buying quality crap 3 of 3

BUYING QUALITY CRAP 3

Now let’s cover your budget.  I don’t make much, myself, although I’m certainly not poor ( debt makes you poorer than lower income does.  Poor is when you don’t have the means of buying necessities.  I’d argue that learning to live on next to nothing, and having a surplus, leaves you in a far better position than having five times the income but spending 105% of it ).  There are two ways to look at prepper spending.  One, you may not actually truly believe that the ass in going to fall out of civilization.  You think you can time the collapse to after the time you die of natural causes.  In that case, why spend all that much on preps?  Or, two, you know without a doubt that the entire global system of centralized agriculture, finance and energy extraction is going to fail massively very soon.  You thank your lucky stars you got a very strong warning in 2009 and are frantically prepping to be ready for Round Two.  You need to buy a lot of stuff in a very short period of time.  And with the employment situation, it behooves you to concentrate on debt elimination first and preps a distant second.  In this case, you would be wise to minimize the cost of preps so as to maximize the quantities needed.

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Note I’m NOT saying you need a zero Visa balance prior to having beans and bullets.  What I am saying is that buying the most basic preps first is fine, but then you most devote most of your resources to escaping the evil bankers, THEN upgrade your preps.  Not only is eliminating debt relatively easy, it can also be part of prepping ( see my book “Six Months To Escaping The Rat Race And Prepping For The Collapse” ).  Every swinging cheese dingus survival expert out there is telling you to prep with lots of money-I’m just telling you to grow a nutsack and make up your mind to make a few sacrifices.  This costs pretty much no money.  You don’t need to start out spending the equivalent of going to the moon to prep.  Start out with the equivalent of sending a starving Ethiopian a sack of grain.

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And then we come to the cost of living.  Costs are getting scary, despite the odd falling price due to economic contraction and lack of demand.  Have you noticed houses getting more affordable?  Health care?  Anything that is touched by the tentacles of the evil banker humps ( the government is guaranteeing all mortgages now, as the banks sit on empty homes-tweaking the risks and supply for their benefit.  Insurance is part of the banking sector ) is rising in price, to bail them out of continuing stupidity ( paralleling Rome’s fall as they bailed out their rich at the expense of everyone else, including system viability ).  Jobs keep disappearing ( after twenty years of layoffs to boost profits, if not double that-although I’m speaking of trimming rather than closing the whole thing down-I’m not sure how anyone has any sense of job security anymore ).  That is one of the primary reasons consumers can’t buy.  Credit is already unable to expand and no one has the extra cash due to hours being trimmed or duel incomes reduced to one, or simply no job at all.  This is the time to REDUCE spending.  Not increase it.  Prep spending, then debt reduction, then the cost of living rising, and you want to spend MORE?

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No one is suggesting you waste your money by buying crap.  This is false economics.  I can get a $12 pair of pants that literally fall apart in five months.  Or, I spend $25 and they are still going strong three years later.  No one is saying buy the $12 pair.  I’m saying, LOOK for the equivalent of $25 pairs of pants rather than $60 ones, in everything you buy.  You’ll slip up a few times and buy crap.  It is inevitable.  But as long as you are coming out saving money in the end, search for middlin quality from cheaper to less cheap, not expensive back down to cheap. 

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And one final consideration.  Do not confuse buying quality commercial products ( verses cheap home improvement store crap ) for your business with prepping.  In a business, by buying the very best, you maximize your income.  That is investing verses consuming.  A coat of $20 a gallon paint might keep your renters paying top dollar.  It pays for itself many times over.  A high dollar furnace keeps away repairmen and keeps the rent money flowing.  With a homeowner, on the other hand, these are just another increased cost with no return income.  In prepping, all you are doing is consuming, and consuming insurance.  Prepping is insurance, not an investment.  You can safely shop around for cheaper insurance because there is always the odds nothing bad will happen.  I don’t mean I feel any less strongly about the inevitability of the collapse.  I don’t.  Every passing day I feel STRONGER about its inevitability.  Yet, since you can’t time the collapse, you might very well escape it by dieing.  That is why prepping is insurance.  You can scream “I’m worth the very best!” all you want, but if the means aren’t there to buy them…

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