In this blog, we’ll cover 5 strategies you can implement today to help you on your preparedness journey even when finances are tight. These easy-to-follow, practical steps will help you to get more from your preps. At the end of the blog, we’ll also provide you with a quick list of twenty tips and tricks for prepping with limited funds, along with 2 downloadable free guides to help get you started. So definitely stick around for that.
Let’s be honest; getting serious about preparedness can be expensive. With a recession that’s all but certain at this point, how can you practically prepare when finances are tight and will very likely get even tighter in the coming months and years? We’ll explain how. So let’s jump in.
STEP 1: DECIDE YOUR TIMELINE
The point here is to decide your target: how long do you want to be prepared for? 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, or more? Once you make that decision, it’s time to move to the next step.
STEP 2: FOCUS ON THE PILLARS
The important thing about canned food is that you should only buy what you can eat. It’s easy to look at these items at the store and purchase food you’ve never eaten before. We don’t recommend that. Also, pick up soups and vegetables. While they may not be calorically dense, they’ll provide a welcome variety and a sense of comfort to you in your time of greatest need.
Beyond just canned food, look to dry goods like hard beans, lentils, rice, amaranth, barley, popcorn, and other hard grains and cereals. They can be stored easily on your shelf for extended periods of time. Start off by focusing on food. If there’s a disaster, food will be the most highly sought-after commodity that is not easily obtained once the stores are cleaned out.
Next, focus on the second pillar, which is water. Start here, and later, as your budget permits, upgrade to storage containers. When we personally started years ago, we went for 5-gallon water storage containers we could put in our closets and, over time, we moved up to 55-gallon drums we have stored in our garage. It didn’t happen overnight; quite the contrary. But our budget helped guide me.
Also, have the means to filter, treat, or boil your water to purify it and make it drinkable. Water is so critical to survival that you can only survive around 3-days without it.
As for the other pillars of energy and medicine, you must assess your needs and requirements here. If you have equipment or medication that you need or your life and health would be in jeopardy, you genuinely need to secure the medicine and energy you need to at least keep yourself safe for 3-days. Regarding medicine, everyone is at a different place with this issue. We would encourage you to learn how to store as much as you need to survive as is legally possible. We know the medical community is increasingly making it harder for people to keep much of an inventory on hand personally, but we would encourage you to chat with your physician about this.
Focus on the pillars of food, water, medicine, and energy, when getting started, and you will likely be just fine. We’ve got blogs covering each of these subjects.
STEP 3: MAKE A BUDGET & PLAN
Also, check out our free Recession Proofing guide, which is a great way to harden yourself off from economic downturns fiscally that covers practical approaches to saving money, so I encourage you to start there. Then look at the Introductory Prepper’s Guide to form a plan to get moving. Forming a budget, using our recession-proof guide, and then following our introductory prepper’s guide will get you started.
STEP 4: CHANGE THE WAY YOU LIVE & EAT
Our point here is that we can’t wait until disaster strikes and then instantly be the expert on all things. We recognized long ago that we needed to change how we lived and incorporate knowledge, skills, and thriftiness into my daily practices. That mindset doesn’t require me to spend even a penny of my money, but it will be my most valuable resource after a disaster.
Finally, change the way you are living your life. If you’re sitting on the couch, get up if you can. Go for a walk, hike, or exercise. If you have a sedentary life at all, this is the day you need to change that. Get up and stretch. Increased physical activity leads to physical and physiological changes in your body’s chemistry. It can change your perspective and help you build a survivor’s mentality. More importantly, moving around more and getting healthy doesn’t have to cost you a dime.
STEP 5: TURN OFF THE LIGHTS & GO CAMPING
Your practice session doesn’t have to be that dramatic. It can simply be turning to your food and water preps and committing to eat and drink only those for three days. That simple exercise will teach you volumes about your supplies and the gaps in them. The practice will allow you to replace your preps with greater purpose and intent. Turning to your food preps like this every so often will save you the money you can apply to your future preps, replace existing supplies, or get the new supplies you now realize you need. The key is putting your resources, knowledge, and skills into practice.
You don’t have to be perfect. In fact, you want to fail here and there to understand where the gaps in your preps are. This is about putting forth a little effort periodically. This is where the transformation into the prepper you decided and committed to being earlier occurs. This is where the change occurs– with every effort and every bit of practice.
20 QUICK TIPS
Much of what we already discussed here are things you can start doing today at little to no expense. Decide what you want to prepare for, get or build a personal plan, take advantage of our free guides, build your core preps slowly over time, change the way you live and eat now, and then put it all into practice. All of those can be done with even the most limited of funds, but we also want to leave you with 20 quick tips for prepping with little to no budget. Over the years of doing this, as you might imagine, we get quite a few tips and tricks sent to us. We cover many of these in other blogs on this site, or you can find best practices with a few simple internet searches.
Here they are, super quickly:
That’s just a quick list of ideas in no particular order. As we said, you can get thousands more preps in place with little or no money. The reason we’re doing a blog like this now is that we really think we have limited time to prepare for the challenges we face in the future. The world isn’t going to be sunshine and roses tomorrow. You may feel that way as well. Hard times ahead are inevitable, and the decisions you make now, the preps you put in place now, will help to see you through those challenges. No matter your budget or circumstance, you can develop a prepping mindset and begin your prepping journey with us today.
As always, stay safe out there.