How Long Prepping?

13 Years

I don't prep anymore......

But I can post again.....

Yipee........

13 years, but I don't prep to the extent I used to. My freezer is not jam packed like it used to always be. I still have tons of canned goods, but they are more organized and I seem to rotate them better.

Globally no disaster yet, but my preps have saved many.

Back in the late 80s - early 90s I was utterly broke. I was living in a single room in a house filled with other cash-strapped people. My store of beans, flour and rice kept the whole house full of other people and myself going for about 18 months. Eventually I moved away when I was promoted at work and began to get a little money together. The stores still saved 3 others even after I moved on.

When Hubby and I moved out of Norfolk 11 years ago, our prep stores (left behind) kept several other people going.

Those we now keep in our barn have regularily helped cash-strapped friends, although not to the point that they diminished by much, as I am a bit of a fanatic and keep adding to the pile. We even have some luxuries stored. Some of those made emergency presents/surprise celebratory booze-ups. So the stores pay off. In spring, wax logs and compressed sawdust logs are often flogged off cheap by supermarkets - I can't leave them there. So currently we are burning some of last year's preps. OK, I confess, they saved money for more preps. But they have proved their worth time and again

I have not really followed 'prepping' in the way that I see many in North America use the term (ie stock piling great amounts of goods).

Rather I have followed a path towards greater "self sufficiancy" concentrating on being able to survive shorter emergencies. Also, when I bought the house we are living in, 15 years ago, I had the idea that we would live here in retirement and so part of my plans was to reduce the running expenses (so we would be comfortable on the lower pension). This latter was a God-send as I was made redundant before turning 60 and then had to take early pension (so having to survive on about 2/3rd of what I had expected from the pension).

In areas like food production I have fallen woefully short of what I had hoped to achieve.

Probably the main success was to replace an oil heating system with a ground heat pump. This was the most expensive change we did to the house, but it paid for itself in 8 years (an annual 12.5% return on investment, which is fantastic in this age of near zero interest rates on savings).

Emotionally the best move was to put a wood burning stove into the kitchen. Comforting to know we could cook during power cuts, and also heat part of the house.

Also of great potential value was the installing of a hand pump on a well (which ran dry two summers ago, so in an emergency this will need to be used sparingly, unless it has been raining like the last month!)


With time I realised that I could never get as close to self-sufficiency as I had hoped (not enough land, not enough range of skills), so what I am looking at is to be able to survive an initial crisis period (say 1-2 weeks), and then to provide a supplement to what could filter through afterwards (in our area from some of the local farmers).