We know what's coming---higher prices, shortages, etc----what are you doing to prepare.

RE: Moving. I’ve heard so many reasons it can’t be done or is hard to do. Got a good job and don’t want to give that up. Got family here. Been here for many generations etc. It’s like anything else. If you feel the need and/or have the desire, you’ll do it.

There are freepers living in NY, CA etc and I just don’t get it. With taxes and fees, you are financing communists who want to destroy this country.

I dragged us from the East coast to a rural area on a gravel road in the Ozarks 10 years ago and am glad I did now. We bought 15 acres of woods and it’s been a ton of work but I’ve turned it into a little homestead with 12 acres fenced in and a four legged red meat source walking around. Plenty of room to garden and 12-24” of good top soil that the USGS rates as Prime Farmland soil. I’ve heard a siren twice in 10 years.

We’re surrounded by Springs that put out potable water including one 1/8 mile down the road. And when I say DOWN the road, it’s down a big hill so toting water up the hill would not be fun. I can always turn a couple of goats into pack goats and they can carry the water. I also have stuff for and have collected rainwater before. As long as I can get a hold of a couple of gallons of diesel a month, I can drive the little tractor to get water. I already have a setup for carrying a plastic 55 gallon drum and have filled it and driven back up the hill with it full. We still don’t have a well because they cost $10k around here for a nice deep one so I do know how to haul water. I have a 250 gallon tank on a trailer that I use and an RV pump provides pressure to the plumbing.

I use a new sump pump that I use to fill the tank from a creek. I run it off a generator right now but once I get a new alternator for the tractor, I’d be able to run the pump off an inverter. We don’t drink it. That’s what the 55 gal drum for and I fill that at a neighbor’s place from his well water. He has a good deep well, 300 feet. You can hit water at 100 feet but it’s crappy water. When that neighbor first moved here, he had that creek I fill up from tested. They said it was drinkable so he used it until he got a well put in.

We have running hot water as long as the temps don’t go down below the 20s which is only occasionally. We manage to make 250 gallons last a couple of weeks and use a composting toilet which helps. We use an RV shower head which has a shut off on the head. Get wet, shut it off and soap up, scrub, rinse, repeat with hair. I can take a shower with 5 gallons of water. I know because once upon a time, we used a five gallon bucket hanging from a tree branch with spigot for a shower.

When we moved out here, I had already been a prepper so we brought probably 500lbs of foodstuff with us. Two 5 gallon buckets of sugar, two of salt, two of rice, 30lbs of beans, lots of canned goods. I knew we’d be off grid for a while so I bought a 12vdc freezer/fridge and a few solar panels. I also had been collecting 12vdc LED lights from the electric sign business I was in for 25 years. We lived off grid for four years, two of them while we looked for a small, decent piece of land for a decent price. Missed out on a couple of fixer upper houses on 4-5 acres for $5k because someone beat us to them.

Ended up with an 8 acre hunk of forest and I proceeded to clear it by hand, graded a driveway with an old riding mower with grader blade, cleared a spot for a tiny house and shop/barn. Kept on clearing land to bring light in for solar and gardening spot. Finally got an electric easement cleared and pole with meter put in and I ran service to the house and shop. Years later, we got the adjoining 7 acres and 3 years ago, I cleared a fence line, mostly through woods and put a fence around 12 acres and got some meat goats, buck and two does.

We heat solely with a wood stove I brought with us and picked up a couple more since, one for the shop and a small one that I sometimes swap out to for Spring/Fall but didn’t bother this year. It’s a new air tight high efficiency and I was hoping we could get by all winter with but we can’t. Besides, the old Fisher has a nice big area to cook on.

I still keep buckets of sugar and rice and always have plenty of beans, dried and canned. Still have one of those buckets of salt, hard as a rock but could be chipped and scraped out. We always keep plenty of pasta and canned sauce as well as many other canned goods.

Eventually our charge controller and batteries expired but I still have the solar panels and plan on getting the system up and running again this year.

We could have taken a buckling for the freezer last year but I kept him for a breeding experiment. The original buck is 7/8 Boer - 1/8 Kiko and the does are 100% Kiko. Boer tends to be high maintenance and Kiko low maintenance. The buckling is 3/4 Boer and 1/4 Kikos. I’m wanting to see how high a percentage of Kiko buck I can go while still putting weight on the babies like a Boer does. The does should be kidding again any time now and normally, I would hope for doelings to expand the herd but with the way things are going, bucklings for the freezer is fine too.

I’ve dabbled with gardening here and have at least grown potatoes all but one year. This year, I’m getting serious about gardening, including starting my own plants from seed. Open pollinated aka heritage of course so I can save seed. I started a 72 cell tray of seeds 4-5 days ago and they’re all up. Grow lights just came in less than an hour ago and I already have them hung.

I’ve been talking about putting up a high tunnel(hoop house - unheated greeenhouse) for a few years now. I have stuff for the frame. Curved pipe that came from a hay shelter that the material disintegrated over time. According to the guy I got them from, it’s just as cheap to buy the whole kit as it would be to recover the frame. But I still need the greenhouse plastic sheeting, parts and pieces, watering system etc. Hopefully this year it will get done. Extends the growing season 1-2 months on each end and hardy greens can be grown through the winter.

I have a spot picked out for a root cellar and did a little preliminary digging. It would be a good spot to dig for gravel for the driveway LOL so I’m going to have to rent a bobcat or something. Grader blade, dirt scoop on my small tractor wouldn’t do anything. Tried a pick but it just slammed into rocks way more often than making it’s way between them.

Aside from being able to cook on the wood stove, I also want outdoor cooking with wood as the heat source since I have woods. Being a metal fabricator, I got the idea to build a smoker from water heater tanks as my neighbor had 3-4 of them. Water heater tanks are a bit on the thin side but it gets the job done and makes some yummy food. I also want to build a clay oven for bread and pizza. We do have clayey loam for top soil and the kids have molded it into shapes before. They’re still in one piece and sitting on a shelf here. We also have true red clay for subsoil and builder’s sand is cheap so one of these days.

I did throw together a crude wood fired grill but don’t have an adjustable grate set up yet. It’s a piece of fence rolled into a circle, filled most of the way with rocks with thin rocks on top of those that line the edge. Cooked on it a couple of times. It works and it’s waste height as opposed to squatting to use a fire on the ground though I have done that. Built a little circular wall one time for the cast iron dutch oven and cooked with wood coals from a fire next to it and shoveled them on and under as needed. Made some really good leg quarters a few times. Also wanting to build a custom fit rocket stove for the pressure canner. I’ve also got one more water heater and want to do a rocket water heater. Both have been done by other people before.

Laundry by hand? Tried it. Doesn’t work worth a squat. I have a wringer washer now and if need be, I’m quite sure I could make it run off of wind power like the Seabees used to do. We do have a dryer but dry them mostly on the line and finish/fluff them in the dryer in about 10 minutes. We have a glass top electric range that I hate. I need to break out the two burner coleman cook stove and use it for a stovetop. We used to go 2-3 months on a 20lb cylinder.

Prepping is all about how to live dirt cheap for me now.

My long term goal was/is to build an earth sheltered home with full length greenhouse on the front and facing S/SE. There’s an alternative home design called an earthship. Those are built with earth rammed tires for walls but I’d be using surface bonded concrete block on a concrete footer and slab. The greenhouse provides most of the heating needed and they use geothermal to pull a draft through for cooling. Being humid here, I would have to clean out the cooling tubes every year so that black mold/mildew doesn’t collect.

What am I prepping for? Anything and everything but it’s been my belief that the quality of life in the US will just keep sliding downhill. It’s funny. I remember hearing the word famine on the news in the 70s and saw the pictures and video and since I was young and green, I thought to myself how nice it will be when their lives can be brought up closer to our standard of living. Little did I know that TPTB have the opposite plan - for everyone but them of course.

They want people to either live in the cities with complete control and surveillance or want people to live a primitive lifestyle. Either way, you’ll be “green” whether you want to or not. So that’s how I’m prepping. I have no desire to live in a Smart City or any kind of city so I’m trying to learn self sufficiency in a rural place which is really the only place to do it.

There are no building codes or zoning laws out here so I can build anything I want out of anything I want. When I die, I can be buried right here but the digging is hard so cremation would be best. Much smaller hole.

My neighbors on either side are from St Louis and Illinois and have these properties for recreation. Hunting, four wheeling, cooking out and drinking beer. Most of the time, especially on weekdays, I have no neighbors.

Got one hen out of several and she has been known to be a little broody so I’m going to get some more fertilized eggs from the neighbor and lock her up with the eggs, food and water. I haven’t fed her in two years but she still lays a couple of hundred eggs a year. I’m hoping she can hatch and raise a little flock of low maintenance survivalist birds. I noticed she runs across open areas and hangs out with the goats and/or dogs a lot. That’s why the hawks haven’t gotten her even though they got the rest.

Did get a batch of meat birds once and processed them so I know how to do that. Never processed a four legged critter though but processing a goat is the same as a deer and I know everyone else around here knows how to do that so it won’t be hard to find a teacher. I do also have a pictorial saved to my computer.

I lived in metropolis building electric signs for 25 years in the hustle and bustle, sirens wailing, four lane divided highways, getting tailgated, shots ringing out in the hood. I still hear shots but they’re aimed at targets or food animals, not people. It’s been tough because we’re poor and we still live a bit primitive as far as water and that makes having a big garden tough. I’ll be getting water once a week in the summer but I have a couple of IBC tanks I can fill and let it sit to warm up before using it on the garden because mater plants don’t like 45 degree water and the spring fed creek is that cold.

Another year or two and we’ll be better set up here and will have a small but enough of a meat supply and that will increase as the herd grows. We’ll get better and bigger at gardening every year. I need to expand the goat shed(s) and improve the chicken coop or make a chicken tractor. I can keep goats out of the garden with the 9,000 volts electric fence but chickens can fly a little bit. They’re gonna have to stay locked up until the garden’s done for the year.

At this point, I feel we could survive an economic collapse. It would be rough but we’d make it. Meanwhile I’ll keep stocking up what I can. Speaking of can, I’ll be growing enough green beans to can some this year. Taters will keep in the ground. Found that out by accident once. Found a few in the Spring that I missed when digging them in the previous Fall and they were in perfect shape. The frost line is only a few inches some years.

Good and Timely topic.

Food/Water/Shelter #1 priority
Community/defense close #2
Cash/barter stuff/gold/silver good there #3.

Now how can we protect or even make a profit off the coming economic problems?

Own gold and silver either in PSLV & PHYS ETF’s in which you can request delivery. Or buy directly and keep in Safes either private companies local. Don’t buy SLV or GLD... the sell more than they own, PAPER. not good.

I am shorting OIL now, since when the republicans get back in office in 2022 midterms and 2024 general we will become energy independent again and the price of oil will go back down. A good play is SCO (proShares UltraShort Bloomberg Crude Oil)

OR another option is look at the silver and gold miners my favorite is $AG First Magestic. There are producers like $GOLD (barrick corp) or ones that are prospecting like $SLVTF Silver Tiger both have upside, both have risks... of course.

I invest in the above and in copper, uranium.

CD

I understand prepping when we are talking about stacking up and accumulating, but I just can’t figure out how we will be able to defend what we have. How do we keep the hordes from the hog cities from coming to take it.

There is a lot of the old horse draw equipment rusting away in pastures where I live and still a lot of horses and mules. I believe the area farmers could manage to get a lot of it in working order in a year if they aren’t killed off by the marauding urban zombies.

There are no major cities within 200 miles in any direction, so I’m not terribly worried about them making it all the way out here. But fuel and fertilizer are going to be the main issues in feeding our community.

Indeed.

Generally I wear walking shoes or boots....So I got that covered.

I understand prepping when we are talking about stacking up and accumulating, but I just can’t figure out how we will be able to defend what we have. How do we keep the hordes from the hog cities from coming to take it.

Well defense is a part of prepping and one early defense is to get 100 miles away from "the hordes from the hog cities". I'm almost 100 miles from St Louis and almost 30 from the interstate that goes to STL and most of that 30 is country and hills. If they make it here, we're talking "The Road" or "Road Warrior" type thing.

Most of prepping isn't about that because there's no prepping for that. It's about prepping for shorter occurrences. Anything from a storm that knocks out power in your area for a couple of weeks to a situation like Spring 2020 when the shelves were empty. I saw empty shelves in Italy and knew it would happen here so I bought 3 12 packs of mega roll TP, a small chest freezer which we'd been wanting for years and filled it. Month or so later, empty shelves and no freezer to be had. Then of course these days with everything relying on the internet to be functional, it makes things worse, especially with the WEF war gaming for a cyber attack that takes out the whole internet. They were a part of Event 201 which war gamed a coronavirus and then it came true.

Can you imagine the internet being down for a few months?

In the long term, for me, I just see the lower quality of life and increases in cost of everything being a long term thing. I've watched it over the years and it just never stops so I'm going for self sufficiency and frugality. I'm just an old blue collar guy. I have no investments or portfolio and prior to reaching 35 years old, I paid no attention to the news, politics, didn't even watch TV. Ignorance was bliss. Then I decided to vote in 2008 but knew nothing about how our government works or is supposed to work. I found that it's not working anything like the original design and that most everyone in DC is a bullshit talking crook who could care less about the people they're supposed to represent so I started prepping.

It's different for everyone. Got a millions bucks? Build a bunker and stock it with years worth of food. Set it up like "Blast from the Past" movie and be done. Poor person like me? Better learn some things and aim for self sufficiency.

I think I have enough to shampoo a herd of buffalo!

“There might be times when you don’t want that.”

You’d be amazed at how many readers might inquire, “Really? Why not?”

Same for cooking aromatic meals.

kets do it, again

“I buy empty ones at yard sales for $3-4 dollars each and get them filled at Costco for $9.00 each.”

Costco must have gone up in price..... Walmart it is $18.50 then about $1.25 tax

“Canned tuna, rice and beans make up a good amount of my food prep.”

Canned solid white tuna is $1.09 at Aldi. One pound frozen ground turkey is 2$.

“No list to move to and if I had a list I wouldn’t state it on a forum.”

You are moving to Moscow. Moscow Idaho.