Preparedness Prioritization
Most of us are not recent lottery winners nor are we otherwise independently wealthy. Thus, we frequently need to make hard decisions as to where our money will be best spent. This includes what little we can carve out for the prepping budget, right?
Emergency Fund Prioritization
One of the absolute best ways to use your prepping budget is to set money aside for emergencies.
While a furnace that suddenly goes belly up isn’t the end of the world, it will certainly seem that way if you can’t afford to get it fixed or replaced. If you had a sudden emergency expense of $1,000, could you make it work? For far too many people, even $200 would require substantial financial juggling.
I’ve said this time and again — prepping isn’t just about surviving the end of the world, it is about trying to make your life easier in all respects. Putting together an emergency fund isn’t easy but it can be done, even if only just a very little bit at a time.
One of the most common reasons I give when I’m talking about why prepping is important is sudden job loss. If it hasn’t happened to you, I’m betting it has happened to someone you know.
When a family is living paycheck to paycheck and that money is suddenly gone, even basic necessities can be difficult to purchase. However, if the family has been able to stock up on things like food, toiletries, and other such items, even a little at a time, they’ll have a bit of an easier go of it until more income can be generated.
In doing just a few minutes of research online, I’m seeing averages of anywhere from 27-40 weeks for how long it takes for someone to find work after a job loss. How long could you feed your family on what you have on hand right now? Could you make it 6 months? How about 10 months? A year?
The Bug Out Bag Question
All too often, I see recommendations, or even rather strident insistence, that assembling a fully stocked bug out bag (BOB) should be the first step in the journey to preparedness. While BOBs are an important component of a preparedness plan, they are not the panacea some folks seem to think.
The most common reasons you’d need to evacuate home will either be natural disasters, such as an incoming hurricane or approaching wildfire, or possibly some sort of localized emergency, like if a train derailed spilling a noxious substance or a factory catches fire and causes nasty fumes.
Running off to the woods with a BOB isn’t going to improve your survival odds in those situations. In both of those cases, a set of car keys, a wallet with cash and credit cards, and a cell phone would all likely prove far more useful than a BOB.
Water
A boil order can throw a wrench in the works. But, having a supply of potable water set aside for emergencies can make things a little easier until the situation has been resolved. Good quality filtration gear can be rather useful as well. Stocking up on water is one of the simplest preps you can do! Either buy cases of bottled water (in my area, I can get them for about $2.50 on sale) or refill clean juice or soda bottles.
Pantry
When the wallet is empty and you’re still 4 days from payday, having a well-stocked pantry is far more valuable than a well-stocked BOB. Same thing goes for when you wake up to a couple of feet of snow and ice and can’t get to the store for a day or two. Shop the sales and add just a couple of extra things to your cart each trip to the grocery store. It will add up quickly.
Putting It All Together
If a wildfire is headed your way, having enough funds available to get a hotel room a few towns away is going to be a bit more important than ensuring you have a hatchet in your BOB so you don’t have to baton firewood with a knife…or making sure your knife is sufficiently robust to handle using it to baton firewood. Y’know, whichever way you fall on the baton issue.
Remember, too, that when it comes to bugging out, should the need arise, having a decent BOB is only part of the equation. You need to know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. But again, sheltering in place at home is likely to be your best option in the vast majority of likely scenarios.
And bugging out, by which we mean emergency evacuation from home, is much more likely to be a trip to a motel or a family member’s home for a few days than involve a lengthy stay in a remote corner of some forgotten forest, foraging for nettles and hoping for a rabbit.
Survival is typically far more about the little things than it is about the heroic efforts.
About the author
Jim Cobb is a well known freelance author on survival and other topics.
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Great article agree 💯
Juice or milk bottles are a risk for re-bottleing drinking water unless sanitized. I also bottle warer for personal hygiene in empty rinsed laundry soap containers. We are in a earth-quake zone.
I think the BOB thing, as stated here, is a totally underrated thing. Way too many people think they’re gonna hoof 60+lbs over long distances. Generally the people who seem to think this are not, IME, capable of doing that.
Both my wife and I have a BOB and they’re really not designed around the concept of running off into the woods. Yeah, they have some snacks, a camp stove, knife etc, IFAK, firestarters etc. but they also have cash, credit cards that have no balance, a charged pre-paid phone and a pre-paid debit card in them. They’re really based around the idea of being forced out of the house and into a motel/hotel or car camping situation. A situation like Katrina and we can live alright on the road until we get out of the area.
Can they do more? Yes, but that’s not really the major idea behind them.