paycheck prepper 2 of 2

PAYCHECK PREPPER 2

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note: via YouTube, cowboy coffee.  I thought the selling point was lack of equipment.  Nope.  Lack of acid.  Rolling boil, add grounds, let roll for a few minutes, throw in a cup of cold water and you are done with 99% of the grounds at the bottom, and did I mention NO acid!  No need to add eggshells or whatever.  Damn, it was nice to drink a cup of black coffee ( I've had to drink with sugar and milk due to my heartburn for the last almost two years ).
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Okay, for whatever reason you are broke.  You have no money, and I’m not talking like, oh, I have no money because I have a mortgage and a car payment and five cell phones and pay a wetback to scoop the poop ( remember those businesses?  Talk about hope springing eternal, some newly laid off schmuck thinking both you can start a company with no overhead or expense AND enough people weren’t laid off and had all the extra money in the world to pay you to pick up their dogs crap because their fat wheezing asthmatic electronic game playing kids couldn’t get off their widening ass ) of your dear pooch, but rather I’m talking about you having no pay and no assets and no joy in your life except the daily library visit when you get to read my blog and a free porn site that keeps jamming up the computers that are supposed to be enjoyed by ALL patrons and not just yourself.  You’ve got yourself a fine apocalypse road warrior weapon, a spear or bow or pipe shotgun, and a Sawyer water filter after cashing in one months food stamps.  You’ll still need a few extra supplies but, since you are NOT so foolish as to give priority to weapons over food but realize you need both, for now worry about calories.

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Obviously you can’t just piss away the other fifty bucks as you need to eat ( we go with a low minimum amount of about a hundred bucks per month per person Food Stamps-for some retarded reason now called SNAP-and use this as our benchmark.  You had taken $50 and bought food for a friend who reimbursed you $38.  Your weapon was $10-$20 and your Sawyer $20.  I’m not sure who has that retail, but online that is what they go for.  Retail would be nice if you can’t pay extra shipping.  You can buy online with no bank account, just buy a gift card ) this month so you will be limited your first time to a $8 bag of flour.  Twenty-five pounds of white flour is almost enough calories for a month.  It is a terrible food.  White flour, white rice, degerminated cornmeal, dry instant potatoes, all of these are calories without nutrients.  But lack of calories will kill you before lack of nutrition.  First, you get calories.  Remember, nothing here is optimal.  It is below bare bones.  It is Third World Prepper. 

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With your twenty or twenty-five pounds of flour or rice, your choice, you have a months worth of calories which is, very sadly, more than most people keep on hand.  Of course you don’t want to stop there, but my point is that for $30 anyone can be a prepper.  You don’t need a $9.99 an issue quarterly slick magazine reviewing products to gay that all up for you.  You can do it for $11 if you boil all of your water instead of filter it ( $8 food, $2 weapon and $1 pot from the thrift store ).  Even the homeless dudes can beg for $11.  You can trash pick two liter soda bottles to store your rice in.  I don’t know how good that will keep out wildlife, but how about lashing each bottle to a branch high up in a tree?  No one looks up there, and fewer varmints.  Good friggin gravy, this stuff is even easier than I would have thought.  Okay, you now need to wait a month.  Even if you didn’t buy a Sawyer, you can’t live too well on less than half of your Food Stamps anyway.  Even without the need to get any more cash, the storage calories cut into your bare minimum enough as it is.

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Until the next month, here is what you do to live on almost no Food Stamps.  Twenty pounds of potatoes is maybe $5.  A bag of flour is $8.  A bag of rice is $10 and several tubs of margarine another $10.  $33 for plenty of calories for a month.  You get three different meals a day, with some variety.  The potatoes provide all your nutrients except what the occasional green leafy veggie gives you.  I’d suggest butter rather than margarine, but that varies by climate.  If you can spend extra, try to go half and half whole wheat flour to white.  It sticks to your ribs longer ( although store bought WW flour is most likely already rancid.  The fact your body can’t tell, tells you how poor all the rest of the food we eat is ).  You might get another kind of oil to cook in, as margarine dropped  exponentially in quality as our corn crop was burned in our SUV’s and no grain was safe from the price surge and availability issues.  Margarine now has too much water and not enough oil, but at least it tastes almost okay.  Crisco, not so much of course.  Your call.  But the $33 amount is pretty close regardless.  When I lived on nothing but potatoes and margarine for a month, back in the Eighties, I think I spent about two hours minimum wage on that, maybe $6.  It gave me plenty of calories and I didn’t crave meat ( which was weird ).  Given the variety of the above, which I didn’t have, and the global drought/ethanol fiasco food price increases from almost a decade ago, I’d say double that ( minimum wage now $8, two hours would have been $16, so double my historical cost.  Everything else except computer chips has doubled at a minimum, so this ain’t bad ) is still a bargain.

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When the next month comes up, see if you can buy some wheat kernels.  Wal-Mart stores are all different, so yours might not carry the $16 bucket of twenty five pounds of wheat.  Due to the Mormon population here we have a short section of prepper food, #10 cans and some buckets.  I don’t even know if you can buy these with food stamps.  Are they a food, or a seed?  If they don’t have a “disaster preparedness” section, some stores will have a sack of kernels in the flour section, but they are NOT cheap.  Best if you buy from a feed store, for $12 you get fifty pounds.  But that would take cash ( I’m going from the viewpoint of the food stamp recipient here to illustrate the ease of even the homeless prepping.  I’m sure you’re not in this situation.  I hope you never are ).  The purpose of the kernels is for sprouting.  You don’t even need a grain grinder.  Just sprouting will make the kernels edible.  These might not keep you alive by themselves-you may need extra vitamin pills.  But they will see to it that white flour or rice won’t kill you, anyway.  Now buy another bag of your White Food of choice.  Your two months of food storage is now a whopping $30. 

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I wouldn’t want to live on White Food for too long, but it is after all calories you can easily buy and cook.  Just don’t skip the necessity of whole kernel wheat-those are the nutrients that will keep you alive.  A quarter pound a day will be a LOT of sprouts ( if sprouts still disagree with you, gluten-wise, you can grow wheat grass.  I’m sure it tastes like green dirt ) and you won’t need much kernels to keep you a year.  Seventy five pounds with Wally kernels is $45, $25 if from the feed store.  Twelve months of White Food is .30 a day, about $120.  I don’t know if you want that much, or prefer to veer off to wheat kernel only after three months worth of White, or whatever ratio you prefer, but figure a minimum six month food storage will run you $12 for a sack of feed store wheat kernels and $50 for White Food, and compute from there.  $85-$100 for a six month supply of food, a water filter and a range weapon ( the shells or the arrows would be a smidge extra ).

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If you were financing from Food Stamps your time frame would be about three months.  The first month, $50 to get cash and $10 for storage food, leaving you $40 to survive on, but with a weapon and a months worth of food.  The second month you could spend $40 on storage food leaving you $60 to eat on now, with an additional four months preps now in store.  The last month, get more cash and $10 more in storage food.  You are left with $40 in groceries and have $38 more to spend, as well as having your six months supply of prep foods now ( you skipped a month cashing in Stamps so as not to cut it too close for too long of a period of time ).  And it is actually just two months as you got three payments in sixty days going from end of month to end of month.  This is exciting stuff!  Of course, you still have almost $40 to spend.  What should you get with that?

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At the beginning I mentioned a knife and sharpener.  You can stick with the butcher knife or you can buy one better suited for combat or cutting thicker items than dinner.  The Swedish Mora knife is hard to beat, bang for your buck.  $15 for a carbon steel blade.  On sale, down to as low as $12, then you can throw in that Rada sharpener for an even $20.  You want the Rada.  I’ve bought many a different sharpener over the years and that is the best one if you don’t have the stone sharpening skill.  Of course, you need the Rada to sharpen.  It doesn’t re-cut the correct angle if it is off on the knife.  For that, if poor, you need a stone.  If you can’t use that bastard, find someone who can and fill get your edge back.  Then use the Rada to keep it sharp.  If you have more money, use the Lansky system to angle and the Rada to sharpen.  With the Lansky, and with older better steel that was unfortunately butchered on a grinder by underpaid labor, such as my Enfield bayonets were, you’ll probably want to add the rough diamond attachment for the initial cut ( the rough stone won’t last as long using this way ).

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Now get yourself a few to a dozen Mylar emergency blankets.  These are disposable items, so they must be modified.  I’d go to the thrift store and ask the help if you can buy soiled blankets they would normally throw away.  Then they are from free to dirt cheap.  Wash them yourself, and place an emergency Mylar blanket in between two cotton/poly blankets.  Secure, perhaps with those clips you use to bind a stack of papers ( clothespins wouldn’t be strong enough ), or worse but better than nothing, those $1 heavy spring clips you get at Home Despot to clamp wood together for gluing or similar project.  The point is to sandwich the Mylar in between two regular blankets to both protect it and to make the regular blankets much more efficient in trapping heat inside.  Boom, done, cold weather gear ( don’t use this out on the top of the Rocky Mountains and get pissed at me if you freeze to death.  I’m not sure how cold you can survive in with this.  Do your own due diligence ).  If you can add a squishy foam pad to sleep on, so much better.  You should be able to trash pick for this.

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Don’t forget to buy a magnifying glass or a plastic lens that does the same thing but fits in your wallet.  You’ll need fire.  All in all, I can’t think of an easier or cheaper way to get prepped.  Nobody north of the Rio Grande is so poor they can’t do this.  You don’t even need your own money, Uncle Sugar will pay for most of it ( I shouldn’t have to mention this, but “selling” your Food Stamps is a good way to get in trouble.  Most scumbags buy twelve packs of soda and sell it to a Habeeb store for half price.  That is how they have Food Stamps but no food past one week after getting funds in them, but do get tobacco, alcohol or illicit drugs.  What I mentioned is no where near as douche-ish, and is what I’ve heard of being done, but I’m just a reporter here, not a preacher or moralizer or advocator ).  You can improvise most of whatever else you need.  Happy prepping!

END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2t8avol )

 

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