Advice From The Snakepit
Submitted as a comment by Snakepit Kansas.
Too good to not share widely
Have six months of food and water on the shelf. Maybe more. 50lb bag of Thai rice from Sam’s is not that expensive. Neither are pinto beans, cans of tuna, tubs of peanut butter and macaroni/cheese. Plenty of ammo. If things go to shit, ammo will be the new currency. The most common currency will be .22long, 9mm, .223 and 12gauge. You already have gobs of ammo? You do not have enough ammo.
Pay off your mortgage now. Get a second job at a liquor store of something and make extra payments. Do the math and figure out how quick you can pay it off. Quit paying the bank and pay yourself. I took a picture of myself some years ago as I dropped the last mortgage payment in the mailbox. Smiling so hard my ears hurt. I do not work at the liquor store any more either.
I am still heavily invested in the stock market. It goes up and it goes down. The trend over time is that it goes up. How much money did I lose last week? None. Why? Because I did not sell. You only lose if you sell low. Do not sell low. If there is a huge dip then that is time to buy. All kinds of folks panic and sell low and that is how some smart wallstreeters make their money, on other folks fear.
God is in charge and we do not get out of this alive. Some day my wife and I will pass. Maybe someone will think we were odd for having so much peanut butter and 9mm shells. What anyone thinks at that point, will matter no more.
I bought massively in packaged foods 3 years ago and found out we don’t eat nearly as much as all the prepper sites say.
They claim the average person needs to consume 2000 to 3000 calories per day. Pleez.
If I ate that much I’d be a whale in short order. My wife is mostly bird it seems so she eats half as much as I do. Never been much into counting calories so I had no idea how much food we needed to have on hand and basically relied on website suggestions.
3 years later and we still have more than half of it in inventory. The problem with stashed foods, for us is, that at least half of our daily intake is fresh stuff. About 1/4 is frozen foods. So packaged foods are about 1/4, yet that is what I stocked up on.
I bought a freezer and slammed it. Guess what. Last week we ate ground beef that was shrink wrapped and stored at 0 degrees for 3 years and it was no different than brand new stuff. The freezer is still about 3/4 full of food.
My advice is to monitor your food intake and maybe make a text file to keep track of it, for at least a month, so you can see the amount that you consume and any patterns in your eating.
FWIW, over the past 3 years I have learned, mostly through trial and error, how to use dehydrated and freeze dried foods, and how spices and herbs work. I do all the food management around here and that includes the cooking of our 1 meal a day – supper. I’m a master at 1 pot cooking.
My method is, make a big batch of something and eat it for supper that night and put the leftovers in pyrex containers in the fridge. The next night I make another batch of something else, eat it for supper then into the pyrex. Then we alternate every other night till it’s all gone. Sometimes I’ll put it in a 1 gallon zip freezer bag and date it. Last week we ate some shredded beef – vegs – rice that I made 3 years ago and it tasted like the day it was born.
It’s not unusual for our evening meals to cost about $2-$3 per person, sometimes even less. Lastly, I insist in backbone at every supper, no exceptions, ever. My wife is less keen on meat and sometimes picks it out and gives it to the mutt, but I never pass it up. Meat is mandatory as far as I’m concerned.
Your last paragraph about peanut butter and 9mm shells made me laugh out loud.
I’ve thought often about the fact I have too much stuff, much of it enthusiastically collected over a life time of travel, some of it inherited or gifted and kept for sentimental reasons. But, until your comment about peanut butter I hadn’t thought about the specifics of what I might be hoarding and how weird someone might find it once I’m dead. I’m gonna have to think on that a while.
After my parents died, as I was going through the task of “sorting things out”, I found in their house 12 electric blankets separated from their cords and controls. I eventually found the cords, untangled them all and tried to match them to the blankets but only got two to work. My parents lived in a cold place and liked to save money by keeping the heat low, but I can’t figure out why they kept all those ropey old blankets and all the cords that didn’t work.
Considering the people I respect here, I am humbled to be highlighted.