I grew up in a home where the parents believed in being prepared. When my dad went back to dental school after working for fifteen years as a biochemist, we lived for three years on the food storage they had acquired. But we didn’t use the food storage during those three years only. We had always enjoyed wonderful whole wheat bread, pancakes, cookies and cakes made from the wheat in our food storage. We learned that this food wasn’t to be used just in case of emergencies. We ate and rotated the items in our storage on a regular basis. We became used to the ingredients contained in these home-cooked meals made from scratch, and really learned to enjoy them. This is important, especially with whole wheat, because it does take some getting used to. You can’t just begin using it when your emergency starts and expect your body to immediately adapt to it.
When my wife and I were married, we wanted to be as prepared as my parents. We started small because we didn’t have much money or room. During the last 25 years we’ve been able to expand our food storage program and also make some additional preparations. I try to help as many people as possible become prepared by summarizing the basic requirements with these three words: Grub, Guns, and Gold! Of course the list is much more comprehensive than just those three items, but it’s a good starting point.
1) Do you have a year’s supply of basic food and water? If “no”, do have any money in the bank. If “yes”, take as much out as possible and buy a year’s supply of food. If you can afford more than that, that’s even better. Food storage calculators on the internet tell you how much of what items you need based on your family size. The major groups to consider include: Grains, Fats and Oils, Legumes, Sugars, Milk, Cooking Essentials, and Water. Additional items might include vegetables and fruits, whether canned, dehydrated, or freeze dried. Also, in order to fully utilize wheat in your food storage program, you’ll need to have a grinder to convert it into flour. We have a stone-ground grinder powered by electricity, but we also have a hand crank grinder just in case! For water we have eight 55 gallon barrels. We also have a Berkey water filter. What’s good about these filters is electricity isn’t needed – they work via gravity. We’re using our Crown Berkey right now with the additional fluoride filters so that we don’t end up with fluoride and other toxins in our bodies. We could even put Mississippi River water in the Berkey and it would make it safe to drink!
2) Do you still have money in the bank after buying your food? If so, buy guns to protect your family and food. The most effective home defense weapon is a 12 gauge shotgun. You may also want to acquire some type of semi-auto rifle, such as an SKS, or my favorite, the M1 Garand. The SKS is an effective killer out to 300 yards, and the Garand is effective out to 800 yards. Some people like the AR-15. Any of those are great. I also like to have a handgun nearby as well, at least 9mm or larger. If you’re not very familiar with guns, take a hunter education safety course at a minimum (your kids too), and maybe a course for concealed carry. And make sure you have enough ammo on hand for whatever might happen.
3) Do you still have money in the bank after buying your food and guns? If so, buy gold. Or if you’re poor like me, silver. Right now silver is trading at 65 times less than gold. In 1980 it was only sixteen to one, and is historically closer to fifty to one. So there is a greater likelihood that silver will be better insurance for you than gold, especially since it has many more industrial applications than gold. I call precious metals “insurance” because I’ve never considered them investments, and have sold silver only one time – to buy more food, guns, and ammo! Precious metals are what will allow me to do those things that will be necessary for my family to survive after the American way of life collapses. But don’t buy precious metals until you have your grub and guns first! Or at least take care of all of them concurrently.
I think we all realize that the best option for us would be to have remote and secure places we could go to if needed. Unfortunately, this isn’t an option for most of us. That being stated, some additional considerations – for those of us trapped in urban or suburban settings, include:
A) You need to be able to cook your food without electricity. So my first thought was to buy a new propane gas grill and fill up our three tanks. So we did. Then I realized that three tanks wouldn’t last very long. So, we bought a Weber grill, and acquired a lot of free firewood. Then I learned that charcoal is better than wood for cooking applications, so we bought charcoal. But the Weber grill requires too much charcoal, so we did some cooking experiments with our dutch oven. We found that we could cook five dutch oven meals with one bag of charcoal. We ended up buying enough charcoal to cook one meal per day for six months. Unfortunately, the next thing we learned was charcoal in paper sacks tends to absorb moisture, and over time, will eventually become useless. So if you buy a lot of charcoal for your storage, you’ll need to repackage it in plastic bags inside the paper sacks, or put the charcoal in five gallon buckets. But, if there is some cataclysmic event and you’re the only house in the neighborhood with food, the last thing you want to do is cook outside where everyone in the neighborhood can smell your tasty stew. So, what do you do? You install a wood-burning stove in your house and cook on top of it! Whatever you do, don’t cook with charcoal indoors – carbon monoxide kills!
B) Many people put their guns in gun safes, like I did. That would protect them for the most part. But I think it’s more likely that my own government would take my guns than anyone else – remember Katrina. So I moved my favorite guns out of the house to secure locations. Now all I have available are one shotgun, one rifle, and one handgun, but I could get to the other ones fairly quickly if I really needed to. Someone recently wrote a book and created a web site called HideYourGuns.com. My question is this: What if someone in the government wrote that book? They’d know pretty much where you hid your guns! And they would have a record of every address where one of these books was delivered! Even if that book were written by an individual not associated with the government, anyone could read that book and know the most likely places people hide their guns! This one is a tough call, especially since your gun is registered when you buy it. So they know where you live, and they know the most likely hiding places for your guns!
C) When you buy your gold or silver, you won’t want to put it in a safe deposit box in the bank. You’ll want to have it in your hot little hands, or somewhere else safe. And you’ll want to buy it before January 1, 2011. I recently heard that one of the provisions of the recently passed ObamaCare legislation is that effective 1/1/2011, all transactions over $600 have to be reported to the IRS. That surely is reminiscent of 1933, now isn’t it?
D) One more very important thing to consider is related to #3 above. Any financial instrument or vehicle denominated in dollars will be worthless sooner or later. If you read what the experts have to say on this subject, it isn’t a question of “if,” it’s a question of “when.” So at the very least, after you have your grub and guns, take as much of your savings out of the bank as you can and buy precious metals. Also, I took as much of my 401k out as I could and rolled it into a precious metals IRA. There is real silver in a vault with my name on it. When the value of the dollar goes down, my IRA will increase in value. If/when a new currency is adopted, my IRA will still have value. For the rest of my 401k, I was able to open up a brokerage account within it and I purchased two different Exchange Traded Funds: CEF – Central Canada and SLV – Ishares Silver. These ETFs own millions of ounces of actual precious metals and investors buy shares in them. These are still based on the dollar, but there isn’t anything else better I can do to make this money safe.
Numbers 1-3 are what I tell everyone who asks me about preparedness. If they show an interest in becoming prepared themselves, I help them acquire the food storage items at cost through my local church cannery. I also then tell them about items A-D. Once they’ve started working on A-D, I tell them about some additional items to consider. I’ve found if I just dump all of the information on someone right up front, they tend not to do anything. Milk before meat!