Author Archives: Thom

Survival Tips from Popular Mechanics

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The weekend’s earthquake in Chile, following so closely on the heals of the Haiti quake and a lesser publicized quake in Japan, really emphasizes the importance of emergency preparedness. Popular Mechanics has been tackling this issue for awhile now, and has prepared a special section full of interesting articles. Go there to learn how to Survive Anything.

Glenn Reynolds, one of my favorite bloggers, has long been an advocate for emergency preparedness as well, and recently wrote this piece for Popular Mechanics.

 

Chilean earthquake creates fear of shortages

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A whopper of an earthquake in Chile has people lining up to buy gas in Hawaii. Twitpic here. I guess the resultant tsunami warning has people fearing the shipment of gasoline may be impacted, creating shortages. And of course, as in most cases, the fear of shortages creates the shortage. Perhaps this post wasn’t as radical as I sometimes think.

 

It’s 10:00. Do you know where your personal records are?

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Keeping track of personal records is one area that is very important, but usually overlooked. Nothing makes this more clear than a house fire, but anyone who has ever applied for a mortgage has also experienced the panic that comes from not being able to find key papers that were “right there, I know it!” Or has even gone to the emergency room with a minor injury and had to admit you don’t remember when your last tetanus booster was.

Perhaps the most important step in preparing for emergencies is to locate the most critical documents and put them together in a single, easy to grab repository–a binder or small box, perhaps. This way you know what to grab if you ever need to evacuate your home in an emergency. But good management of personal records goes way beyond dealing with personal disasters. It’s an ongoing process that takes some time and effort to begin with, but becomes almost effortless the more you get into it.

Managing (including risk management of) personal records is a favorite topic of mine. I’m starting a series discussing it in more detail over at Taxidrivermom’s collaborative blog, The Knot in the Rope. Rather than post in two places, I’ll post each installment there, and link to it from here. Meanwhile, check out Knot in the Rope. It’s got a little of everything if you’re interested in personal preparedness and self-reliance.

 

Frugality, financial compatibility, and the silver lining of unemployment

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One of the smartest financial decisions I ever made was marrying my wife. I’m a reasonably frugal guy, but she is great at it. I think it comes from living in Estonia under the Soviet Union for awhile. They didn’t have much, so everyone got used to getting by on very little. As a result she’s never been one to spend extravagantly.

When we got married I wasn’t making much money. It seemed like a lot at first because it was the first time I’d ever been on salary instead of wages, so thinking “lump-sum” made it sound so much greater than it really was. At any rate, when we got married things were a bit tight. We’d just barely squeaked our way into a home loan to buy my brother’s house, and it seemed like we were one major appliance failure away from financial ruin. Yet because we were frugal we got by, and even absorbed a few lesser financial problems.

In time, however, my income started rising. And that’s where my wife really helped out. My first instinct was to increase our budget to match our increased income. We could afford to live a little better now, I figured. But she was firm, insisting that we instead put that money into savings. I grudgingly went along with it at first, but after awhile I got a bit excited to see how much we were putting away and how we could endure minor setbacks more easily.

That became the pattern for the ten years we’ve been together. My income continued to rise, and as we were having kids, our expenses rose, too. But because of our frugality our expenses did not keep pace with my income. We were spending more money, but we were saving more, too.

Am I ever grateful for that savings now–and that frugality. I lost my job nine months ago, and though unemployment insurance helps, we still rely on our savings quite a bit. Our savings has been holding up amazingly well. That’s partly because we were saving so much, but it’s also because we know how to be frugal. The minute I knew my job was going away we went into “bare minimum” mode and were able to cut our budget by about a third. That really helps the savings go farther.

Eventually I will find work again, and then we’ll see the silver lining. Unemployment has helped us identify and eliminate some of the fat from our budget. When my income goes back up again it will be much easier to simply say “no” to letting our budget increase again rather than having to look for ways to cut back once we’ve gotten used to spending more. We can move forward with a much more efficient budget and with any luck rebuild our savings that much faster.

Of course first I have to find work, so our savings may continue to take a hit for awhile, but it’s comforting to know that I’ve got such a strong partner in my wife. It’s a big relief knowing that she’s working just as hard or harder to keep our expenses down right now. We’re under enough strain right now without having to clash over money as well.

Being married to someone I’m financially compatible with is a true blessing.

Keeping sufficient gas in your car

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To continue on the theme of the last post a bit, I believe it was the same person who first taught me about disaster kits who told me that you should always keep at least half a tank of gas in your car at all times. The reasoning, he said, was that in an evacuation you don’t want to have to stop to fill up. Even if you are not in any physical danger at the moment, you could encounter long lines at the gas station of those who do need to gas up.

It’s better, he said, to keep at least half a tank in your car. That way you can drive quite a distance before you really do need to fill up, and that should usually be enough to get you out of the area of danger. Gas stations farther away will not be as busy, as well.

I have always tried to heed this advice, at least most of the time. But thinking back on it, is it really necessary? Is it over-thinking things? Like the disaster kit it’s something that doesn’t really make sense until suddenly it does. But then, how many disasters are going to require that you drive 100 or more miles to escape?

What do you think? Is keeping half a tank of gas in your car a sound practice, or just needless fuss?

Disaster Kits

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Some people may question whether or not you need to stockpile food and supplies enough for long periods of time, but very few will argue that you don’t need a disaster kit. Disaster kits are portable supplies of food, water, clothing, and other essentials to last about 72 hours, or three days. That is usually the amount of time it takes to restore basic services in the event of a disaster.

Disasters can take on many forms. For example, the area where we live is known to have earthquakes. There is also the possibility of severe winter storms. Add to that, we live about a quarter mile from a major road in one direction, a quarter mile from a rail line in the other direction, and about half a mile from a major freeway. We are also not far from several industrial areas. An accident resulting in a chemical or oil spill could easily result in our evacuation.

Of course unless a disaster is very large in scope very few will be in a position where they cannot simply go stay with friends or family. But even then, if you catch them unprepared it may be better to have at least some basic supplies for yourselves.

What goes in a disaster kit? A lot depends on you, but Jodi and Julie over at Food Storage Made Easy have a good page dedicated to the topic of disaster kits. They also discuss different approaches to getting a kit here. The main thing is to get one. We bought small plastic totes and put together a tote for each member of the family. Once a year we go through them and rotate the food and make sure the clothing still fits. We have three children, aged nine and under, so we should probably update our kits more often than that.

Waterproof things when you can. During one recent inspection we found that a can of liquid had rusted through and leaked into one tote, making a stinky, sticky mess. Several other items were ruined by the moisture. If it is absolutely essential that some items be dry (such as matches, candles, or important documents) it’s worth putting them in a sturdy zip-lock bag, or even sealing them in durable plastic with a vacuum sealer.

Another very important factor is location. Disaster kits should be stored where you can get at them quickly during or immediately following an emergency. If you had ten minutes to evacuate, would you be able to get everything you need into your family vehicle in time? Store your kits near the most likely escape route from your home. Ours, for example, are right next to our garage door. I can have them loaded in the back of our mini-van in the time it takes to get all the kids into the van and buckled in.

It’s true that disaster kits take time and money to maintain, but if you ever need them they will be valuable beyond estimation. Just ask anyone in New Orleans during Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami, or the Haiti earthquake. Three days of basic supplies can literally be the difference between life or death.

Disclosure

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The FCC has decided that bloggers not revealing where they receive income is a threat worth quashing. I agree it’s unethical, for example, to blog about how wonderful Nabisco products are without disclosing that Nabisco is paying you $200 a month to say nice things about them from time to time. I don’t think we needed the government to step in and police that, but it is what it is.

And so here is my disclosure:

I may recommend–or at least review–books and other products from time to time. If I provide a link to Amazon.com or some other site to those products, I’ll probably get some sort of a reward if you click on or buy those products. I try not to recommend things I don’t believe in just to make money.

The other is VIP Gamestore, a video game store. I have mostly just a passing interest in video games, but I believe in our approach. There are people for whom video games are a key source of entertainment. It’s not incompatible with this blog to offer people a way to obtain that entertainment more economically. There may be some relevance here from time to time, and so there may be some links as well.

I am also a consultant/private contractor in several areas. I’m not sure how that will tie in with anything I say here, but I’ll disclose that, too.

If, in the future, anyone offers to pay me or offer me goods/services/rewards for links, references, reviews, etc., I’ll be sure and disclose it. I’ll probably do a little happy-happy dance, too, but I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

So rest assured that unless I say otherwise, anything I link to, mention, or plug outside of my business ventures indicated above I am doing out of true, unadulterated interest and/or enthusiasm. Read with confidence.

Introduction to Simple Self-Reliance

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Last year I became a grim statistic; one of the one in ten people who can’t find work. The past nine months have revealed both good and bad. The good is that my family and I have been above average in our self-reliance. We had money put away for emergencies such as this. We were able to cut back on our budget considerably. We are able to make do, do without, or make it ourselves in quite a few areas.

But I’ve also realized that we could do more. I have nothing against my mechanic, but it costs me $30 to have him change my oil–something I’m pretty sure I could do myself with a little study and practice. I’m still having professionals come and fertilize my lawn and spray my trees. I’m still paying $30-40 for tax software, even though I’m pretty sure there are cheaper alternatives.

Or perhaps I’m just not thinking creatively enough. Is there some skill I possess that I could use to barter with someone else who has the skills I lack? Could I have my friend the out-of-work accountant do my taxes in exchange for my setting up a website for his wife’s day care?

The more I think about it the more I realize that there is much more I could do to become even more self-reliant if I put my mind to it. Could the drive for self-reliance become a harmful obsession? Of course it could. But I don’t think I’m there yet. The key, I think, is to determine which areas are the most beneficial and focus on those first, then apply whatever time you have to lesser gains.

For example, is it really worth my time to figure out how to save $20 on an oil change every three months if I could instead figure out how to save $150 on lawn fertilizer each year? Perhaps not. Why waste time trying to save two cents more on a tube of toothpaste that runs out once a month if there are ways to save two cents per roll of toilet paper that I replace every few days? There’s self-reliance, and then there’s psychosis.

So hopefully this blog will prove to be both useful and sensible. I’m not advocating we all move to the back woods and build our own compound with our bare hands and prepare ourselves for doomsday. But if I can figure out how to keep at least a week’s worth of food on hand just in case severe weather causes the store shelves to empty for a few days or a new pandemic forces a quarantine, wouldn’t that be a worthwhile pursuit? I think so.

And that’s why I want to do this blog.