Five years ago, Jo Nemeth decided to live without money. Now Jo has moved in with her best mate Sharon Brodie in Lismore to help reduce her resource consumption and together eliminate their household's use of fossil fuels and also has founded a group that meets monthly in Lismore to help others do the same.

Before I decided to live without money I was living a fairly average Australian lifestyle, which to me, as a global citizen, is fairly privileged lifestyle. I had a good life. I was working in a really good job that I really enjoyed as a community development worker in Casino at a neighborhood center. I just was working like most people, trying to make ends meet to pay the bills, but even with a reasonably good wage that was very stressful

I was also spending a lot of time reading about all of the things that were happening around the world: the oceans being overfished, child slavery... the fact that things that I was buying were affecting and impacting people on the other side of the planet that I would never meet.

It wasn't just climate change back in 2014. That wasn't even such a big thing in my mind. It was more resource consumption. That sort of stuff. I was reading a lot about that and it was really getting to me - on top of just trying to make ends meet.

That all culminated around my birthday in 2014. I was reading a book written by a couple who rode their bikes up and down the east coast of Australia and in that book they mentioned people who had chosen to live without money - for various different reasons. I kind of twigged then and thought, oh, hang on a minute, that might be an answer. I just couldn't put the idea down after that.

I read about other people who were doing it and decided to do it myself modelled off a guy called Mark Boyle who lived in the UK for three years without money. That was my answer to removing myself as a large part as part of the problem, not necessarily being part of the solution, but at least I felt like I wasn't going to be contributing if I wasn't buying stuff all the time.

I decided I had to go without money because I don't trust myself. Even if I have a little bit of money, I will buy things that have impacts that I'm not necessarily happy with because I don't have a lot of willpower. I just thought it's easier not to have any money. So much easier. You don't even have to think about the choices. It just takes all of that weight off.

I made the decision and then it took me about a year to wind down my old life.

I needed to find somewhere to live, and I did that pretty easily. I approached some friends who lived down the road in Koonorigan where I was living. They had a farm and I knew they had a big veggie garden and lots of kids and were flat out and barely able to do all the things on their farm. So I went to them and I said, hey, I need somewhere to live cause I want to do this social experiment. They said, sure, no worries.

Living without money can be hard work. PHOTO: Supplied.

Once that was sorted, it all kind of fell into place, but in that year I had to extricate myself from the relationship that I was in. My daughter was still finishing high school, so I had to work out what to do there and to make sure she was set up okay.

I ended up at the end of 2014, I quit my job, closed my bank accounts, got rid of my car, got rid of a lot of stuff and just settled in on the property at Koonorigan to start with.

Jo with her tiny-house-wagon. PHOTO: Supplied.

It's been four years now and I've done a few different things. I've moved around a bit and tried different ways of living without money. I did a house sit in Byron and I have a little tiny-house-wagon thing that I had at two different places in North Lismore. It's now at out at Goolmangar, out of the flood zone at last. So while I live here in Lismore most of the time I also have a country house - the wagon. I can come and go between this place and my other friends out there. I help them out when I'm there and I help Sharon out when I'm here and that's kind of how it works.

At the first farm, sorting out food was easy because they already had an established veggie garden and I'd already helped them out a little bit. I just stepped into the role of caretaker of this big veggie patch and I started growing my own little patch as well. I built a little shack out of secondhand materials, which I used the last bit of my money to finish off.

When I was thinking of going without money, I did have concerns about not having enough food to eat. There was that survival instinct that kicked in. Like, how am I going to have enough food to eat? But actually one person needs very little in the way of food. I had an abundance of food from their garden plus my garden. When I visited friends they would feed me and I'd help them out as well at the same time. It's always this kind of win-win, give and take.

Each place I've gone, I've tried different things. I've volunteered at the markets in Lismore here in exchange for some organic food. I did a similar thing when I house sat in Byron. I worked at a soup kitchen and got some meals there. I've done some bin diving, but not very much. I haven't really needed too, because it's quite easy to grow enough food around here. Shelter has been the wagon and the little shack that I built at Koonorigan and now I've got a little sleeping loft that I built in Sharon's shed. I make a little nest for myself wherever I go.

I don't call what I do bartering because to me bartering is a direct exchange where you make an agreement. I work this amount of hours for you in return for this, this and this. And to me that's very much still a monetary kind of mindset. It's thinking in those financial terms. I try to not do that and I haven't really had to do that very much.

Basically, what I do is I just help people out and they help me out. It's like we all do with our friends and family anyway. There isn't that kind of bartering mentality. It's just give and take, a natural flow and that's how it's worked for me. I just try to be really helpful and if I'm really helpful, people want to help me out and help me to meet my needs. We really don't need very much to meet our basic needs. It's not very challenging.

The biggest challenge at the start was giving up my relationship because it was a long term relationship and he wasn't interested in doing this and he has gone on to live a very different life, making lots of money. So that was the hardest thing.

Then that first year it was challenging having to hand wash my clothes because at that time I was wearing jeans - because I already had jeans - and I was working in the mud in them and hand washing in buckets. That was really difficult. Since then, I've learned to not wear jeans when I'm working in the mud, that kind of thing. And at Sharon's, I do the washing for the household, so I just chuck my clothes in the washing machine as well.

Initially the first few times that I came to town when I'd given up money, there was that automatic reflex to go into a shop to buy something. I had to just reframe everything and go, actually, that's not a possibility for me anymore. And that was more surreal than difficult. It was just like I was living in a slightly different world.

If there are particular things that I feel that I need or would like, I just wait for my birthday or Christmas. When I was living on my own, before I moved here, I would supplement my diet with rice and oats so I asked for rice and oats as birthday and Christmas presents. Last Christmas I asked for seeds. Sharon and my daughter Amy paid for about $50 worth of seeds for me. So I've got a stockpile of seeds for the next few years, which is fantastic.

Sharon bought this house just over a year ago and I was helping her out beforehand, so I kind of just ended up here helping to unpack and stuff. It kind of just organically unfolded. I don't remember us having an actual conversation. Sharon and I have been best friends for a long time. We've been very close ever since our kids were in nappies, that's 22 years, and we've always been supportive of one another.

Sharon and Jo with the first eggs from the chickens at their new home together in Lismore. PHOTO: Supplied.

She supported me heaps in the past and I've supported her as well, so this was just an extension of that really. Up until recently there hasn't been any real concrete arrangement. She said stay and I said I'd build myself sleeping loft out there and I'll grow food. She said, I've got a whole yard. I don't know what to do with, so just go for it. I cook a lot and I clean a bit and I wash the clothes and I look after the chickens and I do all that kind of stuff that Sharon's too busy to do and she goes to work and does a great job. It's a symbiotic relationship.

Recently we've moved into this phase where we're starting this project where we want to get off fossil fuels. Because we're both very concerned about climate emergency, we have decided as a household to be a bit of a showcase. This is kind of my agenda, but also meeting Sharon's concern and her desire to do something.

Together we've formulated this plan to be off fossil fuels in the next three and a half years, which is a massive undertaking but we figured that we're a regular suburban house, if we can do it or get close to there, then we can have other people come and see how we did it and learn from our mistakes and then hopefully that will influence other people to reduce their fossil fuel consumption as well.

Our plan is just to think about everything that uses fossil fuels, either directly or indirectly, and try and stop that. It's pretty simple, except that we understand that fossil fuels are in everything. Our society is completely built on the use of fossil fuels, so it's a huge challenge. I've been living that way now for four years anyway. That was part of getting off away from money. For Sharon, it's a steeper learning curve or a steeper challenge but she's up for it.

We feel very despairing when we can't act. So this is our way of doing something.

We're starting by getting rid of the gas in the house, that's the cooktop and the hot water system. Sharon immediately put solar panels on the roof when we moved here. Eventually the cars are going to go, so we've been doing lots of bike riding. We are reducing our consumption of new things. We're trying very hard not to buy anything new. Buying second hand is of course, okay.

We're going to try and produce a lot of our own food or just use food that's grown very close to Lismore. Food is probably going to be the hardest thing because even though we can access quite a bit of food that's grown very close to Lismore, there is still fossil fuel use in the growing and creating of that.

Even setting out at the beginning we're pretty sure we're not going to be able to be 100 per cent fossil fuel free of indirect use but we have to try, we have to do our very best. I don't think at this point in time with the climate crisis as it is that we really have much of a choice. I think we're all going to have to do it at some point. We're just starting now.

This is what the RetroSuburbia group is about. David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture, wrote this book called RetroSuburbia. Basically it's about permaculture, but permaculture aimed at the suburbs, so for people like us, using what we already have available to reduce our footprints, reduce our demand for fossil fuels and reduce our resource use. The book is like a guide.

The idea of the local RetroSuburbia group that I started a few months ago is that I don't want to have to do all the research and come up with all the answers myself. There are people in Lismore who are doing very similar things and who have some of the answers. So let's get together and throw around ideas together and not reinvent the wheel. There's a few of us who are getting together, and just really talking practical solutions about how we can reduce our demand on fossil fuels.

Anybody can come. It's the third Saturday of the month from 10am to 12am at the Lismore City Library. We had quite a few people come last time. I'd like to have knowledgeable people come along so I can learn from them but it's good to have people who are just starting out come along so they can get some ideas about how to start reducing fossil fuel use.

One of the things that my mum taught me years ago when I was young was to learn the difference between what is a want and what is a need. That's something I keep coming back to. If it's something that I just desire, then if I can let that go, that makes a massive impact. I think that we inadvertently do a lot of damage through our consumption of things that we just desire.

I think an important thing that I'm learning is the need for collaboration and to work as part of a team. Sharon and I have the benefit of her working and me not, so we can collaborate really well together. I help her to get off fossil fuels and she helps me to get off fossil fuels. If you're just one person it's very hard to do that.

A lot of people, their response to hearing that I live without money, the negative response I get, is that I'm just bludging. It took me a long time to get out of that mindset as well myself because that's our culture. You can't depend on anyone else because if you do you're a bludger.

I still have that message in my head sometimes and it was very strong at the beginning. I didn't feel like I was a bludger, but I felt guilty because I felt like I was on a constant holiday when everybody around me wasn't and so that left me feeling guilty. But then I realized that actually we're always dependent on other people. It's just that when we use money, the dependencies are spread globally.

People and ecosystems around the world meet our needs. We have money as an exchange. My dependency is very much face to face. I'm dependent on Sharon at the moment and she's depending on me. It's a reciprocal thing, but I know what my footprint is. I know what my impacts are with Sharon and vice versa. So that's the power of working like this as a face to face collaboration and taking money away. I've come to understand that I'm not really bludging, I'm actually just having my needs met super locally.

The Lismore RetroSuburbia group will meet next Saturday, July 20, at the Lismore City Library from 10am until noon. You can read more about Jo's journey on her blog JoLowImpact.