FIFTY DOLLAR PREPPER
( Note: not too long after writing and originally publishing this, the price of flour at Wal-Mart went from $5 a bag to $7.50. I left the original pricing, so adjust accordingly )
You know how irritated I get whenever some douche more interested in feathering his own nest than helping some brothers out makes prepping out to be complicated or expensive. Mostly not because I’m a nice guy but because I remember all the help I could have used when I was in a newbie situation and all I ever read was spend, spend, spend. Instead of every friggin issue, EVER, having a cold weather survival article, would it have killed American Survival Guide to run an occasional Frugal Prepping piece?
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Well, yes, apparently it would have, and that is one of the main reasons I refuse to read that bitch now that they are back publishing with all their poorest features doubled down on. God forbid a freeze dried yak spleen manufacturer complain that ASG was covering survival food from the grocery store! Or that Colt would complain that any gun under a months wages was ever featured. Product whores, to be perfectly frank. Advertiser anal lickers. Now, I cannot say the magazine was completely worthless. They were our only commercial product source.
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Even Rawles would feature plenty of great ideas, amid his elitist Yuppie Scum advice. Only the predisposed idiots moved to the arid Rockies and built a concrete bunker atop a mountain, looking around for other fundamentalist religious nuts, seeking a mate with his wallet, destined to die alone least any lesser earner coveted his middle class preps. My point being, you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. At times, it might seem from my venomous rants I’ve forgotten that. But even I am guilty of supporting the snake oil salesman, and NOT feeling guilty for it.
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I still believe most doom writers are guilty of being unable to NOT spend money, and as a whole the industry frightens any and all you dare darken their doors seeking admittance. Even the legions of YouTube doomers encourage the more pricey options of preparedness. They aren’t even survivalists ( civilization collapse adherents ), they are preppers ( short term disruption planners ). And how friggin much cheaper is it to survive a month, verses a decade? But NO. They want to make it as expensive as possible.
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When your night vision device costs more than five years of food, something is seriously wrong and improper about your priorities. When one MRE costs more than a month of food, you aren’t trying to prepare. You are playing at a Praetorian Guard Of The Free Republic fantasy. You want all the wealth of empire and all the freedom of your ancestors prior to imperial colonialization. You are as nicely brainwashed as the banker elite care to have you, and despite all your bluster pose absolutely no threat to them, because you are a marshmallow man, not a Minuteman. You wouldn’t know how to handle deprivation or lack of luxury, and that makes you malleable.
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It hurts my very soul when I hear any of my readers and their lack of food storage. All the other jerk faces out there can starve, but I care about you’all. Even if you cannot eat wheat, stop buying expensive alternatives and go to the feed store and buy soy flour. I don’t want you to eat it, not if you don’t have to. But have it. If you can eat refried beans, you can eat soy. It is just a bean paste. A little meat in it and you can flavor it and stretch out your meat supply. Soy is not healthy, but not eating is a lot more risky.
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I don’t want you to JUST survive on wheat or soy or rice. I want you to have enough to be able to survive on long term, as a base calorie. To get enough calories to have the strength to add other foods to that core. That if you had no other food for stretches of time, to at least survive with no ill effects other than taste fatigue. And believe me, I’ve been there, taste fatigue is NOT what you worry about at the time. It is hunger. The taste fatigue comes AFTER.
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So when I tell you to have three to five years of food ( because that is how long wars and crop failures and bad weather last ), I do NOT mean you need ten thousand dollars. I mean, spend the $100-$200 a year on BASE calories. You can happily then add all the yummy num-num foods you eat daily to that LATER, should you have time. I’ve had plenty of folks tell me they believed they had at least several more years until SHTF, and they turned out to be right, and I turned out to be wrong. But at the end of the day they were guided by nothing more than optimism ( just as I was ONLY guided by pessimism ). NOT one damn one of us can time the collapse.
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So panic early. I can at least claim my fame with my calls for panicking early, because those who didn’t couldn’t buy dingus for preps for quite some time. Do not NOT panic early on food. That is about the only thing for sure you cannot be wrong about. Almost every other error is survivable. No, your odds of surviving as a Casper in a downtown ghetto during a Mostly Peaceful Protest are NOT great. But they are a lot better than surviving without enough food.
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Yeah, in case you missed it, my new and improved Always On advice is going to be for you food, Food, FOOD. At least until shortages and price hikes make it almost impossible to not prep for food storage. Look, I act all high and mighty and free with my advice, but as I’ve told you plenty of times before, that is because I’ve made every single mistake there was to make. I ASSUME that since none of us are rebellious young men anymore, we can actually listen to the advice of others who learned at the School Of Dumbass Hard Knocks. I’ve been a dumb ass far more often than you’ll ever dream of.
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I was a dumb ass last year, at the start of Corona. There was plenty of food preps I was weak on. Oh, I never would have starved. I’ve been good on base calories since long ago. I’ve had a good six months plus of grocery store preps where I could have stayed indoors, with NO resupply, and had enough to eat without touching the apocalypse food. But my diet would have sucked. Right away I found out I was low on white flour and sugar, and with no plans should a potato shortage occur. Which of course it did.
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I panicked early enough, just barely, to avoid OTC drug shortages or disposable batteries or toilet paper ( actually, I didn’t need any asswipe for longer than the shortages lasted, but only because I had been stocking for the year prior, as the stepson in law was working at a TP factory and reported rumors of price increases. The drugs and the batteries I only got AFTER Corona started, just quicker than everyone else ). But Semi-Luxury Foods? I was weak on Mac & Cheese ( I had plenty of regular pasta, but short on Parmesan cheese ), cans of pork and beans ( much tastier than what I can do with dried beans ), and REALLY low on cans of meat ( having burned out on eating them while living off grid, I suddenly craved them again once they were all gone from the grocery store LOL.
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Of course, obviously, BASE calories first, grocery store stockpile second. I was very lucky to not have to worry about the base calories, past my daily consumption flour. I could focus the money on other more readily available items. So I want YOU to take that lesson to heart. This is most likely your last chance. Any food you buy now is automatically cheaper, because inflation, and better than money in the bank. Because money is only there so you can eat. Better to eat while living in your car than starving in your home.
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However! You are not a new prepper. You have reached the point in your life that you can spend the equivalent of a months car payment on prepping supplies, and not even miss the money. Just focus on the extra food for now, rather than other items like guns. New preppers? You do NOT want to treat them as if they are survivalists. You must treat them as if they were a prepper, a hurricane prepper. A guy that feels secure he can eat for a month, not someone insecure because they don’t have five years of supplies. Later, you can steer him along the path. But STOP throwing newbies into the deep end of the pool.
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No one gives up prepping because that is the best idea ever. No one stops prepping because nothing else can go wrong. They give it up because they feel like they can never afford it, so they start to ignore the problems and just hope for the best. Before the gracious Gary North with his Y2K scare info blessed me with systemic vulnerability learning, I was a One Year Mormon Prepper. Not the Mormon part, so perhaps a better description would have been a One Year Prepper To Avoid The Worst I Could Imagine. Mormons really will have a social covenant to allow them to recover within that year. Well, if recovery is possible for anyone that is. The rest of us, not so much. I was still following the old Cold War nuclear conflict Civil Defense advice of a years worth of food, as well as the Mormons historic requirement.
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So when I was starting over prepping, with wives leaving and leaving me with just the clothes on my back, me leaving replacement wives, happy to escape with the clothes on my back, yeah, it would have been nice to have a broader range of options than Gun/Ammo/Years Worth Of Food. It would have been nice to be aware of lesser options, just to get me an intermediate level of prepping. Despite having a survivalist newsletter from the early 90’s, I wasn’t a very GOOD survivalist. I was a prepper with questions preppers couldn’t answer. The writing was just finding answers no one else had.
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But it took me some time to get to where I am now. I would have loved some advice on a dirt cheap level of preparedness better than a hurricane prepper and easier than a civilization ending survivalist. And I got the idea rather late in my journey. It was from the book “One Second After” by William Forstchen. Which I only tried because I liked his Lost Regiment series ( which to my mind is a far superior survivalist fiction than the trilogy from One Second After. I love logistics, and that was why I favored the Lost Regiment ).
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One Second After was simply brilliant in its first half ( mediocre the second and the two following books befouled and unworthy of the genre ). And one part really stuck with me more than the others, when the father laments not even having stocked so much as a bag of rice which would have fed them for a month. And hence was born my Intermediate Prepper advice. You Just Need A Months Worth Of Food Bag Of Rice. Okay, I hate rice. But I know most of you like rice. Not that I named the thing back then. It was more of a scornful “you can’t afford $5 to survive a month? A months worth of flour is FIVE FRIGGIN DOLLARS!”.
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And I only used flour because as soon as you mention Wheat Kernels to any prepper, the chairs go flying out from under asses and everyone stampedes for the exits. Because, you know, a grinder. God forbid we must grind rather than boil. I mean, I get it. Most preppers are of the Super Size variety, as is the general US population. Not because ALL of them are nasty herbivores grazing all day, but more from the crap food served up now almost everywhere. McDonald’s really did used to be more of a treat than a poison.
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Plus, to be fair, needing to buy a grinder really ups your initial cost, and if you are initially getting involved in prepping, you want low cost. Period. I do NOT advocate ONLY eating white rice or white flour. They are empty calories. That white rice alone as a diet killed off many WWII POW’s. But, again, NO calories kills you faster than empty calories. The reason I give this advice is so that no one has to go without prepping. Anyone can start, for nearly no money, and they can survive LONGER than these prepper idiots with $90 buckets of instant foods ( where a “meal” is 90 calories ).
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Yes, it is only two months of food ( and you will probably get sick from just eating those empty calories before that two months is over ). But once folks see how easy and cheap prepping can be, then they can move up to prepping much more extensively. They can add protein and fiber and vitamins to their food. They can get more ammo. Etcetera. But first, like our doctors SHOULD be doing, Do No Harm. Don’t scare away people with a surplus of enthusiasm or paranoia. Or well meaning but off putting advice. How about, “First, let me show you how easy this is. After that, if you want to continue improving your family’s safety, come back and we’ll go from there”.
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How about, “Prepping is easy, dude. You got fifty bucks? That’ll feed you for two months, filter your water, get you light”. THAT is what newbies want to hear. Not, “well, you’ll have to get out of debt, which is about five years of spending nothing on yourself, no treats, no eating out. You’ll need to sell a car, shop in thrift stores for underwear, buy land in the middle of nowhere, then camp on that eating solar cooked wheat gruel after a running gun battle getting out of the city on a bicycle whose tube you’ll be patching up every thirty miles. Your wife WILL leave you and take the house and its a good thing you have plenty of guns because you’ll probably want to eat one”.
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Now, I hate, despise and hold up as all that is unholy salesmen. All sales involve deception. I don’t care how much you blather on about how you can always close a sale on a Win/Win, because MOST salesmen do not have those ethics. You can, probably, trust most cops. But by and large if you are ever a suspect, they WILL use lies and deceit to trick you into incriminating yourself even if you are innocent. A salesman will close the sale, because that feeds him. If you get one that helps you, you got lucky. I’d rather have a listless teenager who doesn’t care if I buy something or not, rather than a salesman on commission ( profit sharing for hourly workers is to my mind the better deal for everyone, paying for customer service and production, not deception ).
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And yes, to a certain degree you MUST act like a salesman to sell our product preparedness. You cannot sell anything by being truthful ( ask my diminishing savings LOL ). And that is a shame, because if anything most of you UNDERSELL the danger. You are vilified and ignored ( but ALWAYS noted as a future target, I guarandamntee you a jelly filled donut ) when you try to save your fellow man from their own flaming stupidity, and you don’t even know enough to share with them how hard it is going to be for anyone to survive a 99% die-off.
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But since human nature is a gold plated bitch, and you cannot change human nature, you work with what you have, which is lying, deceit, soft selling, sugar coating and bold faced untruths. BUT! There is a difference between you and the sleazy bastard selling you an unneeded medical operation so his kid can go to college. Your lies WILL improve someones lives, at least physically. You ain’t doing them any favors mentally, because doom is something you cannot go back to not seeing ( those preppers that quit were never in much danger, since it wasn’t their lives but their standard of living that was on the line, and all they stopped and gave up on was TOO much preparations for their perceived limited daily disruptions- there is a reason I derisively label them Hurricane Preppers ).
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Worse case, nothing ever happens, no one is going to really be out anything. Even a crackhead gets $180 a month in food stamps, and this plan would barely dent ONE month of that. No one else is going to miss $50. I mean, how hard is it to survive if you already have food and water? Shelter and protection can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it. You already live somewhere there is shelter and water ( and if you are living somewhere that water is oil dependent, you are living in the wrong place already, and need to have already bugged out ). I don’t include protection as a prepping cost, as I once did ( see my Frugal Survivalist book ). The reason is simple. If you subsequently went through as much decline as we have all in the last two decades and are NOT armed, you deserve to die.
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We had the Derivatives Bubble AND the Tech Wreck, AND the 2008 Crash from MORE derivatives bubbles AND the 2008 $150 Oil AND you are not yet armed, ready for crime and riots? I mean, forget the last ten years. Forget the Preppers Only Worries, and focus JUST on what the general public knows about. Forget Peak Oil, because even most preppers ignore that one, gleefully. How are you a regular citizen and see the War On Terror, the New Orleans Throw The Negroes Under The Bus After A Hurricane Response, and THEN see the 2008 food shortages and folks losing their houses and their jobs, and then NOT worry enough to buy a damn gun?
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If you are that friggin retarded, talking to YOU, every single first time gun buyer during Corona stupid ass mother humping moron douche licking cow molesting mouth breathing Darwin Reject. I’m GLAD you couldn’t buy any ammo for your gun, and if you finally did it was $1.50 a round so you only bought one box, so you will die terribly amid the carnage you helped institute with your communist voting, you vile hunks of crap. You are too stupid to live, and I hope you get a respiratory ailment from breathing through two masks alone in your car, and your butt buddy commies in China won’t sell you antibiotics, and you get sick and suffer BEFORE the Darkies you worshiped break down your door and you are ass raped repeatedly after your gun wouldn’t fire because you didn’t realize it was on safe. And THEN, they put you in the stewpot.
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Even if you were too young to realize all of the financial events would lead up to 2008, what excuse do you have for NOT being armed after eight years of Obammy and his Brown Shirt attack thugs being given permission to attack Whitey at random? If you JUST turned eighteen, how did you NOT realize the power Blacks were given to terrorize your school? Are you THAT soft headed? If you don’t understand you need to be armed, JUST from life lived in these here United States day to day, you honestly do NOT deserve to live. The first thing I did getting out of the military and moving back to California, as soon as I got a credit card, was going in debt to arm myself.
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I was stupid about it and should have acted sooner, but I sure as hell never waited for the 90’s and the serious break-downs to do it. I at least had THAT much sense. And I bought food BEFORE guns. At this point, even if you are stupid about food, how can you possibly be THAT stupid about guns? I mean, famine might at long odds not happen, but crime is just getting worse. I admit that the 70’s was bad as far as crime. We really did have a Great Depression then, and the crime reflected that. But that was from having leaders who had no clue what to do.
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Now we have leaders who are as clueless about how to reverse our economic collapse, but they are purposely making crime ten times worse than it has to be ( at least they TRIED to fight it in the 70’s, even with commie/liberal interference ). If you cannot see the looming Race War that is planned and funded, you are not paying attention. EVERY political party and EVERY politician, even your beloved Orange Jesus, is trying to kill you. And it IS your fault, for having the big swinging brass balls to want a share of the resources needed to keep you alive.
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And if, in an emergency situation you cannot improvise or steal shelter, if you don’t even have the bare necessities to live in your climate as the grid goes down more than two hours, you have little hope of ever surviving anything. Everyday in the news, more and more black outs, and you don’t have a plan? You won’t survive, even if you found a deserted Doomer Bunker, you are THAT retarded. My basic premise is that anyone paying attention should want to prep, if for nothing else than the day to day disruptions. They just don’t know how.
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And if you want to, only a moron cannot figure out on their own that they need to be armed, and they need to understand a basic plan on getting out of the rain as needed. Who never went through a natural disaster as a child? Earthquakes were regular, and we even had an evacuation from a chemical spill once. At least as I child I was aware bad things always happened. So how can anyone claim otherwise? Even if you don’t know WHAT to do, how can you say you didn’t know those kind of things happen regularly? Who doesn’t know to have a flashlight and good batteries?
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Even my good for nothing but having breasts Baby Mama knew enough to have a flashlight ready to go, even if it was in the junk drawer ( okay, I’ll admit, she had a body custom made for having kids. She was a GREAT breeder. And she did turn me on to Beverly Hills 90210, my not so secret guilty pleasure of the time, so she gets credit for that. But otherwise, worthless ). If SHE knew some basic preps, no one else should have an excuse. Everyone should have a need to want to learn, as long as you don’t scare them away. The ones who won’t arm themselves? I wouldn’t even bother. At all. They will be so stupid they will just feed one of your enemies.
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This couldn’t be simpler. And yes, I made you wade through a dozen pages to get here because I’m contrary and it amuses me, and if you just want clickbait, go read your doomer news elsewhere. I love to read and I love to write, and I have no patience with how everyone else does things. You need a tote full of flour, a water filter, a flashlight and some thrift store items, and you are prepared to survive two months. It will cost you around $50. Less than a dollar a day.
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You have 1500 calories a day, which is just enough to walk around a little with no further activity other than sitting around and scratching your ass. Now, this is of course a general guide. I’ve had wives who lived day after day for years on LESS than this. I think the general knowledge of calories was hurried during war time and never evaluated further. And you do understand, I hope, that not all calories are created equal. But as a general rule, a pound a day of grain will give you everything needed for your body, without it cannibalizing itself. Calories wise, NOT nutrient wise.
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A Sawyer water filter is THE best thing to ever happen to preppers since the LED lights. If there was ONE thing I’d invest in as a barter item for the apocalypse, it would be Sawyer filters. Now, they are not 100% absolutely needed. Boiling water is a nice low tech way to treat your water, and everything else is just an answer in search of a problem. The good thing about the Sawyer though, is that it makes treating water easier and faster. It is a nice way of transitioning from modern to primitive, IF you can afford the luxury. Which everyone should be able to do. I don’t know if anyone really knows how many gallons it will filter, but even at one quarter of the stated volume, that is STILL twice the life of the nearest competitor those Swiss filters. Which cost a butt ton more.
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Why did I go with middlin quality guns rather than the best ones? Because One Is None. Duh. I’d rather have multiples of Good Enough rather than one Best. As with guns, so with water filters. JUST having one is not a good idea. At $20 each, all but the beginner can have more than one unit. Of course, don’t be a moron. Buy a thrift store aluminum pot for a buck or two, in case the Sawyer filter fails. At the same time, by a used pan there as well. If you need one, a butcher knife, or a bunch of steak knives if you want some spear tips. The thrift store is great for prepping.
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So, we are in for $15 for seventy-five pounds of flour. $6 for a plastic tote to keep them in ( leave in the bag, if you live in a dry climate. If it is weevil bait, you’ll need to buy a few Mylar bags and freeze the flour first to kill the eggs. Seal with an iron ). $3 for a thrift store pot and pan ( one for water and making coffee, a prepper essential but already owned by everyone so no charge, and the other for cooking your bread products. Flat pancakes are better than no food, even for those who cannot cook. Throw in a $2 bottle of oil so the flour isn’t wasted burnt on the bottom of the pan ). And $20 for a Sawyer filter. Last, spend $3 to $5 for a Family Dollar LED flashlight with batteries.
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No one is saying those batteries will last two months. But it is a start. And you can always salvage more batteries out of toys or remotes or smoke detectors. Yes, duh, obviously, thank you Captain Obvious. You can add a LOT more, just on bare bones basics. Like a knife sharpener. But you are missing the point ( hell, needs must, use a damn rock you pick up off the ground on the knife. Be a studly improviser, rather than a Gear Queer ). The point is this is a field demonstration to sell the prepper lifestyle on the unsuspecting and naive. It is a technique. Get it? Now go out there and help your idiot friends and family. If they don’t want to play, you know who gets added to the Darwin Award list when the SHTF.
( .Y. )
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James M Dakin
181 West Bullion Road, Unit 12
Elko, Nevada 89801-4184
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