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How I Got Started Prepping, by Gary S.
You may be reading this and have not made the decision to get started. You may be facing some of the same challenges I had or you may have your own. I want to encourage you to find ways to overcome your obstacles. Getting started is the biggest step.
My family and I have always led a very frugal life. My wife and I both work, and I have a second job as well. The grocery bill stays under $30 per week through couponing and eating-in. Money has gone into savings in case of emergency and we finally have a few months saved up. Any extra at the end of the month is put towards a quickly dwindling mortgage. The only expense we do not continually try to find new ways to lower is the tithe.
This was our lifestyle before I started ‘hearing’ the news last summer. I had been reading and listening to the news, but I had not been hearing it (my ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ reference). I quickly realized I needed more information. With a Google search I found SurvivalBlog and started reading the main page… then the archives… then looked for other resources. I promptly realized I needed to stop reading and get started. I also realized I had two major hurdles before I could even start.
Hurdle number one was my wife’s fears. Like most people, we were sheeple, making our way through life in the blessed assurance that the security blanket we had been given would always be there to keep us safe and warm. Fortunately, we communicate about everything (we don’t always see eye to eye, but we do talk). At first, the news scared her. She could only handle a few minutes of my questions at a time a couple of days a week. I just had to slowly feed her information. I asked questions when making meal plans like, “What would we do if the food we needed for the week was not available at the stores?” It is 10 months later and I am still asking questions. She is involved now, but not as much as I would like her to be, or as much as she really needs to be if something happens. It is an ongoing process, but isn’t everything about getting prepared?
At some point she conceded we had to do something, and trusted me to start. She was okay with being prepared, but she is still not interested in imagining her life after TSHTF. She helps by buying more at the store than we need when there are deals on goods with a long shelf life. She also created storage options under the beds and set up a system to track the expiration dates on these purchases.
In opposition to some of the advice we see, we do not always buy food we will eat if we still have it in two years from now. We understand much of it will need to be donated and replaced at that time.
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