HomerJ wrote: ↑Sat Aug 29, 2020 8:31 am
Kelrex wrote: ↑Sat Aug 29, 2020 6:24 am
Grt2bOutdoors wrote: ↑Sat Aug 29, 2020 2:04 am
HomerJ wrote: ↑Fri Aug 28, 2020 11:35 pm
mortal wrote: ↑Fri Aug 28, 2020 10:06 pm
I mean, the worst case scenario is a nuclear exchange and the total collapse of civilization.
Part of me wants to spend $10,000 to stock up just in case that happens (my parents have a farm way out in the country)
But my wife would never let me
spend "waste" that much money on supplies and seeds and books and ammo.
But if it ever happens, and all our electronic ones and zeros end up meaning NOTHING, I'm going to be very sad I didn't turn a tiny fraction of my portfolio into those material goods.
I keep a normal stock of a few weeks of non perishable, it’s a fraction of the cost your talking about. Even if you bought that much in supplies, how long do you think you’d survive?
You can prep marginally well for one disaster, but not for all of them. A few weeks of food supplies (plus a knowledge of cooking from only non perishable ingredients), a go bag, extra medication, a good first aide kit, basic first aide skills, and some basic self sufficiency skills are all great short term hedges for most emergencies. Long term prepping? Virtually impossible, you would have to spend a fortune and gamble that you prepped for the correct scenario.
What good is 10K worth of food when the majority of major emergencies require evacuation? Sheltering in place actually requires the fabric of society to hold together, especially if you have resources.
An expert on disasters and emergency management once told me that the only way to realistically prepare beyond the basics is to "live a life without regrets".
Well, since my parents have a place out in the country, if we could get there, it would be a pretty good place to ride-out any catastrophe. Better than staying in the city with hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
I wasn't just thinking food.. Some food sure, but more like guns for hunting, seeds for planting, and a bunch of hard-cover "rebuild civilization" books.
You know, books that explain how to build a windmill or how to grind wheat into bread, etc.
It would be fun to put together a blacksmith shop out there (my dad already has a great wood workshop with a ton of tools, even all his old non-power tools),
I know it's silly, which is why I haven't done it... but I work on Disaster Recovery (among many other things) in my company, so I have a weird mind-set about trying to be prepared for as much as possible.
Maybe I'll start buying the books, if nothing else
As long as the catastrophe doesn't necessitate evacuation as I mentioned already, or destroy the property (and it's food and books), or result in violent uprising in the region, or invasion, or make the property and it's resources a target of theft or extortion, or the property doesn't get seized by the state, or the emergency doesn't result in one/some of your family members needing extensive medical care in an urban center, or, or, or...
A plan to shelter in place actually requires the fabric of society to hold together in order to be sustainable. Civilization can't be rebuilt until the state of emergency is restabilized, and in the meantime, surviving disaster is a very different process than thriving in the aftermath.
Holing up in a remote rural estate is a *great* option for *some* scenarios, but I would account for it as the rather limited hedge that it is.
In a lot of scenarios having a universally valuable skill that's useful in both destabilized and restabilized conditions is your best hedge because then no matter what society is doing and no matter what happens to your property, your human resources will probably protect you.
That's a not-totally-insignificant motivation behind why I became a medical professional. I figured it was useful no matter what the future brings.
Bringing it back to the OP's topic, this is also why even if I had no assets and no capacity to earn, I'm sure I could barter some skills for security.
Money is just a placeholder for skills, time and effort. If the money system collapses, the skills don't lose value.