Your advice to someone new to prepping

[Bob]

Prepping advice: the most important thing to prep forms a temporary disruption in services!

Consider. what if these become unavailable for 1 week:

- Your water service
- Your grocery store
- Your electricity
- Your gas station
- Your police department
- Your doctor

What would you need to get by until the next week, if you needed all those things and they were unavailable. Then shoot for two, three and four weeks.

[David]

Prepping advice: the most important thing to prep forms a temporary disruption in services!

Consider. what if these become unavailable for 1 week:

- Your water service
- Your grocery store
- Your electricity
- Your gas station
- Your police department
- Your doctor

What would you need to get by until the next week, if you needed all those things and they were unavailable. Then shoot for two, three and four weeks.

Good post!

How's your book/guide coming Bob?

[Bob]

Haven't touched it in months. However - as I have always pointed out...in it, there is always another disaster right around the corona - I mean corner!

[David]

So what would your advice be to someone just getting interested in prepping?

Don't wait until there is a crisis on your door step to start preparing yourself and your house. This seems like obvious advice, but as can be seen now wit all the media-induced panic, most Americans aren't prepared for even a couple of weeks and freak when their MSM overlords tell them to because they can't use critical thinking skills to discern what is real and what is not.

[bdc]

Same as I always give:
1. find a quiet corner, a chair, pen and paper. This means no music, no ipod, no cell phone (even set on mute), no significant other, no computer, no newspaper.
2. write down what bothered you the last time your were in the hospital. Then write down what bothered you the last time you had an extended illness at home, bedridden, and without assistance.
3. Then you figure out low cost solutions.

That is where you start in your preparations. If you think you are going to become Bugout Bubba, the next Rambo or similar character, stop reading what I am writing.

1. Someone in your circle - a significant other or a child or you - are going to be sick. Unless you take a hike, it is going to significantly affect any of your plans.
2. You have to deal with that situation before baking bread/planting crops/reloading ammunition/fantasizing
that you will be living off the land.

So, maybe .. . you consider acquiring another blanket that buying reloading gear. Or you think about getting easy to prepare foods like canned soup rather than 300 pounds of wheat berries that you have to use a $200 mill to reduce the wheat berries to flour and then spend hours baking breads.

After you have done the quiet thinking about medical problems and priorities, then read the obscure book about the Belieski brothers. Then read it again. The populist notion of survival is SELF SUFFICIENCY. The reality is SELF RELIANCE. What is the difference. Self sufficiency is being Rambo living in the Alaskan woods with no one around. Self reliance is surrounding yourself with a group of people with varying skills that are needed for the members of the group to survive.

You don't have to be a warrior to survive. You have to develop skills that will be necessary and trade with people with other skills. I give an example. The challenge was getting from the last city in Iran, cross a 7 mile no-man's land, and get to the first city in Afghanistan before nightfall. The reason for the urgency should be apparent. When the regular bus got to the imaginary border and the passengers were dumped out, you had to organize. And, it had to be done within a few minutes.

There was an expression that described my quick group. We were "world travelers". All that had to be done was say how long you had been on the road and how languages you spoke and whether you had come this way before. The leader and his girlfriend had been on the road for three years. He spoke 7 languages. I only spoke three languages and my wife spoke two other languages than I. We quickly organized into specific subunits - like negotiation team, security, foraging. We crammed like 11 people and their gear into a 9 person van - and made it. The other people from the regular bus did not make it.

You have to understand group dynamics in a survival situation and stop thinking "Rambo".

[Bob]

DO NOT start prepping right now!

Do what you have to to get through this. Then, settle down. Then go back and read this thread.

[David]

DO NOT start prepping right now!

Do what you have to to get through this. Then, settle down. Then go back and read this thread.

This ^

The middle of a crisis is not the time to start prepping. You're well past the window of opportunity and will have to fend the best that you can. Which is not a sound strategy.

Once this is over, don't go back to sticking your head in the sand i.e. not thinking prepping is valid or important. Start prepping for the next crisis when this one passes. Because there will be a next crisis, be it natural or man-made. Go back, reread this thread for the suggestions and then implement those suggestions.

Folks that have enough T.P. and food and whatever don't panic and have to run out and try to find T.P. and food and whatever. They can remain home and calm which is always a sound strategy.

[tom mac]

As above....
think about what you needed this time and start there.

[David]

[Bob]

So I watched the 101 video.

+ Nice range of topics
+ Lot of information
- Rule of threes was weak. Points you at a gas mask first
- no prioritization and confusing if you don't know what's important