Because prepping involves so many different aspects of life that some people would call hobbies, it can get expensive very quickly. You have bushcraft, ham radio, bugging out, food storage, and firearms just to name a few, and all of these can tap your bank account.

There is literally no end to the supplies that we “need” for prepping, but sticking to a budget will not only help us become better prepared, it will help our financial situation regardless what happens. Going into debt may help in the short term, but overall it will severely hamper your ability to prep.

The first thing we need to understand about prepping is that knowledge is more important than supplies. All the supplies in the world will not stop you from making poor decisions, and all the supplies in the world doesn’t guarantee your survival. The key is to stay out of the situations that would require those supplies.

You may have heard the saying “knowledge weighs nothing” and while it may seem a little cliché, it may well be one of the most important rules of prepping. You could put $500 into your bug out bag setup, but if you don’t know the first thing about bugging out, your bag is only going to be useful to the guy who finds it next to your dead body.

With that being said, there are still quite a few areas of preparedness that we need to spend money on, but if we do it right, we can become better prepared, while keeping our heads above water. [Read more…]

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When it comes to preparing for a pandemic, it’s not something that is high on our preparedness list, although it’s nowhere near the bottom either. I think this is because in the United States we generally take a proactive approach to disease and sanitation, and it doesn’t affect us like it does in other 3^rd world countries.

As humans we can go anywhere on the planet within days or hours, traveling through busy airports and flying on airplanes with god knows who. This means that regardless how prepared we are as a country, we still at risk. All it takes is 1 flight, with 1 sick person to start the ball rolling.

Epidemics throughout history have been somewhat localized, and with our advances with medicine and sanitation, most threats have been eradicated or put in check. We have seen a few near misses in recent history though such as the H1N1 virus, the Avian Flu, SARS, and most people don’t think of HIV/AIDS as a pandemic, but it was/is.

Hollywood has almost made pandemics seem like “something that only happens in movies” because when people think about pandemics they think of movies like Contagion, 28 Days Later, and the hundreds of zombie movies out there.

A pandemic doesn’t need to be a large-scale statistic breaking event to affect your life. For a disease to be considered a pandemic, it only needs to affect a small number of people on several continents. Epidemics are localized (Malaria), pandemics are worldwide (H1N1). To be a pandemic, the disease must also be deadly, and contagious. [Read more…]

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