automatically create independence.
You have to build it.
Even PocketSmith Is Bringing More AI In-House
We also spent time discussing what AI looks like inside an established software business.
One use case I particularly liked was PocketSmith’s approach to customer support.
Rather than replacing its support team with an AI chatbot, the company is experimenting with local AI systems that help employees find information buried in years of previous support tickets, internal discussions, and product knowledge.
When a new issue comes in, the system can surface similar cases and relevant internal conversations.
The human still responds.
The AI reduces the amount of time that person spends hunting through years of institutional knowledge.
That’s a much more interesting application of AI than simply asking:
“How many employees can this replace?”
It’s another form of leverage.
And because some of the processing can happen locally, it also fits surprisingly well with the broader theme of the conversation:
Own more of your infrastructure.
The Best Time to Start Is Before You Need It
If there was one idea connecting almost everything James and I talked about, it was this:
Don’t wait until you need independence to start building it.
Don’t wait for the electricity to become unreliable before thinking about backup power.
Don’t wait for your employer to eliminate your position before creating another source of income.
Don’t wait until you’ve already moved abroad to figure out whether your business can operate remotely.
Don’t wait until something fails to learn how it works.
You don’t have to become completely off-grid tomorrow.
You don’t have to build a 29-person software company.
You don’t even have to quit your job.
You can start with one solar panel.
One backup internet connection.
One consulting client.
One small business experiment.
Then learn.
Then improve it.
Then add the next layer.
As James put it near the end of our conversation, the important thing is to persist and keep learning.
That advice works whether you’re building a solar system in rural New Zealand or building a business that lets you live anywhere in the world.
And in many ways, they’re the same project.
They’re both about designing a life where you have more control over what happens next.
