Your Survival Guy

Preparing your investments and family for when disaster strikes.

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Happy Days: How’s Your Survival Prep Situation?

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By Chalermpon Poungpeth @ Shutterstock.com

How you doing? Isn’t it crazy how we’re still not back to normal? You have a government that continues to stuff you with Covid crap, and you can’t wait until the elections in ‘22 and ‘24. They can’t come fast enough. But let’s not wish time away. Let’s get down to some basics. How’s your survival prep situation? Because doing just a little bit now can put you on terra firma in times like these. Let’s go.

First up, the big three: Food, water, and shelter. Let’s get the hard one out of the way: food. Your way of eating is your way of eating. Plain and simple. I get it. I can tell you what I like to eat, but that’s me. Let’s think about food in stages. Stage one is when you lose power and are temporarily inconvenienced. In this case, a can of chopped white clams over linguine sprinkled with parsley and a glass of Meursault by candlelight is heaven on earth to Your Survival Guy. But you may think that’s nuts. But, I think we can both agree that living out of your pantry is something you can get by on for a week or two. Done.

Stage two food prep for Your Survival Guy involves my freezer. Now, this can get tricky as I’ve found pieces of meat hidden away like a Navy SEAL sniper, camouflaged in frost as if it has a second lease on life, thinking I’ll never find it. And that happens. I know we have meat stored that will never find the back of my mouth. What we try to do is stick to a rotation of what we’ll eat during a three-month period. Look, I have friends who harvest deer meat for the season with the expertise of Sam the butcher from The Brady Bunch. I want to be like Sam too, but it’s just not in my wheelhouse. Moving on.

Stage three is when you roll out your buckets of 25-year shelf-life food. Who knew it could last that long? Get as much as you’d like. Companies like Wise will make more. And as a side note, there are some members of my family who would prefer to starve than survive on it. Make sure you have plenty of water to unstick your tongue from the roof of your mouth. This crap is loaded with sodium. Food prep is where my island life thinking comes into play. When the hordes come a knockin’, you want to live in an area where you can keep ‘em out, and lock it down. Sorry, it’s just the way it is.

Where you live is a huge factor in your survivability. Is drinking water plentiful? Can you fish it? Does the sun shine enough that you can use solar to recharge devices or run hot water? In the northeast, for example, it’s dark by five and cloudy half the time. Make sure you have a backup plan if you lose power or natural gas on the coldest days of the year.

Next, is water. Let there be water. You can read all about how to store water here. My garage is loaded with blue 50-gallon containers, making it look like the lab in Breaking Bad.

Then you have shelter. Here’s my take on shelter. Own your house. Get out of debt. Because when interest rates are lower than your doormat and inflation is running hot, the money you spend on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt adds up. Period.

Guns? Get your guns and your training now. I’ve spent days training at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, New Hampshire. I suggest you get trained up too. I’ve also been trained in concealed carry and will tell you this is a personal decision. Because once you go down the road of everyday carry, you bring upon yourself the same type of responsibilities you face with a newborn. There are no breaks. You’re always on. There are no days off.

Need ammo? Go local or go online. And if you can’t find what you need in either place, go to your club and ask around. I get regular emails from my rifle club from members selling ammo. It’s out there if you want it. But be prepared to pay. With that in mind, you can do your wallet a lot of good by practicing using dry fire drills.

How about communication? In our latest power outage, we lost WiFi, but my cell service was fine. I’m not going down the rabbit hole of the pros and cons of 5G, but the fact of the matter is, the cell network is getting harder/stronger. And then you have the billionaires, Musk and Bezos, duking it out over satellite/internet coverage which will make the days of “no service” a thing of the past. But before that happens, you might want to buy a satellite phone like I have, and remember, this isn’t a cost-saving endeavor.

There are GPS devices out there that seem like they work great. But do your own research and think about what will work best for you. There are some that will send a message every two minutes to a loved one to let them know “I’m OK.” If I’m fishing with friends 100 miles offshore and sending “I’m OK” every couple minutes like messages in a bottle, I can assure you that the recipient will hope I’m lost at sea. And at up to $0.50 a message, that adds up. But if you insist on getting a device, pay off your mortgage, and with the savings, you can buy the nicest satellite phone on the planet.

Action Line: You don’t need to save the world in a weekend. Go about your survival prep in a methodical, timely manner, and you’ll feel like a million bucks. Then, you can focus on your pets because they don’t do well drinking out of a survival straw. And remember, survival prep is an every day, Sunday, Monday, Happy Days type of mindset.

 

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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com