Six Preps to Eliminate From Your Life

Eliminate things? Cut back? It’s a hard thing, to get out the loppers and cut a perfectly decent limb off of a fruit tree.  You can just see the fruit it might bear come fall! Of course, the way it’s angled it will clog air flow through the tree and promote disease, or it’s grown so long that it will crack under the weight of the ripening fruit.

So it’s got to be done.  Off it comes, and the tree will be sturdier and healthier in the long run. Some times you’ve got to sacrifice the ‘pretty good’ to have a shot at the ‘great’.

Have you ever noticed?

Do you notice that since you’ve started prepping, a lot more stuff falls in the ‘that might be handy to have one day’ category?  It’s happened to me. It doesn’t come naturally to my rather minimalist self, but I do like the notion of having what I really want/need even if life takes a turn for the worst.  So I put reserves on the shelves, and have manually operated versions backups to the nifty-but-fragile powered equipment, and stack the larder deep.

A few years of this though and you find out:  There is such a thing as too much even when you’re prepping.  There’s efinitely such a thing as ‘This is not the prep I really need.’ Time to eliminate some stuff.

Perhaps you thought this whole thing through before you started prepping.   You researched your needs carefully, considered both storage space and what sort of storage conditions each prep would need, prioritized just right for your budget before you started acquiring stuff, got what you needed to keep things organized as the preps flowed in.  Go You!!

That’s not how we roll

Not us. For example, we had a rule of ‘Shoot one, buy two’ on ammo going for a good while, as a method of stocking up ammo.  Oh, and if there was a stupid good deal on bulk for something we didn’t shoot often (like the Mosins), can’t let that opportunity go to waste.  By the time we stopped to count…oh Heck, how’d That happen?  So we developed a more rational plan and quit restocking until stores matched plan.

If you’re in our world instead of the fantasy land  of ‘Did it Perfect From Day One’, it may be time to get out the (metaphorical, this time) loppers.  What branches do you need to prune?  To stimulate your thinking, here are some prepping ‘limbs’ we’ve trimmed off lately, our “eliminate me!” checklist:

1. Is it time to get eating on some food stores of limited shelf life? We got a Cansolidator for canned goods to double as pantry and short-term preps.  It surprised me how quickly time passes:  We’ve had to consciously make an effort to eat more of those canned goods before their quality drops off.  
2. While you’re eating and replacing those food preps — are you finding any you just really don’t want to eat?  The canned soups sounded good at the time, but when I noticed how slowly they were rotating I was reminded I seldom want canned soup; and Salty likes it even less.  Now we replace those rows not with new soups, but with other things we eat more often.
3. I found my very first prep this week.  It was some gallon jugs with water I stashed under the basement steps years ago.  We put better solutions in place years ago and I’d forgotten about the jugs.  Good thing we don’t need them.  They’d all either oxidized and cracked (they weren’t designed for long-term storage) or evaporated molecule by molecule through the screw caps. What preps have you had for awhile that might no longer be good?
4. The last time we had a power outage (a month or so ago) I hauled out one of our first solar-powered flashlights.  Even fully charged, it was hard to read by its dim glow.  Solar technology has come a long way in the last few years, as has battery design. We also had a venom removal kit in our med bag that I removed after research showed it’s a bad idea to use those with pit vipers (the only venomous snakes in our area). What have you got that could now be replaced by a much better version?
5. While (gleefully!) storing the winter clothes up in the attic, I came across some hiking boots I’d set aside up there.  I have hard to fit feet, so when I find a pair that fits well Salty hunts down a couple extra pairs (cheap! and often gently used) with his online shopping mastery.  Que the sad trombone sound:  Who knew that at 50+ years old, my shoe size would increase?  I blame the extra hiking I’ve been doing.  The point is that if your sizes are changing, any sized item preps had better be changing too.
6. Excess limbs, from the fruit trees planted as long-term food preps.  More on that in another post…

Do your sized preps still fit? Thanks bethography* for the image

Why bother? 

Why not just keep it all?  It could be trade bait, right?  Well, maybe.  Some things, like too-old canned food, just plain lose value.  Eliminate them with extreme prejudice. There’s no point in letting it go bad; better to use it up now.  Worse yet is to be thinking your prepped to discover the prep is not useful.

The other reason is opportunity costs.  The resources and storage space you’ve got invested in items that no longer really suit is resources and storage space unavailable for something better.  Sometimes you’ve got to just bite the bullet and prune off that badly angled branch to make the whole tree healthier.

*By bethography – melting mama [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons