How to Start Prepping with No Money

Obsessing about doomsday is probably one of the biggest rookie prepping mistakes. You can only be concerned about threats to yourself, your family, and your community. Don’t try to extend your prepping to cover to national or world threats, because there’s nothing you can do about those unless they could impact you.

Remember, you’re your own first responder.

Believing every rumor. It’s too easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole of conspiracies and become convinced you have a bull’s-eye on your back. This can lead to panic, stress, and information overload as you become convinced you must prepare for everything.

Stop. Relax. Go back to the section on “threat assessment,” and do something that doesn’t cost money: Plan. Make lists. Decide what you need to learn, build, buy, or accomplish.

Failure to make a “decision tree.” This means thinking through various scenarios and deciding in advance how you’d handle them. The “in advance” part is crucial. This is called an “OODA Loop” (Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act), first developed in the military. It’s a powerful tool that’s made its way into the boardroom because it allows for rapid action when decisions are needed to succeed in the face of changing conditions. Thinking about scenarios before they happen decreases the chance you’ll freeze and fail to act during an emergency.

Failure to develop a resilient mindset. People who survive catastrophic changes usually share one trait: They’re able to roll with the punches. This is an underrated but vital component of prepping. It helps to think through the “what ifs” of everything, from losing your home in a natural disaster to losing a loved one. These aren’t pleasant thoughts, but knowing (and even planning) what you’ll do in the face of calamitous events is imperative.

Obsessing about “stuff.” One of the problems with trying to prepare for everything (plague, meteor strikes, zombie apocalypse, whatever) is the focus becomes stuff – just stuff. As the first leg of the three-legged stool of preparedness, stuff is necessary – but not by itself. A common mistake is purchasing what “experts” tell you to buy without considering your family’s health, budget, location, etc. In prepping, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Preppers should triage their prepping efforts into a pyramidal “hierarchy of needs” to determine where their resources should be allocated. The biggest needs – food, water, shelter, etc. – make up the necessary base of the pyramid. Only when the base of the pyramid has been built should you concentrate on the least likely scenarios, such as zombies. Don’t build the pyramid upside down.

Failure to take inventory. Before buying a bunch of stuff, take a deep dive into what you already own and how it can be applied to a prepared lifestyle. Then, start making wish lists for other things to acquire. As stuff accumulates, it’ll be easy to lose track of what you have and where it’s located. Having an inventory and schematic of where things are stored will be highly useful (especially if you need something in a hurry) and prevent the purchase of unnecessary duplicates because you can’t find the original.

Thinking you’re going to bug out to “the woods.” This is one of the most cherished and enduring bits of nonsense in the prepping world, with whole books and websites dedicated to how best to leave behind your home and carry in your bag all the things necessary to set up a new life in some remote location.

What will you do once you’re there? Camp forever? Hunt and forage for the rest of your life? What about your toddlers or elderly relatives – will they be camping with you?

Seriously, think it through. There’s no food, shelter, or services in “the woods.” Once your packed-in food runs out, what then? Spare me the notion that you’ll snare rabbits and gig for frogs, because you won’t. Stop pretending evacuating to the wild should be your goal. It’s nothing but a dangerous fantasy.

Failure to plan for a loss of electricity. Threats to the grid are real – occasionally on a regional or national scale, but far more often at the local level. Having the means in place to see, cook, heat your home, and otherwise handle a power loss is essential.

Supplies

Failure to have a bug-out bag ready. Bugging out – evacuating – is often necessary in a disaster. For this reason, bug-out bags are highly recommended. The goal is to allow you to evacuate your home in the most rapid and efficient manner possible while retaining critical items you’ll require for both immediate needs and long-term negotiation as you pull your life back together.

When evacuating for a disaster, you won’t be camping in the wilderness while you trek to your rural cabin. Instead, you’ll be fleeing toward the assistance of other people, where (hopefully) your immediate needs of food, water, and shelter will be addressed.

With that in mind, don’t pack as if you’re going camping. Instead, think about what you’d be devastated to lose; what documentation might help you get back on your feet and deal with banks, insurance agencies, and other bureaucratic necessities; what personal clothing, medications, and sanitation items would allow you some measure of comfort and dignity for a few days.

Skills and Knowledge

Failure to learn skills. This is the second leg of the three-legged stool and vitally important. Skills can be as varied as sewing, gardening, blacksmithing, food preservation, carpentry, first aid, animal husbandry, dairy production, etc. However, many newbie preppers think they can rely on gear, equipment, and supplies and don’t bother learning the skills that go with it. Having a pressure canner is great, but you’ll have to learn to use it as well. Gardening is simple, but mastering it takes much longer. Learn your strengths and skills now.

In natural or societal disasters, you’ll be stressed, scared, desperate, panicked, and unfocused. If you think you’ll suddenly have the leisure to learn the intricacies of cooking from scratch, growing a 1-acre garden, canning green beans, or plinking at targets, think again. Skills take practice. Start now.

Failure to learn scratch cooking. Most prepping websites try to make it seem like freeze-dried “survival” food is the only option. But “survival” food is outrageously pricey, far less tasty and nutritious than implied, and often unsuited to family members’ personal tastes, dietary limitations, health, or age.

It’s more inexpensive and nutritious to learn to cook rice, beans, pasta, and other shelf-stable basics in flavorful and creative ways. That said, this assumes you have a way to cook without electricity (rocket stove, woodstove, propane stove, or even an open fire). If you’re in an urban high-rise apartment, your choices will be limited. If you’re in a suburban or rural environment, it’ll be far more cost-effective to make sure you have alternate cooking methods. Besides, scratch cooking is a valuable skill no matter what. That way, you can stock the items you eat on a regular basis, just in more significant quantities.

Obsessing about one aspect of preparedness (such as firearms) to the exclusion of others. This obsessive focus on just one aspect of preparedness can apply across the board. If you only focus on stockpiling food or packing a bug-out bag for a mythical adventure in the woods or any other single-minded pursuit, then you’ll be caught short when disaster doesn’t neatly fall into the box you’ve planned for.

Focusing on technology. The prepper movement is full of expensive novelties that allegedly allow people to continue their normal lives in the absence of the grid. However, the more complicated the solution, the less likely it is to work flawlessly and forever. Remember this rule of thumb: The more moving parts something has, the more likely it is to break down. If you can’t fix it through your own ingenuity, it might not be the best “prepper” tool or equipment.

Technology has its place, but relying on it to the exclusion of low-tech alternatives is shortsighted in the prepping world. Low-tech options are generally time-tested, less likely to fail, and relatively inexpensive – in other words, a lot of bang for your prepping buck. However, people have to balance low-tech solutions against whatever physical limitations they may have. Many low-tech solutions are low-tech because they’re labor-intensive, so they won’t work for everyone.

Community

Failure to develop community. Among preppers, there’s a subset of macho lone wolves who earnestly believe they can survive the collapse of civilization by their wits and their trusty firearms. I call this the Rambo approach to preparedness, and sadly, it’s an unbalanced and unrealistic approach to the subject. As one critic put it, “An army of one isn’t an army, it’s a casualty.”

Community is the third leg of the three-legged stool. It’s a source of mutual defense, skills, production, trade, and psychological comfort. One person or one small family will never replicate all the skills and resources needed to endure a widespread crisis. But within a community, skills you lack might be supplied by others, and skills others lack might be filled in by you. Community is a force multiplier. It’s an example of synergy, where the whole is bigger than the sum of the individual parts.

That’s why group ties are so important. However, those group ties must be forged now, not later. If the manure hits the fan, no one will want to join hands and sing around a pot of stew unless they know you in advance. Don’t let your neighbors be strangers while online strangers become your friends. It should be the other way around.

General Advice for Hard Times

The following tips were gleaned from various “Lessons from the Great Depression” articles. As preppers, this is relevant advice to keep in mind:

• Diversify everything from investments to skills (jacks-of-all-trades and generalists thrived).
• Fewer bad things happen to those who are debt-free.
• Need less and waste less.
• Multiple income streams are better than one solitary income stream, no matter how large.
• Tangible investments are often better than intangible investments. Livestock and gardens reproduce.
• Band together whenever possible (family, neighbors, church) to help each other out. There’s strength in numbers.
• “The situation at hand had the final say.” During the Great Depression, people were forced to roll with the punches and adapt to their circumstances. No amount of anger, despair, or bargaining could change reality.
• Be generous. Personal circumstances can change in an instant.

Patrice Lewis is a wife, mother, homesteader, homeschooler, author, blogger, columnist, and speaker. An advocate of simple living and self-sufficiency, she’s practiced and written about self-reliance and preparedness for almost 30 years. She’s experienced in homestead animal husbandry and small-scale dairy production, food preservation and canning, country relocation, home-based businesses, homeschooling, personal money management, and food self-sufficiency.