My Preparedness Philosophy

You won't have to do much looking around the web before coming upon websites with people telling you what kinds of catastrophes are coming and what you need to do to prepare for them.  You will also soon discover that their ideas about those things probably differ from yours.  The following quote from the LDS Preparedness Manual is especially profound:

"However, final decisions on preparation for actions during an emergency are the sole responsibility of individuals.  No one knows your needs or can take care of you better than you can - nor does anyone else have that responsibility."

There are some hard facts one must consider when planning for your long-term survival.  First and foremost is how many people are there going to be in your survival group, and how committed are they to the cause.  Because if they run out of food, water, etc. before you do, guess whose supplies they are going to want to share.  Because when a person and their family are starving, they most likely will use any means available to obtain resources, and that includes taking it from their use-to-be survival partners.  So you need to be prepared for that.

Choose your partners wisely.  Don't let anyone know where your survival supplies are stored or how much you have stored or even that you have any stored.  Don't store all of them in your house.  If you do and your house burns down, or is overrun, etc., you are no longer prepared for survival, and fall into the above category of having to get supplies from somewhere else using any means necessary to do so.

Be mentally prepared for survival.  If the worst comes, you are probably going to have to say no to people who know you well and who are in desperate need.  And telling them they should have been better prepared is probably not going to dissuade them from begging for or trying to forcibly take some (or all) of your supplies.  You'll have to have the intestinal fortitude  to firmly and continually say no.  And you'll have to have some means of enforcing it.

And realize that there is no way you can overcome everything that could possibly happen.  There are all kinds of conspiracy theorists that think the government is out to get you.  They're probably not, but if the President decides to take you out with a drone strike, or if SEAL Team 6 arrives at your door and wants your supplies, you're probably done for, no matter how much you prepared.

All the good stuff about preparedness is contained in the links above.  I tried to not reinvent the wheel, so if I found some good information that I agreed with (at least mostly), I put a short description about it and then linked to it.  If it was short enough and I thought it was valuable enough, I sometimes copied it onto this website.

I hope that you find the information contained here useful.  Live long and prosper.

 

Preparing to Start Thinking About Prepping
(a paper I wrote to get me motivated)

Sacred: "highly valued and important."

Sacred obviously has other meanings as well, but I want to discuss this one, because we often get what's important badly skewed.
And trendy clothes, fancy cars, high-tech gadgets and high-dollar houses don't even make the short list.

In my highly biased opinion, a substantial stock of safe food and drinking water (and a means of replenishing it), and adequate shelter (and a means of protecting it) are the only things that rise to sacred status.

There are any number of catastrophes that seem increasingly more likely to occur. Something as simple as a trucker's strike would disrupt the delivery of food, and any city, large or small, has less than a week's food on grocers' shelves.

A major disruption in our electrical grid would obviously cause all kinds of problems, and almost assuredly will happen. I was without electricity for 9 days during a bad ice storm. Imagine if the entire US was without electricity for a month or more - not an unrealistic scenario.  Widespread rioting like that in Ferguson, MO could make it dangerous to leave your shelter, and rioters or looters could attempt to burn it down.  Then throw in terrorists, zombies, giant solar flares - I think you get the picture.

And hungry and panicked people resort to desperate measures, including taking your food, safe water and shelter.

Very few of us are prepared in any way for what is surely to come in our lifetime. Unfortunately I have to be included in that group - but I've started working on it. I encourage you to do the same.

You can start by stockpiling a few items of food, by ensuring that you have a weapon of some sort and that you know how to use it, and by assembling a basic bug-out-bag for when you have to leave your shelter for some reason.  But I encourage you to start.

There will be information on how to do that and much more available here.