Five Preps You Can Buy For $5
Since prepping can be very expensive, we thought we would share five preps you can buy for a total cost of $5. There are a whole host of preps you can buy for one dollar if you shop at the right place and plan ahead, here are a few of our favorite non-perishable long-term items to stock up on.
One thing about every item on this list: All of these items are things you will use sooner or later anyway, so there is zero waste in stockpiling any of these (to a reasonable level, anyway).
Petroleum Jelly
The first item on our list, petroleum jelly, is a great $1 choice because it has so many uses.
Petroleum Jelly has long been used on skin to reduce dryness and cracking, and also to reduce scarring from wounds. Medically, it’s used in the treatment of things like frostbite as Spice details in this article.
https://beansbulletsbandagesandyou.com/bullets/2017/11/30/preppermed-what-to-do-when-the-frost-bites/
Additionally, it’s a great fire starter that doesn’t have to be dry.
Dental Floss
If there’s one thing you REALLY don’t want in a Stuff Hits The Fan (SHTF), grid down situation it’s dental problems…
Dental pain can be so severe it is incapacitating, and the best way to keep away from having this (aside from regular dental cleanings) is daily dental care, including flossing.
What puts dental floss on this list instead of toothpaste and tooth brushes (which both do the job of keeping your teeth and gums sound) is the extra non-dental usefulness of dental floss. True, both toothpaste and tooth brushes have other prepping uses as well, but floss is a spectacular prepping tool… it’s light, very strong, flexible and cheap.
Spice detailed some of the uses of dental floss in this article, check it out.
https://beansbulletsbandagesandyou.com/bullets/2018/07/29/budget-prepping-valuable-preps-5/
Butane Lighter (Or 4, Depending On How You Buy Them)
Over the years, I don’t know how many prepping articles I’ve read that were centered around how to build a fire without matches or a lighter. I can’t begin to even guess how many, but it’s a lot.
Starting a fire without a lighter/matches is a great skill to have, and I can do it (my Boy Scout training comes to the rescue!), but I gotta be honest, with the price, size and weight of inexpensive butane lighters, I find it hard not to just stock up on them and not worry about it.
By the case, the following lighters cost $12 for 50. I’ve purchased a case of them and will do a full review in the future.
This case of lighters? $12 shipped, bringing the “per lighter” price to 24 cents.
Aluminum Foil
Aluminium foil is an absolutely great prep with a ton of uses, and it’s also something that most preppers probably don’t have nearly enough of. It’s probably my favorite of these five preps.
First, aluminum foil absolutely shines for cooking over fires without pans… but it’s useful for so much more.
One thing we use aluminum foil for is below and behind our supplemental heat radiators, for example. Our house is old, and our heating system will keep the bathroom relatively warm… but I gotta admit, when I take a shower, I don’t want “relatively warm”, I want PIPING HOT when I step out of the shower all wet to towel off. We’ve set up a small electric radiator, but we’ve also made a couple of modifications using aluminum foil. We placed the radiator in a cardboard box covered in aluminum foil, and we’ve also covered the wall behind the radiator with foil.
That foil has effectively doubled the felt output of the heater, since it reflects the heat away from the floor and the wall. It’s ugly, I’ll grant that, but Spice and I are all about effectiveness, and very little about “pretty”.
Foil can be used to clean things, polish silver, sharpen scissors (yes, really), you can use it to protect your tree trunks from rodent damage in the winter, incubate seedlings, you can fry things in it, dehydrate things on it, make a funnel out of it, etc.
Work Gloves
Last but certainly not least are work gloves. There are two kinds of $1 gloves that we keep around our house, the soft cotton brown ones and the leather/cloth “regular” work gloves.
I generally buy the soft brown ones “at need” and buy the leather ones in a $10 for 10 pairs package at a discount hardware store, and I use both extensively.
When we prep, we tend to think about “if the SHTF”, and frankly if the SHTF, most of us have hands that won’t hold up very well to a lot of tough, physical labor. Gloves will, therefore, be an invaluable prep, so I like to keep lots of pairs on hand just in case of need.
Conclusion
This is just a very short list, I will do a few more of these articles in the future with other items that are inexpensive to prep (not only because they are cheap, but also because you will use all of the items sooner or later anyway.