NO SUBSTITUTION
*note: I've added C5, The Green Mountain Dude, to my web site "links to others". You should of course e-mail subscribe to his articles, but it is there if you need it. Good reading. My web page is www.bisonprepper.com
*
You are definitely going
to want to learn how to live cheap.
Number one, hello! Thirty-three
percent unemployment! Number two, hello!
Money to prep for the apocalypse. And
number three, hello! Quality of life
which you might think is unimportant, but really it matters. Living frugally is largely philosophical, but
that doesn’t make it difficult. That
makes it easier. Okay, here, I won’t
keep you in suspense. It is easy,
peasy. “Living cheap is about
elimination, not substitution”. There,
that is all there is to it. But being
one of the cheapest dates you’ve ever had, I’ll go ahead and babble incessantly
on and give you good entertainment.
Starting back in the ‘80’s when I started researching the topic ( we
were, barely, lower middle class growing up, but it didn’t feel like it. We lived pretty darn good, with no debt and
always a huge garden and food from scratch, always woods to roam and frolic
about in. All the ways we lived poor, I
just thought it was staying out of debt and watching the budget. I already knew how to live cheap, but didn’t
know I knew it because immediately upon the start of paychecks I embraced
consumerism and stayed poor from that ), most of what I encountered reading was
advice on substitution, NOT elimination.
*
I had to learn that lesson
on my own. Charles Long in his “How To
Live Without A Salary” was my bible, and I’d heartily recommend it. I read it probably a half dozen times. But for all that is great about it, mostly it
was substitution. Not that there is anything
wrong with that. Visiting the upholstery
guy or the RV shop and buying a $60 squishy foam pad that rests on a piece of
plywood ( Sweet Baby Jesus on a unicycle, I can’t believe the price of
wood! From $2.50 to $3.30 a stick 2x4,
but far worse plywood from $10 to $17! ) is a much better bed than going to the
furniture shop to buy a mattress anywhere from $600 to $1600 and up. That is what industry consolidation gets you,
either in the RV or the mattress sector, double to triple price increases with
quality falling in the toilet. I’ll
sleep on a stack of blankets before I ever give those sheep molesters ( get it? The sheep in the ads for mattresses? ) any of
my money. Substituting a conventional
mattress with something far cheaper is a great skill set to cultivate. But it simply isn’t enough. In the ‘90’s, the famous pimp for
substitution was the Cheapskate Gazette.
It is now available collected in a book.
I bought it, just because, but have yet to even open it.
*
Substitution, for all the
good it does, is also limiting. Okay,
you substituted a mortgage with a fix-er-upper house. You never buy an auto with debt but buy older
cars with the depreciation cost factored in.
Bully for you. You are far less
of a sucker than most people. But guess
what. You are still playing a suckers
game, although by bottom feeding you are the least gullible of all. You are screwing yourself less. When you practice elimination rather than
substitution, you not only eliminate a huge upfront cost, you also eliminate an
ongoing expense. It is far better to not
own a car at all, rather than putting all the effort into getting an affordable
used vehicle and learning mechanics ( not that learning any skill is useless,
even if soon obsolete ) and paying insurance and buying gasoline. What you pay in one month on insurance cost
alone, at a minimum, keeps me biking for a year. Yes, a bicycle rather than a car is
technically substitution, but what I mean by the term is to find the cheapest
like item. Finding the cheapest way to
own an automobile is still having the cost of an auto, even at its cheapest a
large hole in your budget with the expectation of the earnings needed for that.
*
It is easy to give up a
car, all you have to do is decide to live a lifestyle devoted to doing so. It isn’t hard. The discipline to deny yourself is the hard
part. Our entire culture is predicated on
not denying ourselves what we are told we need.
And we believe them. Oh, the
friggin humanity! I must expose my
delicate constitution to the elements!
Oh, for the love of God! I must
exercise! When will the savagery
end? Look, I’m not saying that you don’t
need a car right now. You made plenty of
previous decisions that in fact demanded that you need a car now and can’t live
without one. You act like you are
trapped. But my point is, no, you are
not. It is a self-imposed limitation you
could easily escape but you choose not to.
And just as easily as you made choices that were predicated on
automobile ownership, you could if you so decided to reverse those and start
living so that you did not need a vehicle.
You are not forced to own a car, you just believe owning one is less
painful than choosing to do away with one.
It is just like a bad marriage.
You’ve decided that living with a suboptimal spouse is less painful than
the separation.
*
This is how you want to
live? Stuck in a motoring paradigm
because moving would be too much trouble.
Stuck with a mortgage you can’t really afford and knowing you’ll lose
the house sooner or later, because living in an alternate shelter isn’t a
perceived option for you. Stuck with a
bitch of a wife who holds the kids hostage.
Let’s take that and use it as an example. Hostages.
When a nation, say Israel, refuses to pay ransoms but instead always
strikes back militarily, what has it done?
Yes, it sacrifices X number of citizens a year to terrorists. But it also decreases the total number of
hostages by eliminating more acts of terror from ever occurring. When Russian special forces rushed the
elementary school full of hostages, they lost quite a few children to hostile
fire. But if they had negotiated, in the
future more schools would have been targets.
When you pay ransom, you just screwed yourself. Now you will always pay ransom. The wife knows you won’t leave her no matter
what she does, what do you get? Far more
pain and suffering in the long run, verses if you had just left and paid the
price. When you pay ever increasing
prices for luxuries you perceive as necessities, the price never stops
increasing because you are being held hostage to your inability to deny
yourself anything. And while previously
I didn’t really care how you decided to live your life, it is yours to do with
as you see fit, now I’d like to express my disproval at your lack of
foresight.
*
Do you think our
unemployment rate is nothing to concern yourself with? How about the wholesale failure of
retail? Or the continuing automation in
all sectors of employment? You could
look at the Great Depression with its 25% unemployment, then look at ours with
its 33%, and add in women working and conclude, hey, twice as many folks work
now compared to then, so really only 16% are unemployed! Wow!
Okay, impressive mental gymnastics.
No, sorry, I have to disagree.
Since most folks are working less than full time, I think we can just
stick with the original figure, since two people each working twenty hours only
equals one job, so even before all the lay-offs UNDER-employment was the only
thing keeping UN-employment lower. We
are experiencing higher unemployment now than during the Great Depression. When the prices for everything in purchasing
power were lower, except for electronics.
Perhaps gas is lower now with inflation and wages factored in, but we
still had public transportation and cars were only necessary if they made money
for you. They weren’t Money Pits.
*
You can repeat the lie
that Amazon is forcing retail stores to close, but online shopping is only 5%
of retail sales. Five. Percent.
And Amazon hasn’t made much in profits in twenty years. All they are is a mail order catalog company
selling really cheap due to lower costs, digitalized. No, retail is failing due to the lack of
jobs, or the lowering wages from jobs, which means no one can buy from them
since they simply have no disposable income.
So, the main source of jobs in the economy is failing due to lack of
jobs in the entire economy, unemployment is higher than during the Great
Depression, and to survive companies are replacing every job they possibly can
with robots ( digital or machine ), and you don’t think perhaps your job too
might be in danger? Hello? McFly?
You can learn to live cheap now, while you have control and assets, or
you can simply wait for it to be forced on you and then you are screwed. I think I know which one I’d pick. And the best thing that saves the most is to
learn to live without the car. But you
won’t. You have a pocket full of
excuses. Okay, I tried.
*
If you did choose to learn
to live frugally, you would find that prepping is suddenly a lot easier. Now, there are plenty of voices out there,
Yuppie Scum voices, that will die nailed to the cross of absolute entitlement,
screeching that they deserve only the best.
I don’t doubt that, seriously.
You work hard, you deserve to be rewarded for that, and yes, cases of
MRE’s and freeze dried foods and crates of HK-91’s and pallets of ammo and all
the rest is super-duper and if you aren’t an idiot they will indeed help rather
than hinder you surviving. But here is
the fly in the ointment. The economy is
CONTRACTING. That means shrinking. That means you can work harder and build a
better mousetrap and be a kick-ass business owner, but you will still fail, if
not now sooner or later. If you build
it, they will NOT come. Not if their
wallets are empty. I mean, come on
dudes, what part of contracting economy don’t you understand? Sure, ride the wave while you can. Pocket the extra as the last disposable
income trickles in. But don’t COUNT of
that for too long, if your prepping plans are predicated on prosperity. The practical reality for most of us is that
prepping cheap and living cheap is a far better strategy than continually
trying to earn more money. In the past,
you could make money by working harder and smarter, because the economic
contraction never lasted. Now, we can
only pray that the contraction lasts longer, because the next step is collapse.
*
Living cheap is about
eliminating monthly costs. And
eliminating threats to your savings account.
Owning a car, and owning a conventional house, neither is part of living
cheap. It isn’t factoring in rising
unemployment. It isn’t freeing money to
prep with. And it is making your life
miserable, when MORE misery is just down the road. You want to kill yourself living a soon to be
dead lifestyle, why? To what
purpose? You keep making these
calculations that if you cling to the oil age life raft you can somehow better
your future. But clinging to the past
doesn’t improve your life in the future.
Only learning to live in the future before it occurs can do that. The future lacks money, yet you keep trying
to make more. The future includes the
implosion of the nation state, but you double down on the bet that imperial
forces will keep bringing home the oil.
The future lacks long distance agriculture, but you stay in the city
that doesn’t view a field of crops within hundreds of miles. You are refusing to deny yourself, a perfect
modern debt serf, and you refuse to embrace the future. Well, good luck with that.
END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2w3VLJv )
* By the by, all my writing is copyrighted. For the obtuse out there
The economic contraction is very well explained here, quick to grasp.
ReplyDeleteAbout living without a car : I've always lived without a car, but only about 14 years did it involve not living in a large city.
The thing with getting rid of some technology altogether is that you do it "for better or for worse". Like, not having a car in the few moments when you really, REALLY would be better off with one. It's about corning yourself in.
This is different from a situation when you can subsitute the car with something else (a bike, you fett) 80% of the time but still have access to a car for those 20% of moments.
Making one's own life more difficult *for real* is a strange and unusual decision. I would say that nobody would seriously do this for "the learning curve". Me, it's because I hate drivers, and I have grown to hate cars because of planned obsolescence and the thousand maintenance and minor repair costs that bleed you dry. It's an emotional thing rather than a rational one (fortunately, it makes sense rationnaly as well).
But I have internet. And a smartphone, too, for a year. Looking back, after the Amiga 500 came into my house, in the mid 80's, I read *much* less. The computer was the real end of an age of civilisation.
To go back to a time without these technologies would be an heroic feat, and actually down right impossible (I still have cassettes and cassette players, but those who don't will fall back on MP3 players, and thus computers.) Inthe same vein, since Youtube, my MP3 files have almost not grown.
Technology is part fo who we are, and when it eventually fails or we won't be able to afford it anymore, a part of us will die.
YOU WILL BE LESS THAN YOU ONCE WERE, and this destroys the soul. The novel "The Grapes Of Wrath" was primarily about that.
Even the fall of Rome saw a big fall in technology. They had the same problem as we will have, a lose of centralization with no cottage industry to back it up. They were just on a much smaller scale. My thoughts on books are like yours on cars-I hate new tech as an emotional reaction that only accidentally translate into a rational choice. On one hand, good authors are accessable and cheaper, who would otherwise be ignored, but on the other too much lower common denominator is now available and we will lose all, good and bad, with the grid. A global Library Of Alexandria.
DeleteI think that auto ownership is sort of a catch-22. If you look at land close enough to bike to work, you’re usually unable to find land at junk land prices, and if you live close enough to a town to be able to bike to work, you will be readily consumed by the zombies post collapse. I can tell you that some of the junk land that I looked at, and that was affordable, was many miles from anything, and would probably take a seasoned cyclist (Think Lance Armstrong on steroids) a days ride, one way to get to anywhere.
ReplyDeleteIs there a compromise? Sure there is. A motorcycle is a good, low cost one, albeit quite risky.
Another is to just cash out now, move to a remote paid off junk land, have enough savings to pay the property tax for life, as well as enough wheat, beans, and rice (Anything that’s cheap is really the key here) to live out the rest of your life. You will be alone, because no woman will ever even consider this, unless you get lucky and find the rare misanthropist Sarah Winchester type. Though you might find some homeless chick that would be happy to live in a trailer in the desert vs under an overpass.
Sheesh-you won't even find a homeless gal that wants to move with you-they all want drugs or alcohol. But you are right, the bike is only good for a small town/village survival strategy, not a loner bug out location. I'd say you are good up to twenty miles away from town, IF you have a moped or e-bicycle and only come into town a few times a week. This avoids the zombies but does leave you without a spouse. Still ways around even that, but by and large you are spot on
DeleteThanks. I was actually being objective in what I wrote above, since I’d like nothing more than to not be dependent on a vehicle. And actually, I’m not due to being near hopelessly unemployed, but that’s a topic for another discussion.
DeleteI think that there is merit in your moped suggestion. A weekend job from the 20 mile distant homestead would be doable I think, since those things sip the petrol. The 50cc is exempt from licensing and insurance in many states still, but I’m not sure about Nevada now?
It’s not something that most dudes want to hear, but having a female in one’s life pretty much requires doing all of the things that you rail against one doing. In days of yore, you could often pick up an cute fat chick that would just be happy to have a man. But thanks to the feminists and their success with the “big beautiful woman” meme, even the fat chicks are picky these days.
I'm thinking this is what I write about tomorrow. Plenty of work-arounds. Nevada requires you pay a once for its lifetime moped license/plate. They just want more money, which is okay since it's probably for the children. No insurance nor need for a motorcycle license.
DeleteThis is my take on Amazon. Everyone knows they recently cut sales commissions from third party links (like from your website). My interpretation is, "We are so big, we don't need your help anymore. People have already adjusted their spending habits so they automatically look to Amazon first for the lowest prices. Thanks for the help, 'See ya.'" If they have 5% of all retail sales, perhaps mostly from millennials, while the older generations that are dying off prefer a brick and mortar store, I think that's a pretty significant amount.
ReplyDeletePeace out
No, Amazon and ALL other online vendors have 5% of total retail sales. Amazon might have the lions share, but they aren't the total. My take, and I could be way wrong, is they are desperate for operating capital and are trimming expenses. Fun filled fact, Netflix leases cloud space for a lot of their movie infrastructure ( all but the actual movie itself ). From Amazon.
DeleteI saw a man today.
ReplyDeleteI did not see one yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. He was about 800-1000 feet away and I saw him through the trees. I know him rather well and was tempted to go over there and converse with him, but I did not. The burden was more than I can bear, so I stayed right here on my porch. Nothing but wild assed animals and my wife and our pets of course.
Seems this has turned into a disease for me and the symptoms flare up to boiling in about 3 hours time, when I am exposed in any way to society. Normally, here on the compound, I get along fine and do my thing, do what needs to be done, and relax knowing that no other human being is going to disturb me in anyway.
When I venture into society, and I don't know why this is, anonymous people seem to go out of their way to infect themselves onto me in a myriad of ways, ways that cannot be anticipated, only dealt with as they happen.
I'm not an ogre, quite the opposite, I am a natural born gregarious person, engaging others in conversation wherever I go. But as I approach that 3 hour mark I am looking for an exit sign, I got to get out. Back to my home grown solace, absent all people.
Maybe it has to do with control. A business owner since 1986 I am implanted in the idea of doing everything my way and accepting full responsibility right up front for everything. Out in society I see nothing but people doing the opposite.
Most people are employees and have that mindset that goes with it. Lazy bastards that hate the employer because of envy and the suspicion that they are not as good as the boss, and never will be. This attitude permeates their existence and prefaces them. As an owner I am sensitive to this aura they present and it strikes me like a white hot iron in the face. I recoil in abject horror and must escape.
Little minds do you no benefit and when I must congregate with them it effects me mentally and physically.
Live your life as a free man the best you can for 3 decades and you too will see my horror when subjected to masses of people content with their self imposed chains.
Or, and here's just a thought, your lizard brain is much more developed than most and it KNOWS the S is about to HTF. Either way, now your focus and investment in your sniper rifle makes more sense :)
DeleteAppreciate the recommendation. Let me try it out.
ReplyDelete