I’ve been around the online prepper community for a while, and I keep seeing the same mistakes being made over and over again by preppers. Here are six common prepper mistakes to avoid.
Common Prepper Mistake #1
The number one mistake I see people make is a lack of attention to their water needs. Besides air, there is no more important prep than water.
We simply must have it to live, yet many people do not put the proper emphasis both on storing enough water to get through a short-term emergency or extended purification for a long-term emergency. “I bought everybody a Life Straw” isn’t going to cut it in a long term SHTF scenario.
Common Prepper Mistake #2
Another huge mistake I see is preppers spend far, far too much of their “prepping” time wasting it on watching news and engaged in politics. I know this is going to ruffle some feathers, but seriously, watching the news is a complete waste of time.
“But we have to know what’s coming!!!” they say. What good does it do to know they are coming if you sat around and watched TV or were stuck behind your computer screen clicking refresh instead of working on your preps?
Absolutely none. Here’s the truth, if something’s coming you are going to hear about it long before it happens… or… like 9/11 it will come out of the blue and no amount of news watching would have helped.
Common Prepper Mistake #3
A third mistake I see is people ignoring the obvious threats while worrying about things that are very scary but also low-probability events. Preppers need to do a realistic threat assessment, and not just prep for what is really scary.
For example, in my life what is most likely to kill me (other than natural causes)? First and foremost, an auto accident. What do I do to prep for this? Well, I wear my seatbelt; I drive the speed limit; I come to complete stops and intersections and look both ways carefully; I wait a second or two after red lights turn green (even with idiots honking behind me) to see if some jerk is going to run the light (this has probably saved me 5 wrecks over the last 30 years), etc.
What’s next likely to kill me? Weather events, so we prep for those. Right on down the line. I do prep for “the big one” but I only do so in a way that makes me more prepared for EVERYTHING.
Common Prepper Mistake #4
Very few people in the prepper blogging community oppose the concept that you can “buy your way” into being prepped. Why? Because those blogs are covered with ads from vendors who want to make money off of you and me.
How many “year’s supply of food” ads have you seen? Here’s what I know. I could buy two of those pre-packaged “year’s supply of food” and that would do very little towards ACTUALLY being prepped. Why? Well, you have to have shelter, water to cook the food with, heat to cook, yadda yadda yadda.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t buy prepping items, by all means do. Buying a “seed vault” is all well and good, but unless you know how to garden and already have the space prepared, it’s probably not going to go well for you and your seeds.
Common Prepper Mistake #5
That brings me to mistake number five, where people think they will just “learn as I go”. People plan to bug out to the woods… the same woods that native Americans (people who lived their whole lives in the woods) often starved to death in over the winter.
People plan to raise crops without knowing how to garden, they plan to grind wheat without ever having run a grain mill before… and then bake that wheat into bread without ever having baked without an oven before. It goes on and on.
Common Prepper Mistake #6
The last mistake I see is a lack of redundancy. For example, people buy a gun and think they are set. They don’t buy spare parts for that gun, nor do they know how to disassemble or reassemble it and install those parts.
The old expression “Three is two, two is one and one is none” rings true. Have multiples of EVERYTHING mission critical. Have multiple ways to filter water, to start fires, have multiple sources of food… anything that you NEED, duplicate.
Great article!