Your parents were preppers!

Well mine were anyway and probably yours too, or depending on your age it may have been your grandparents, but most people used to plan ahead at least a little. No they didn’t call it prepping, to them it was just common sense. I remember working in the family garden and going to u-pick farms and picking beans, corn, and cucumbers that mom would can, pickle or freeze. I remember sitting in the back yard snapping beans or shucking corn; we worked through the summer to prepare for the winter. My parents were both born in the Deep South during the Great Depression; they knew what hunger was, they knew what it meant to do without and worked everyday to keep from ever experiencing that again. Today, most of us have lost those skills, the ability to plan and save, the skills to can and preserve for tough days ahead.

Admitting you have a problem is the 1^st step to recovery!

I’ve been there and you may be there now. The average American family can’t come up with $2000 cash in a financial emergency and 66% have less than $25,000 saved for retirement; those are some scary numbers folks. Most people are living in the moment, not planning, not saving and certainly not prepping. This isn’t a financial lesson, I’ll get into that in later post, but simply an example of how completely unprepared the average American family is. Most people are teetering on the edge, living paycheck to paycheck, no savings, no food in the fridge and would probably starve in a few days if the pizza delivery joint was closed. Sad. People have become so dependent on the system that they really can’t do anything for themselves.

Baby steps

Getting back to the basics; planning, saving, preserving, canning, freezing – even growing some of your own food! These are the most basic first steps to self-reliance. Sit down and write out a plan; stash away some basic supplies, then use that as a basic foundation to build upon. Do you have a place to grow a garden, do you know how? If so, what will you do with what you grow? Where will you store what you save? And where on earth are you going to store all this water? Start simple with a plan to slowly build from there and as always, save things you will actually use. No point in stashing 30 cans of beets if you hate beets, save what you eat. Baby steps.

Happy prepping!