Posted on 03/12/2012 11:27:17 PM PDT by blam
Prepping for the Financially Challenged: A One Month Survival Plan For Under $300
Tom Chatham
March 12th, 2012
The American Dream Lost
The following article has been generously contributed by Tom Chatham, author of the newly released book The American Dream Lost – Economic Survival Strategy for a New Paradigm.
Many people are now waking up to the possibility that the future may not provide the great recovery we all expect it to be. They are begining to sense that something is wrong with the economy and it will not get better. Their first thought is the question, What do I do to protect myself and my family? They usually answer that question with the thought, maybe these preppers aren’t so crazy after all. How do you prep with very little money?
Many start answering this question with buy this and buy that but that is not the first step to prepping. Every situation is different so your preps need to reflect your situation. The first thing you need to do is get a legal pad or a note book to write in and answer these basic questions.
* Do you own or rent?
* Do you live in an apartment or a home with a yard?
* Is your home paid for or could you lose it if your income were cut off?
* Do you have some place else to go if things get too bad or you lose your home?
* Can you plant a garden or fruit trees in your yard? Can you own livestock or even a few chickens?
* How much can you afford per month to buy supplies?
These questions are just a start but they will determine what you will need to get by in a difficult situation.
An apartment dweller will have no need to get seeds and garden tools immediately while it might make perfect sense to someone in the country with a few acres of their own land. If you live in the suburbs and have a small yard you might be able to plant some fruit trees but what happens if you lose your home to foreclosure? Would the money for those trees have been spent better somewhere else? You need to decide what your emergency will involve and what your basic needs will be because of it.
Lets look at an apartment dweller for a minute. They depend on water from the city, food from the grocery store, power for heat, light and cooking and sanitation, all of which has to be brought into the city or pumped out of the city on a continuous basis. If all of these systems shut down for any length of time you are now stranded in a cave on a cliff with a long staircase to traverse each way. Assuming that everyone is in the same situation as you and you are not evicted from your home, what supplies will you need to shelter in place and how long will they last?
Being in an apartment you are limited to the types of supplies you may be able to store. For instance it would be a waste of money to invest in a generator if you know you can’t store a 30 day supply of gas. The two primary supplies you need no matter where you are involve water and food. In a system wide failure water would be the first thing you would run out of. You can only live about three days without water so it is a critical storage item. The only problem with water is that it’s heavy and takes up a lot of room if you want a several month supply. For someone in an apartment this is out of the question so how do you get around this? The solution has to be to store a small supply and have a plan to resupply what you need. The cheapest way to go is to get a supply of five gallon plastic food grade buckets to store water in. As a secondary storage device get a few thirty gallon trash cans and some food grade liners for them. These can be filled just prior to an emergency if you have any warning. Another secondary storage medium would be your bath tub. This can hold fifty gallons or more to last you quite a while. In addition to storage containers you need to get a good water filter. A gravity fed system is good but a portable reverse osmosis system is better. You may need to forage for water during a long emergency and you don’t want to contaminate your clean buckets with unfiltered water that you will have to carry home. Also you will need to filter water in your tub or other container that may not be completely clean. The reason to have some five gallon buckets is that you may need to carry water up to your apartment and more than five gallons is more than most people would be able to handle at one time.
The next thing you need to have on hand is a supply of food. The cheapest things to start off with that will keep you fed are the following items. You might want to get 3lbs of rice, 3lbs of dried beans, 5lbs of cornmeal, 42oz of oatmeal, 2lbs of powdered milk, 26oz of mash potato flakes, 30 packages of ramen noodles and 12 cans of vegetables. All of these things will cost you about $35.00 and provide one person with three meals a day for 30 days. This list is meant to prevent desperation on your part for the least amount of money not necessarily a perfectly balanced menu. A good multivitamin can fill in any shortfalls of this menu. This short list provides you with a reasonable amount of food for a very small investment and all of it will fit in two five gallon containers to allow for easy transport if you decide to relocate with it.
Another item you might want to get depending on your location is a good quality cold weather sleeping bag. This is a must if you are living in a cold climate without a dependable heat source. You can survive in a very cold place for a very long time if you have the means to stay warm and get a good nights sleep.
The next item you should have is a propane stove, at least a single burner unit, and at least a one pound canister of propane for each week for the duration you plan for. This will allow you the means to heat water and cook food and also provide heat on a limited basis. To make your fuel go as far as possible you also want to have a small pressure cooker so you can cook things like beans and rice quickly.
For light you can have a 100 hour liquid paraffin candle that will provide you with 3 hours of light every night for a month. You want to have a large box of strike anywhere matches and a disposable lighter to light your stove and candle. A hand crank LED light with a radio and cell phone charging port would be a good addition to this kit.
The final thing you would need is a sanitation system. With the power off, you might be able to flush your toilet with your water stores but the pumps that carry the sewage away will not be working so the sewer lines will eventually back up. To avoid this you need to have a portable toilet with disposable linings that you can utilize until the power returns or you relocate. A simple totable toilet and a few liners can be had for under thirty dollars. You can also get disposable liners that fit your regular toilet bowl that you can use.
Depending on how much you spend on your sleeping bag and pressure cooker, you can get everything listed here for around three hundred dollars. For that price you would be able to shelter in place for a month. If you increase the amount of food, propane and candles you get, you could shelter in place for months.
Security is not covered here because it is something that could fill an article of its own. These are the basic things you should have for an apartment if you plan to stay in place for any length of time. These limited supplies can be the difference between remaining safe and healthy and becoming desperate. The small quantity of supplies listed here would be easy to relocate with even if you had to travel on foot. In the next article we’ll talk about expanded preps for apartments and things for single family homes.
I think the problem with prescriptions is that insurances won’t pay for more than a few months at a time.... “accidentally” forgetting your prescription bottles at a hotel or a gas station (when you took them in the bathroom(?) and getting a whole new set would make sense.
bflr
I knocked them off the counter and they fell into the toilet!
I will probably have electricity so might bring an electric wok. Will probably go to the local wholesale food market, pick up small cheap apples and bananas, bag of rice (preferably brown, I am in Whole Foods country). If I can find large (number 10) cans of beans or chile, or tomatoes I can whip up something. Otherwise a trip to Walmart for large cans. Rice and beans, spaghetti and meat sauce, peanut butter and jelly, for variety. Thanks for ideas, I will also lobby for more money.
Good luck! Thought and preparation will lead to success. That and hunger... ;)
An old vet told me that the best meal he'd ever eaten in his life, was a single boiled potato while in a German POW camp, after days of nothing to eat.
I have an MSR gasoline stove for camping or bug out.
Rocket stove is for fixed location because it is heavy.
BTW, don’t have the link, but there are backpacking stoves that you can make out of a tin can that burn just about anything very efficiently.
Kind of like “accidentally” losing my guns in a boating accident. Good idea.
ping
Here you go. Happy hunting.
I generally get my “take every day” prescriptions refilled every 25 days (the insurance generally allows a refill a few days before you run out).
That way, you’ll accumulate an extra one-month supply every five months.
The drawback will be that you’ll run through your 12 refills in 10 months, at which point you’ll need to get another authorization from your doctor. As long as they’re not pricks about “How’d you go through a year’s worth of medicine in 10 months?”, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Preppers’ PING!!
Look what is happening right before your eyes and take heed. There’s a Great Storm coming you can feel it.
Listen to what the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it. NIV Proverbs 22:3
One of the things that will hurt is the fact that many will not except that a breakdown is occurring even as they watch it happening before their eyes. Why don’t they realize it?It’s caused by a condition called ‘Normalcy Bias’ a mental state people enter when facing a disaster.
It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
A good article on ‘Normalcy Bias’ is on our own ChocChipCookies Blog The Survival Mom:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/12/29/normalcy-bias/
You either prepare and stand on your own beholden to no one or you become dependent on others to provide your basic needs and become their ‘serf’. Me I don’t want to be beholden to anyone for providing what is needed for me and mine. I certainly don’t want to have to kiss some ‘gubberment’ third class bureaucratic to try and coax some help from them, I don’t want some ‘jack booted’ thug herding me in line and telling me where to stand, sit, eat or sleep. And last but not least I don’t want to be shut up in with a bunch of ‘zombies’ and have to worry about not only trying to get basic necessities but having to fight to keep what I manage to get.
Its your choice you can prep or you can stand around on a bridge waiting for FEMA to bring you a bottle of water, a MRE, a warm blanket and a kiss for your boo-boo and maybe you can even get your picture as you stand there on the national news.
For those who are just starting or are old hands at prepping you may find my Preparedness Manual helpful. You can download it at:
http://tomeaker.com/kart/Preparedness1j.pdf
NOTE! THIS IS A FREE DOWNLOAD. I DO NOT MAKE ONE CENT OFF MY PREPAREDNESS MANUAL!
For those of you who haven’t started already it’s time to prepare almost past time maybe. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, a extra couple changes of oil and filters for your car, tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.
As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”
Again I like to recomend FReeper’s ChocoChipCookie Blog The Survival Mom (Please Blog Police let this one slide!) Where you can get lots of useful information like:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2011/11/20/8-morale-boosters-for-any-worst-case-scenario/
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/02/02/survival-priorities-the-rule-of-three/
And More
“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger.
Underestimation can be fatal.”
You can always make tortillas. My friend and I used to make them with masa flour and eat them with butter - YUM!
10-4 on that. Anyone with a serious working knowledge of 20th Century history should see it similarly.
Could I be added to your prepper ping list, please? Thank you!
Hit up your co-workers to help with a Potluck (ie: Cookies, etc)
Cole Slaw, Potato Salad, pasta salad from scratch is relatively cheap
Egg Salad, Pulled Pork, Ham Salad - from scratch.
Rolls from Thrift Bakery- shop around
walmart has levothyroxine for $10.00 for a 90 day supply. Ask your doctor to prescribe a 90 day supply with refills. Then ask the pharmacist if you can get two 90 day supplies to keep on hand. Since you are paying cash, there will probably not be an objection.
Good article for low budget prepper in a small space. This is better than waiting for FEMA till you die.
If you have absolutely nothing else but water and a blanket and no resources beyond a couple of dollars, a bag of dog food will keep you alive. It has enough nutrients and has been used on abandon ship kits for long distance sailors. You will not want to eat it all at once so it will last a while and will keep you alive.
Check out the sales in your area.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.