Originally published on JustPlainMarie.ca on July 20, 2016 and then on JustPlainCooking.ca
You can certainly start prepping for trouble and disasters if money is tight!
You Can Afford to NOT Prepare
In fact, you really can’t afford not to – even if you’re on welfare and visiting the food bank regularly, you’re not too poor to prep.
Do you really believe you’re too poor to prepare for disasters?
If you ask people if they would like to survive in a disaster situation, every one of them would tell you yes, obviously. (And by disaster, I mean anything from job loss to devastating hurricane!)
But if you ask them how many of them are actually prepared, you’d see maybe only a third of them (and that’s being generous) would say they were.
While everyone wants to survive a natural disaster or economic collapse, not everyone will actually work a plan to make sure that happens.
There are always a variety of reasons that people give for not preparing.
Topping the list is always the excuse that putting a survival plan in action costs too much money.
And at the back of this excuse is the belief that the government will always pick up the slack during an emergency.
After all, isn’t that what the government is there for?
What they fail to realize is that most governments aren’t in the position to help people during a catastrophic event. Sure, the government can step in and help if an area or two is hard hit – but we saw how well that went in the United States during Hurricane Katrina (and Maria and Harvey!) and other disasters.
Before 2020
I’m editing this post in 2025, and I have to sigh at what I wrote in 2015 when I wrote this. So much has changed in ten years. However, I’m not changing the next few paragraphs.
Now imagine a disaster of such proportions that it astounds the entire world. If something like an Ebola crisis began to hit hundreds of thousands of people in every city, for example.
I recently read a post-apocalyptic series in which humanity was almost destroyed by a fungus that took years to manifest fully. By the time it became apparent that the fungus was deadly, it had infected the world. Even on a lesser scale, any virus that doesn’t manifest quickly has the ability to travel far and wide.
Governments wouldn’t be able to keep up. If you weren’t infected and had to stay quarantined in place, you would become one of millions. How well do you think your needs would be met?
And Back to 2025
So now we don’t need to imagine. We know how quickly a virus will travel the world. We know how helpless governments everywhere will be. And we know that, in the end, we are on our own, relying on the preparations we’ve put in place before the crisis.
You can’t afford to rely on anyone else and you can’t afford not to prepare.
The problem that most people have when they use the excuse that they can’t afford to gear up for survival is that their outlook is far too broad.
They’re looking at a list of supplies as a whole rather than breaking them down and concentrating on building up in small increments. Or worse, they think preparedness means a bunker full of bacon or more toilet paper than they’ll use in a lifetime. (Never, ever, ever will I understand the run on toilet paper.)
You can set aside the supplies you need for survival even if you don’t have all of the money you need at once because you can do it on a budget.
Four Simple Things You Can Do
Even if you live paycheck to paycheck, you can afford to prepare. Buy just a little extra each month. And I mean a little – if your “extra” is $10, that’s what it is. It’s better than $0! As each month passes, your store of supplies will grow.
Concentrate on reaching small goals first.
Build Community
I know, I know. I said you can’t really rely on anyone else, and that’s true. But the myth of the lone wolf living in the deep woods and never speaking to anyone else – it’s a myth. People need people.
Two incidents here in Nova Scotia made me realize how much we all need community – Hurricane Fiona in 2022 and then the incredible snowstorm in early February 2022 that dropped over five feet of snow in a weekend. From food to emergency lodgings to damage repairs, people relied on each other and we all got through both.
Get a good cookbook
Yes, this is a shameless plug for my cookbook, but if you read the reviews on Amazon, you’ll understand why. A Cabin Full of Food is designed to keep your pantry full of home-grown food and your table full of delicious meals made from that food. The recipes will work equally well in a fully equipped modern home and in a grid-down situation.
Even if you have no idea how to cook, the simple recipes in conversational format, will help you put food on the table. So your first step is to get A Cabin Full of Food – and then start using it. None of the ingredients are “exotic”, expensive or difficult to find, and the cookbook is in use from South Africa to France and all through North America.
Double Up
Let’s say you are planning to make a recipe using canned corn (and you haven’t yet canned your own) because you noticed that canned corn is on sale – Buy one, get one free.
Instead of buying the three cans that you planned to use this week, pick up six. You’re not spending any extra money.
Later, as you have more ready cash and are more comfortable with stockpiling, you might buy a case or three during the sale (which is what I usually do), but even if you buy three extra cans, you have painlessly added to your pantry.
Focus on Small Goals
You do not need to run out and buy a year’s worth of food for every member of your family. Start working on building your deep pantry. When we started prepping, we were poor enough that we qualified for food bank assistance and other help.
Building a deep pantry was one tool we used to pull ourselves out of that poverty.
The same thinking applies to other supplies. Watch for sales. Have a list and slowly pick away at it. Focus on small goals and celebrate your successes.
Someday you’re going to find that you’re researching how to build a chicken coop, the basics of goat care, and taking steps to full time homesteading, and you’ll look back and realize that you got there by starting when you were “too poor”.
It happened to us.
Leave a Reply