With prices on everything going up and our earnings going down, many
of us are living on the edge, some of us are only one paycheck away from
being homeless. Right now, food and supplies for everyday living is
readily available, you can walk into any store and find the shelves
stocked with food. But you must realize those shelves can be empty in
just a matter of hours in any kind of major emergency, and when that happens, it will not matter how much money you have, if there is no food in the stores, there is no food. These types of
emergencies can be on a global scale, solar flares, asteroid or comets
impacting the earth, to regional problems such as hurricanes, floods,
wildfires, to very local problems, such as a car hitting a power pole
knocking out the power for your entire neighborhood… even down to a very
personal crisis, like losing your job, being injured and not being able
to work, having an unexpected bill. What can you do to help ensure that
you will survive?
As I mentioned, grocery stores have stocks of food, right now, but
that could change in a heartbeat. It used to be that grocery stores had
larger warehouse areas in the back of the store, they received fewer but
larger shipments. Now, most stores have at best, a 3 day supply of food
in the store, including the stock room in back. They receive multiple
shipments a week, but ultimately receive less stocks of food from each
one. If anything were to happen to the transportation of these foods,
trucks, or trains, or airplanes or ships, then your grocery store will
run out of food within about 3 days, that’s IF there isn’t a panic run
on food, then you have hours at best. If something happened and you
could not leave your home, starting right now, today, how long would it
be before you started running out of food? How long before you would be
in real trouble? A few days? A week? A couple of weeks? A month?
Today I’ll talk about how to prep in the area of food, even if you
are on the tightest of budgets. If you say to me that you cannot afford
to put back extra food for emergencies, I will tell you that is
precisely WHY you need to do it. If you have extra food, even as little
as an extra 2 weeks to a month’s worth of food, then in a financial
emergency, such as an unexpected bill, or job loss, you will not have to
choose between buying groceries and paying your rent or mortgage.
First
you need to decide how much extra you can spend, if you do not have a
budget written down, it’s time to do it and see just where your money
goes, you might be surprised as to how much waste happens a few dollars
here and a few dollars there. I know there are ways you can stretch your
earnings, do you really NEED that $3-4 dollar cup of yuppie coffee? Do
you really NEED to eat out at lunch (or breakfast, or dinner)? How about
taking your lunch for a month and spend that extra money on food
supplies to put up. Do you really NEED to buy prepared junk foods and
convenience foods? How about buying more basic foods and actually
cooking a meal from scratch?
Ladies, how about doing your own nails for a month, or you could go
to a beauty school to have services done. Do you really NEED every
premium channel on satellite or cable TV? Do you really NEED to drive as
much as you do? Fuel is very costly, running around for no good reason
eats into your budget. How about putting your gym membership on hold and
working out at home, or find a cheaper gym for a while. How about
shopping in resale shops? Do you really NEED to pay full retail price
for clothes and such?
Now that you have determined how much you can spend, now to decide
what to buy. Ideally you would buy foods that don’t require
refrigeration and will last a long time. Obviously rice and beans come
to my mind, also canned foods, dehydrated or freeze dried foods. The
reason to stay away from frozen foods is in an emergency where you might
not have electricity, you don’t want to lose hundreds of dollars worth
of food that you worked so hard to put up. If you are really good in the
kitchen, you can even can your own foods in Mason jars and such. I have
a friend who buys chicken and beef in bulk quantities when it’s on sale
and cans it, she spends a day preparing and canning the meat, she even
cans her own stock/broth.
I
love those little hermetically sealed aseptic foil packs of foods, like
tuna, chicken, beef, you can even get milk in those foil boxes that
don’t require refrigeration, just watch the dates on those, even though
they are aseptic, they do eventually start tasting “off”.
You can also stretch your money by clipping coupons, you can even
print coupons from the internet, but be aware, the ink you are using
might be digging into your savings, so decide if you printed coupons are
worth the savings. Get together with coworkers, people from your church
and neighborhood, create a coupon co-op, that way anything you don’t
want, someone else might be able to use, and you can get coupons that
someone else might not want. Use store sales, if there is something you
like that would work well in your preps, and it’s on sale, then instead
of buying one or two, buy a few extras to put aside. If your store
limits the number of a sale item you can purchase, then bring along a
friend or family member to help, and don’t forget, they probably will
not try to stop you from buying something, taking it to your car, coming
back in and buying it again.
You
can shop at discount stores, look for dollar stores, Big Lots and such,
you can find LOADS of prep worthy foods (along with other goodies to
put up for emergencies), what you would have spent on an expensive cup
of latte, you can buy a whole box of tuna packets, for what you would
have spent on a month at the gym, you can fill a shopping cart with
canned meats and such, as long as you shop smart. Don’t forget about
store brand foods, you know the ones that used to be referred to as
generic? WalMart has their Great Value line, I usually buy those first
because they are such a bargain and they are just as good as the name
brand, Sam’s club has Member’s Mark, look at the stores where you shop,
buy one of a store brand item to try it and determine if you will like
it before buying up quantities. Even the dollar stores are starting to
carry their own house brands, usually at half the price of the name
brands.
Be sure to rotate your foods too, you don’t want to find out that
your foods have gone south when you are in a position to have to eat it.
Grocery stores use a system called “FIFO”, first in, first out.
One more place to find food to put up, is at food banks. I have gone
to food banks and I often find many people walking past the foods that
would be best for putting up, things like bags of beans, bags of rice,
one food bank I used to go to would allow you to take as many bags of
beans and rice as you could fit into one grocery bag, I was amazed at
the numbers of people who would walk right past that to go to the more
convenience type foods. Please don’t let pride stop you from providing
for yourself and your family.
Later I’ll discuss how and where to store your precious foods, what
other items to stock up on, and security related to your preps and
family.
I originally wrote this article for
www.off-grid.net, as of right now, I have
4 total articles in this series, I'll be posting the rest of them here in the coming days.
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Wretha,
Thanks for visiting!
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