Preparing

One of the things about preparing for emergencies is everyone likes the sexy and fun stuff- people imagine scenarios for TEOTWAWKI. Tongue in cheek, we called it the Zombie apocalypse forever, until that term made it so far into mainstream that it became its own gag.

We love to look at guns, security, freeze dried foods, and tons of other things, and in nearly every case, those things aren’t going to be what eventually ends us. TEOTWAWKI is more likely going to be a medical event. Your chances of dying in a Zombie apocalypse end of the world are so close to zero as to be immeasurable. The most likely event, one that most of us are unprepared for, is a personal emergency.

Perhaps you break your leg slipping down the stairs. Maybe you got laid off from work. Or perhaps your spouse was just diagnosed with cancer, or you wake up one morning and she is just… dead, lying in bed next to you, having never woken up. Are you prepared for that? Consider how the following will disrupt all of your well-laid plans:

Are you ready for suddenly having difficulty speaking, the left side of your face drooping, and don’t know where you are? Is that house in the woods, 45 minutes from the nearest hospital, no neighbors within a quarter mile of you, and no way to summon help sill working in your favor? Yeah, having a stroke is FAR more likely an event than the entire collapse of society. More than 750,000 people a year have a stroke, and if you don’t get definitive care within an hour, those deficits start to become permanent. Every minute a stroke goes untreated, the brain loses roughly 1.9 million neurons, accelerating permanent brain damage. So while living in the middle of nowhere seems like a great way to avoid TEOTWAWKI, your world as you know it just ended. Two hours after the onset of symptoms, you may well spend the rest of your life walking with a cane, or being unable to speak.

Or perhaps your job just disappeared, the company you work for was just down-sized. You are now out of work. How are you going to survive with no money? Sure, you have a closet full of guns, a basement filled with freeze-dried food, and you don’t need electricity. How are you going to pay your taxes, and how will you keep your home full of supplies when the bank comes calling, demanding that you repay your loans?

Even if all of society DOES collapse, have you planned for everything? Do you have ways of handling mundane things like trash removal? Sewage? We all know those things aren’t fun. There is a reason why publications on hygiene, trash removal, and wood gasification are on our manuals page.

It always makes me laugh when someone comes on here, bragging about how prepared they are. They will tell you about their years’ worth of freeze dried food in their fortress out in the woods, how they have 100,000 rounds of ammo and over 200 firearms. I promise you, unless you are a billionaire, you have accumulated those guns and ammo at the expense of something else. There is something you should have done, but neglected it at the expense of firearms and ammo, which believe it or not, won’t get you out of every conceivable situation, and having 200 of them isn’t any better in such a scenario than having 3 or 4 of them.

Take a look at your own situation. If you are prepared for one scenario- the complete breakdown of society, I can promise you four things:

• It probably will not happen in your lifetime
• Even if it does, you won’t be prepared for it
• Something more mundane will happen to you
• and you likely won’t be ready for that, either

Want to be ready for things? Have an emergency fund to get you through small emergencies. Then a second for bigger ones. A third for catastrophic ones.

• To start, you should have at least $1000 in cash in the house.
• Then you should have a second fund, accessible within 5 business days that is equal to 90 days’ expenses
• Then you should have a third fund, accessible within 45 days that is equal to at least a years’ expenses

If you don’t have at least the first two, then having 200 firearms isn’t going to help you a bit when you lose your job and can’t pay your bills.

Live far enough away from a city to be safe from most craziness, but close enough to civilization so that you can get help when needed.

I’ve lived through a few TEOTWAWKI events in my lifetime.

• Got divorced. Twice.
• Lost my job a few times.
• Went bankrupt
• been homeless because of the three above at various times
• injured so badly while at work, I was told it was a 50/50 chance I would never walk again

and not one of the above was caused by a riot, flood, hurricane, or collapse of society.

Remember that when you are planning for future disasters. The disaster you are planning for is rarely the one you will experience.