Preparedness for when

vanoonoo

betterlife wrote: »

Hi everyone, im quite new to prepping, so was wondering if i could ask some questions please?
i know you are prepping for when the shtf, but what is that for you? is it for rocketing food prices, loss of jobs, economy collapse? and do you just prep as in buying stuff for store cupboard etc or are you trying to become more self-sufficient?

like many others - a bit of everything, I like to feel organised, I like to have things to hand to be able to cope with the unexpected - that may be surprise visitors, local shop being out of milk or bread, power cut, loss of income, change in personal circumstance, illness, general cant be ar5ed and dont want to leave the house (although that is less unexpected these days, more of a default ). We were quite "sorted" in our previous home but moved at the end of february and it's taking a long time to get myself to a point where I feel comfortable again. i still dont have an alternate indoor heat source and that worries me altho we do ahve plenty of warm clothes and layers and extra bedding and we could always go to local relatives who have an open fire and a wood burning stove. we're considering an allotment shared between relatives.

hello btw

GreyQueen

pineapple wrote: »

Interesting. I'm going through similar calculations re the pros and cons of buying things like a pressure cooker - I would prefer a stainless steel one so not cheap. For me, it's not about saving time, it's about saving energy. Similarly have been looking at a proper thermal cooker - I've tried the diy haybox principle but imo it's a palaver and not very efficient.
Still - the way energy prices are rising....

Hi pineapple, I think this is an excellent way to look at things.

One thing I took away from a convo with a pal who is a purchasing professional is "on-costs". A lot of us can get caught out like this, particularly as some businesses use a modest initial price to lure you in, then hold you hostage to parts, components and consumables which is really where they make their money.

:mad: Certain brands of computer printer especially spring to mind, as do water filter jugs etc.

An example of on-costs for your prosepective pressure cooker would be the replacement gaskets. Mum replaced a Pr*stige brand with a more expensive one (Fisshler?) and the gaskets were harder to obtain and more expensive, too.

It's helpful to look at the lifetime costs of owning something as well as the ticket price when you buy it. I think it's easy to forget that there will be on-costs to many things and not research them before making our choices.

Yesterday I brought one of my stock-cupboard 1 litre bottles of cooking oil onto the counter for use, and shuffled the rest up. Only 16 left, at a monthly use rate averaging 1 bottle a month. They're all in date and live in the saucepan base unit, lined around 3 sides and using what would otherwise be wasted space.

I find that I like having "inventory" to hand and the sense of security it brings. To know that no matter what a JIT delivery system or severe weather will throw at you, that you have supplies to hand and won't take much harm.

It's also money-saving. How often have we popped out for a single item which we've run out of, like milk or bread, and gone into a supermarket just for that item? Yeah, right, and you're lucky to escape without dropping £5-£10 on other items which you just had to have, but which you didn't need until you saw them.

I'm not casting nasturtiums, as I put my hands up to doing the same. If you only do this once a month, imagine the savings if you're able to go to the storecupboard for a litre of UHT instead, worked out over a year.

Not to mention the savings in time, aggravation, shoe leather and possibly petrol or diesel.

thriftwizard

is it for rocketing food prices, loss of jobs, economy collapse? and do you just prep as in buying stuff for store cupboard etc or are you trying to become more self-sufficient?

It often takes a nasty shock of some kind - unexpected redundancy, being told you have a disabling disease, the death of someone dear to you - before you become aware of how fragile our living arrangements actually are. Once you have "woken up" you start to see all sorts of possibilities, some of them pretty high on the scale of probability like catching flu & not being able to get to the shops for a day or two, through irritants like tanker driver strikes & minor hurricanes, to some less-immediately-probable scenarios like Mt. Hekla blowing her top or the Euro collapsing. And you realise that it's certainly not going to do any harm, in fact it may very possibly do some good to be prepared for the possibility that life as we know it may (at the least) be interrupted, one way or another, from time to time.

For some of us, all we can do is have a few extra tins, a first aid kit & a bottle of water stashed away. For others, it's a year's supply of dried food and a gun licence. Others still are learning skills that would help keep them alive & make them useful in times of trouble, from preserving & knitting through poultrykeeping & foraging to herbal medicine.

Everyone has their own take on it, and we all have circumstances of one sort or another that limit our ability to be as prepared as we'd like to be. For some people, where they live is potentially dangerous for one reason or another (e.g. bad neighbours, gangs, riots, flooding, landslips, wildfires) so they need to be ready to grab a bug-out bag & run to safety. For the majority of us, staying put is the most sensible option, with people we know & trust around us, in a landscape we understand, and our storecupboards close to hand.

None of us know with any certainty what's around the corner. For me, it's just that I can enjoy everyday life a lot more knowing that if any of the wheels should come off this ramshackle contraption that we call civilisation, or even if I should just happen to catch a passing virus & be incapacitated for a day or two, we'll cope...

[Deleted User]

GreyQueen wrote: »

Certain brands of computer printer especially spring to mind, as do water filter jugs etc.

Have you considered an inline water filter system?

B&Q do an Aqua Shield Water Filter Kit, which is a tap you fit to your sink.

You connect it to your incoming cold water pipe (DIY installation), and it filters the water as and when you are using it, rather than having it standing in the fridge.

The kit is £37 (including the first filter cartridge), but replacements are only £10 each, and each filter will last for 6 months/2000 Litres.

GreyQueen

:T Excellent post, thriftwizard.

I hope that none of us have to struggle with survival, but it has been the commonality for most of humanity for most of our history on this planet. There are very few places where the livin' has been easy and our present time, when even the poorest of our society have a level of comfort and security unimaginable in ages past, is a historical anomaly.

We all have normalcy bias, the expectation that things will continue as they have been, but better.

I've had a close brush with the Grim Reaper and am with you today thanks to the pharmaceutical industry. 100 years ago what ails me was fatal, now I can expect to live a normal life expectancy.

If it all went hopelessly t*ts-up and TEOTWAWKI, I wouldn't last past the few months' worth of meds I have by me and my intention to loot any pharmacy I can get into for more. However, in intermediate crises, I figure that by being prepped, inc my meds, I can avoid being part of the problem.

Those of us who can take care of ourselves for days/weeks/months/ a year or two, without outside inputs, will lessen the burden on the rest of society. My 90 year old Nan can't do much for herself these days, but she is a wealth of knowledge and can tell you how to do things, if the ability to demonstrate the technique is beyond her abilities in advanced old age.

We all bring something to the party which is life beyond our current roles, comprised of our hobbies, pastimes, work histories, things we learned from family and friends, random stuff acquired from books and the interweb. This contributes to our wellbeing and towards what we can do for others.

ETA; thanks for the info, Bob, but I was just using it as an example; I don't actually filter my water, I drink it neat inc all the lovely limescale. But thanks for posting it as it could be of interest to someone else.

[Deleted User]

Morning all, beautiful day here but colder than it has been by quite a lot which I'm actually enjoying!!!

THRIFTWIZARD and GQ very pertinent and sensible posts from you both, lots of common sense and optimism in both. I look at life much the same way and my safety net against the vagaries of life gives me a sense not of security but the feeling that I have a fighting chance of riding out whatever the problem is that occurs. I've no doubt that 99.9% of the population considers me so off my rocker that I'm odd even by oddity standards but I really don't mind what they think, I'm not going to let any of my prepping be altered by other folks opinions. I feel that you're foolish in the extreme if you don't consider what might happen to halt life as we live it in its tracks, and if that happens it won't come with a weeks notice of its intentions, I'd hate to be caught on the hop and expect to be able to aquire everything we needed last minute from the shops. I've made us and our lifestyle as self reliant as it's possible to do when you live in a village and have to be part of 2013 society, you can't do much more than that can you? Lyn xxx.

Perplexed_Pineapple

Thriftwizard, that absolutely sums it up for me. The other thing to say is that for me having dependents (kids) has totally changed my perspective - when we were young(ish) and fit(tish) :rotfl:we were confident, perhaps not unreasonably, that we could cope with whatever life threw at us (barring nuclear Armageddon, naturally). No petrol? Walk five miles to the shop if needed, no problem. Lost job, never mind there's another and it didn't matter if it were on the other side of the country or even the world. Now, with other people to look after it is a lot less easy and although I think it is unlikely we will have major politico-economic havoc in the next decade or so the world is going to change and I plan to have a variety of skills to cope with it. So along with the science and IT they learn at school we are trying to teach our kids some of the skills that their great-grandparents had in the home, garden and allotment, and which our generation has more than half forgotten (or never learnt in the first place).

[Deleted User]

Anyone seen this?

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/439701/Now-get-ready-for-an-Ice-Age-as-experts-warn-of-Siberian-winter-ahead

daz378

i only started consciously prepping ....when the prepper tv program mes started but even before then always had well stocked larder and a wind up radio and torch.... the other part of my life that as made me more inclined to prepping/paying off debts is my realisation that we could be wage slaves......work is now enforcing the more difficult aspects of our contracts.. with little regard to how we feel about... perfectly legal but unsettling non theless....watching dvd World War Z the other day....good idea when brad pit gaffer taped magazines to his arms ..ergo improvised armguards ... carry on prepping:)

pineapple

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

Anyone seen this?

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/439701/Now-get-ready-for-an-Ice-Age-as-experts-warn-of-Siberian-winter-ahead

Posted on the issue yesterday
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=63607071&postcount=15019

There was a regional BBC programme about it
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03flj49