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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Prepping on the Cheap!

So how to prep while keeping my family on a budget is a topic that has been on my mind a lot lately. I mean, let’s face it, stuff is expensive. Grocery prices are sky rocketing, gas has taken a front seat in budgeting, not to mention the fact that our income, like many families, has decreased in recent years as the recession has continued.

This is also a concern I’ve heard echoed across the prepping community time and again. It’s easy to resent your neighbor when they can afford that new BMW(or water collection system) and you can barely afford to put gas in your old clunker. Well take heart, there are a few obvious, and not so obvious, ways to help your family prepare for the future without breaking the bank. Now I won’t lie. It does take a lot of extra work to hunt for deals. But if you’re on a budget and can only afford to spend… say $50 dollars a month on preps, you can go to Wal-Mart and buy a camp stove for that $50 or you can buy a used one at a yard sale for $5 dollars and still have $45 left for the month. There are many ways to save on preps and I hope to cover more of them in the future. But to begin with I’d like to touch on just a few to get started.


Yard sales:

Yard sales, estate sales, garage sales… whatever you want to call them, they are a great place to find useful preps. It’s amazing what people will deem useful and what they think of as junk that they will get rid of for pennies on the dollar. I’ve bought new hiking boots and back backs from aspiring hikers that never “found the time” to go on a hike. I have a collection of old glass oil lamps and even oil for the lamps that I’ve found at yard sales. The most I’ve paid for a lamp so far is $5 but I’ll go a little higher if it’s a really nice lamp. I’ve bought camp stoves, tools, wool blankets, apple peelers, barrels, ammo cases… The list goes on and on. I hit on a yard sale once held by an avid hunter that suffered a foot injury and could no longer hunt(my husband’s favorite yard sale to date.) I even found a yard sale held by a prepper couple that had accumulated so many preps over the years they were weeding out their overstock. The preps are out there, our challenge is to find them.


Craig’s list:

I’m convinced that anything can be found for a bargain on Craig’s list given enough time and patience. If you’re not familiar with the site, get to know it. It will save you tons when you’re looking for specific items you’ve not been able to find at yard sales. They even have a free section where people just want to get rid of things and want someone to pick them up. A word of caution here. I don’t go after curb alerts. That’s where people post their address and say first one here gets it. Nine times out of ten it will be gone by the time you get there and you’ve just wasted your gas. Neither do I travel to pick up items without some sort of picture of what I’m going to get. While the stuff might be free, again gas isn’t, and it defeats the purpose to go across town to find out the item isn’t what you thought it was.


I found this water collection barrel
for free on Craig's list!


Garden forums:

Gardeners are notoriously generous people. They love what they do and want to share their joy with as many people as they can. Join a garden forum. Gardenweb is a great one!  Forums are a wonderful place to get heirloom seeds and even starter plants for your garden. Become active in your state forum. Ours has a picnic/plant swap biannually where you can swap starts from your existing plants for starts of plants you may be looking for. Forums also have groups that swap heirloom veggie seeds and plants through the mail. Don’t have any seeds or plants to trade? Don’t worry. Like I said. Gardener’s are wonderfully generous and it’s pretty easy to find people that are willing to help you get started for the cost of postage. J


Coupons and Sales:

Ok, I know coupons aren’t for everyone. It takes a certain amount of organization and a lot of work, but the payoffs can be huge. If you’d like to see just how huge then Google coupon stockpile and take a look at the images! Some of these people’s stockpiles are astounding. If you’re looking to build a stockpile, but it seems it’s all you can do to feed your family on a week to week basis then this might be for you. Luckily, couponing has gotten much easier than when your grandma couponed. Today there are numerous sites that are dedicated to help make couponing easier by matching store sales to current coupons. All you have to do is print their list for your store and match up the coupons.  A few of my favorite sites are Southernsavers.com and hotcouponworld.com. If you decide that coupons aren’t for you then at least look at the sales. Buying a few extra of things your family uses while they are on sale can really add up over time.

DIY:

Never discount the value of a little knowledge and some good old fashioned ingenuity. There are great resources available these days that can help you learn to do almost any project you need to have done. This can really add up to some major saving vs. paying to have something done or buying something new that you can make for yourself. Youtube is usually my first choice for visual instruction. Cable channels are great for things such as gardening. And then there’s still the ole’ reliable library.


There are many more resources out there, but for the sake of length I’ll leave them for a future post. My main point is there are ways to prep on a budget. They may not always be the easiest or fastest ways, but that’s ok. I think easy and fast are contrary to the beliefs most of us have come to embrace in our search for a more self sufficient lifestyle. Instead, it’s important to face our difficulties, continue to learn, share our thoughts and knowledge… and prep.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Christmas Prepping!

As preppers, I’m sure most of us have faced the distress and worry of family members that refuse to see the value of prepping, or even stocking up on a few things for that matter. We personally have talked to all of our family about this matter at one point or another, with little results. Oh, I have one brother-in-law that takes a mild interest. It suits his lifestyle of hunter, fisherman, and outdoorsman. Still, he hasn’t made it a priority in his life to seriously prepare his family for unforeseen disaster. Through couponing, I’ve also managed to enlighten a few family members to the benefits of food storage under the guise of saving money. On the other end of the spectrum, I also have a sister that, for a while, was convinced we were going off the deep end and were going to run off and join a cult. Fortunately, I’ve not felt the need to do that either. Hah! Never the less, all of these things left us with a conundrum. How were we going to prepare for ourselves AND an extended family that refused to see the need in doing so for themselves?


Then the answer came to me one day last summer as I sat at my mother-in-law’s kitchen table enjoying a glass of iced tea and a few hours of conversation. She had been reminiscing about her mother who had passed away a few years prior. Grandma, as we all called her whether she was our grandma or not, was an avid canner. My MIL was telling me a story of when she was younger and helping to can up a batch of green beans. Grandma had canned the whole mess in a hot water bath and had ultimately lost all of her green beans to spoilage that year. And boy, was she ever mad, my MIL recounted, her eyes tearing from laughing, while she told of emptying all the jars of spoiled green beans in the field. Luckily, Grandma didn’t give up on her canning. Instead she enjoyed many years of canning, sharing the work and satisfaction with two daughters, as she created not only great meals but great memories. It was then and there that I decided what my MIL’s Christmas gift from us would be. A new canner and a Ball’s blue book of canning. Yes, I’m giving her the gift of a canner because I know it will make her a little more prepared. But I know it will also bring her many hours of joy and hopefully a few more good memories.

 Now, having two daughters of my own that are both young adults, I can also see a gift I can give them. And here it is…

Yes, that’s a near empty canning shelf you’re seeing. And, yes, as a prepper I should be ashamed. But I don’t see that as a barren shelf but a shelf of potential. It’s a shelf of future skill for me to teach my daughters and a shelf of happy memories to be made.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Girl Prepper!

Ok, so I’m not a superhero prepper. But I aspire to be. The truth is, a year ago I didn’t know what a prepper was. I happened upon it by chance through coupon forums and then through youtube. Boy was I amazed. I guess we’ve become so conditioned towards our current lifestyle of consumerism and convenience that it had never occurred to me that people actually lived like this. Amazed, I began watching more and more videos and reading more and more blogs. Somehow it all made sense. I was even perturbed that it hadn’t occurred to me before.
Yes, that’s how we were meant to live. A life where we took responsibility for ourselves. A life where we could be more self-sufficient, know how to live without the helping hand of a power-grid, the convenience of Wal-Mart, or even the drive-thru if Wal-Mart was too inconvenient. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not ready to schlep off my whole life and way of living but I was ready to begin to learn. I was ready to become a prepper.
It wasn’t long before I started sharing my new found knowledge with my husband. Now, he wasn’t quite as in the dark about things as I was. He has always kept up with politics, and world economics as well as other threats such as EMP’s and the possibility of terrorist attacks. He just didn’t realize that there was a whole community of people preparing for the possibility of these events. Once he did, prepping made as much sense to him as it did to me. In fact, I recall having a conversation with him not long afterwards about how could we have missed this?
It makes such common sense, why isn’t everyone doing this? Heck, a hundred years ago, everyone was. Only it was called life, not prepping. Have we become so spoiled to modern conveniences and so caught up in the rat race that we’ve all forgotten how to live? Quite possibly, I believe.
So join me in my new endeavor to learn how to live. I’m going to be doing lots of experiments in the future as I work to make our lives more self-sufficient. I’m learning how to can and working on growing a garden in soil impossible to grow in. I’ve started our food storage and will be working on my carry and conceal license. We also have 18 acres of raw mountain land that we will be developing into a retreat for our family. We plan to start clearing the land in the spring and will be building a small cabin on it ourselves. In other words, I have a lot of work to do and I hope to share it all here. I hope you’ll all join me!

 Thanks for stopping by!