finances for collapse book 7

FINANCES FOR COLLAPSE BOOK 7

MINIMIZE COST, NOT MAXIMIZE EARNINGS
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( this is article 1 of 2 today )
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We’ve talked about doing away with rent and a car so as to radically minimize your bills, freeing money for preps even as you need to earn less.  The main point of that discussion was to get you to think about sacrificing and rethinking luxury items.  Being able to tell wants from needs.  Now that you have done so, now you can focus on the actual tactics of living frugally.  You can’t just say, hey, I’m going to live frugally so now I’ll buy the cheapest insurance, the cheapest car, and get the best mortgage rate I can find.  That is NOT living frugally.  Living frugally is doing without a car, with no rent, not eating out, not buying processed foods.  Think of it this way.  A middle class spender, seeing the writing on the wall, knowing they have to start living a lower middle class lifestyle, will clip coupons.  Great.  That means your overpriced unnecessary luxury items cost a lot less.  The frugal fool, on the other hand, does away with buying any of that at all, and saves 100% on every item, instead.  I assume we are all on the same page here?

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Really, the whole Frugal Way can be distilled down to one instructional sentence.  Watch every penny and the dollars will take care of themselves.  That is pretty much it.  Anything else is just gaying it up and padding the word count ( like I’m doing here.  Not because I’ll make more money off of it-I mean, HELLO!, make money on books?  I don’t do that-but because I have a daily word count for my blog and because I am completely enamored with my own voice ).  I work half time, at minimum wage.  With that, I live in town, save money, and prep.  I can do it all on very little because I don’t spend money except on basics.  Everything I buy for groceries is on sale, since I stockpile everything and never need to spend full price or over price.  Rent and utilities are so cheap I’m back twenty years.  Otherwise I would have thought differently about moving back to town from my off grid hovel.  Those are my three expenses, and that is pretty close to it.  The occasional bike part and pair of shoes.  My yearly web site and e-mail account.  Birthday and Christmas. 

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There is never an impulse buy.  No “nickel and dimeing”.  Sure, I might see a great prep item.  If I don’t buy it now it will never again be available.  But those are rare and rarely bother my budget.  When a unheard of find of war surplus 303 ammo was offered at close to reloading-powder-only-with-no-other-components cost, I of course got a batch.  One box only.  I could have raided the savings and bought them out, but then that would have been a foolish buy ( despite what I truly think, you can actually have too much food and ammo-at least, if it interferes with your other budget items ).  What I did was a use-it-or-lose-it one time purchase.  Any more and it would have been impulse buying.  It is a slippery slope.  You need to beware temptation and emotion hidden as Required Tangibles.  Since, in the great scheme of things, you can never have enough tangibles, nor enough savings, you must balance them out.  Invest, then save, then back to investing.  Rather than gaining a thrill from spending and treating myself, I get that glow from increasing my savings ( all our jobs are one financial calamity for the boss away from being pink slipped.  I hate saving in the Banksters Currency, but it is a necessary prep anymore.  Once your job is gone, good luck finding another ).

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I’ve talked about the 500 year European empire before.  For the Scepter Holder De Jour, riches in the form of excess energy were pouring in from yesterdays power holders as well as each new colonial conquest-really a sweet deal for the few powerful banker families that were along for the ride the whole time-and after a few extra generations it was easy enough to firmly believe that Growth was the new religion to worship.  The sweet part of the deal was that even if you weren’t in charge anymore you still had a bigger slice of the pie than any Darkies elsewhere.  You still shared in the White Union economy, for obvious reasons such as a shared property rights culture and what not.  Now that paradigm is ending, and I’m not talking about China taking over the joint.  I’m talking about all the excess energy ending and no where else to colonize ( you can’t count every last gram of mineral or carbon fuel in the earths crust and count it as a future exploitable resource.  All resources must be politically, economically and physics-ally [ hey, I know-not a word ] available ).  The end of growth, quite simply.

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Our politicians don’t suck more than ever because of any lack of votes.  They are operating under a growth contraction.  Groups are not fighting amongst each other because a Democrat was elected-but because the pie is shrinking.  Every cultural failing you observe is due to our lack of growth and energy contraction ( as measured in net energy, not volume of energy ).  You must live your life as if growth is dead.  If your needs contract along with your income, you are better off then most other people who still think they will live to see the resumption of unlimited growth on a finite planet.  Just ask them, they all have an excuse as to why they believe that The Laws Of Physics Don’t Apply.  If you live so far below your means that your surplus further aids future contraction insurance/investment, you have financed the collapse for yourself.  Then, once your surplus has been whittled away, you are still able to survive on a pittance.  But in the meantime everything you invested in ( no debt, extra insulation on the house along with a south side mini-greenhouse, etc. ) is helping you weather the contraction.  You only get there by needing next to nothing, not by winning the lottery or killing off the wife for insurance money.

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