Prepping: Tips for the Frugal Prepper

welcome back friends prepared suburbanite here over the last couple of videos I've received a number of comments that were basically questioning asking how can I afford to prep it's all sounds like you got to spend a lot of money on it I don't have any place to put all this stuff and I really don't have any money to do all the things that you've recommended that we do so in this video I want to address a number of really important but very frugal tips on how to even save money while you're being a prepper so stick around gonna help a lot of good stuff to talk about [Music] so here we go first things first you need to know what your budget is you need to know what your expenses are you need to know all the sources of your income to establish that budget you need to know what you can afford to do and if you don't know what you're spending your money on if you don't know where your money's go in you don't know where it's coming from then you're not gonna be able to do a very good job I did a video recently within the last couple of months or so about the best tool for a prepper and in that I talked about creating a budget and the things that I've done to make sure that I've got the resources available in the knowledge in the history of all my income and all my expenses I'll put a link to that video down below so that you can watch that but that's number one is know exactly where your expenses are so that you can take a look at what you're really spending money on and then question every expense you see every dollar according to Dave Ramsey every dollar that you've got needs to have a purpose and if you don't know what that purpose is for that dollar that chances are you're gonna waste it so number one is establish a budget all your expenses and leave a line-item open for your preps so number two for the list of the best ideas to be able to afford to be prepared in the future number two is couponing my daughter is an excellent and steadfast coupon guru and I talked to her over the weekend about her experiences with couponing and she can actually document how much money she saves every week and every month when she uses coupons she clips him here she clipped some Nair she's got access on the internet to a number of couponing resource pages where you can download coupons and her suggestion to me was hey tell your audience that they should not be spending money just to save money and that rings true in a lot of cases and I think really what she's trying to say is don't buy stuff you don't use just to save twenty five cents off it doesn't make sense but do try to use those grocery stores and wholesale clubs that do offer maybe a double coupon back or that they honor everybody else's the other the competitors coupons that kind of stuff so that you can buy the stuff that you need that you use and save a ton of money doing it you can save a lot of money using coupons and related to that related to that is buying in bulk now buying in bulk is kind of tricky sometimes you've got to find the right supplier you got to find the right deals and you got to make sure you've done your homework so that you know exactly what you're paying for sometimes bulk items are priced higher per unit than just buying single unit doses of whatever it is that you're trying to stock up on so pay attention but in ninety nine point eight percent of the time you're gonna find that buying in bulk is gonna save you money in the long run so it may cost a little bit more upfront you may spend twenty five dollars to get a case of whatever as opposed to five dollars a piece because you know the difference between 25 and five that can be a lot of money when you don't have a lot of extra to spend but you won't have to spend that money again next week or the week after two weeks from now whenever you need to replenish that particular item so if you buy in bulk and you've got a couple extra dollars to spend after you've done your budget buy in bulk whenever you can and I'm talking meat I'm talking paper products toilet paper and paper towels food that's on sale case lots of stuff that you can get at your local Wholesale club's the Costco's and their DJs and places like that sam's club use the bulk buying opportunities that you have you will save money over time and time is money so number three on my list is develop some skills baking and canning are very very important as I mentioned and item number two if you're buying in bulk and you go to your local farmers market and you buy a couple of pecks or a bushel of tomatoes and you know how to can them you're gonna save a ton of money yeah you've got to invest some time you've got to invest in the canning jars you got to invest in a vessel to do the canning whether you do hot bath and cold death there pressure canning so there is going to be a little bit of an investment in that but that's what your budgets for is to allow you it up detail that kind of stuff saying that you can save up some money to buy the things that you need so that you can save money over time learn to bake we've been baking bread for on a regular basis pretty much every day since we since we retired and just bakin a loaf of bread is one of the most simple things that you can do we did a video Oh probably a year maybe a year and a half ago about the the bread recipe and how to put it together that we use and we've made some improvements on that particular recipe since then we found out they really don't have to leave it to set overnight for the bread to rise you can basically start it in the morning let it rise and then redo it in the afternoon and bake it but just before dinnertime and you can have a wonderful fresh loaf of bread and you know what it only costs pennies we buy flour just like everybody else does and the ten pound I think there are twelve pound bags now but you can get five pounders at the at the local supermarket you can get ten pounders 12-pounders that whatever you do that's sort of buying in bulk but we use I think two or three cups of flour a little bit of salt a little bit of sugar and either water or milk or once in a while with splurge that throw a can of beer in there's the liquid you mix it up you let it set you let it rise put it get it ready warm up your vessel stick it in the stove 425 degrees they think for maybe 30 minutes and you've got a loaf of bread and it really does only cost pennies I'm talking maybe ten or twelve cents of loaf as opposed to the cheapest bread you can buy which is maybe a dollar a loaf but you get into some of the better loaves of bread store-bought store brands and national brands you can pay three and four and five dollars a loaf or that kind of stuff so learn how to bake and canning is very very important my wife's learned to kin from her mother helping her around the kitchen she grew up on a farm in northern Pennsylvania and that's what they did they grew a garden they had fruit trees tomato plants potatoes all kinds of vegetables that kind of stuff and she learned how to can in a number of different methods of canning and she never forgot it and when we got to the stage in our lives when we were trying to be frugal trying to be self-sufficient trying to be prepared for everything she just had to brush up just a little bit a couple of conversations with her mom about how long to do this and how long to do that and it came back to her just like riding a bicycle and now we're investing in teaching our daughters and our granddaughters how to canned and it's not all that difficult but it does require an investment of time so learn those skills learn to bake learn to Kin and number four on my list of tips for being a frugal prepper and saving money while you're prepping at the same time is stop buying prepackaged meals I know how the convenience factor works I know that we're all Rushton day-to-day stuff with with jobs and kids and extracurricular activities and all that and it's just so much easier to pull some TV like dinner out of the freezer puppet the microwave and say there there's dinner it takes a bit of planning it may take an investment in a crock-pot may take an investment in developing some cooking skills but use what you've got don't do the prepackaged meals first of all there they're really not all that healthy for you using fresh vegetables fresh meats cooking on your own it really does create a much healthier very much healthier diet for you and you can save a lot of money prepackaged meals are very very expensive it may also be that you need to examine your diet what you're spending your your food budget on I know folks that at least before the pandemic when the restaurants were still open that would frequent a restaurant three and four even five times a week whether it would be for breakfast or lunch or dinner that whatever they'd be there a couple times during the week either for take-out or dying in kind of an experience at the local restaurants that gets pretty expensive you're not only just buying the food which are buying the convenience of having it pre-prepared for you by the chef's kitchen and you don't have to do all the cleanup all that kind of stuff but you're paying the premium for that and then another 15 to 20 percent on top for the tip for the waiters and waitresses yep so examine how you're spending your food and dining budgets and you may have to and you may want to and you may be forced to cut back on those kind of expenditures when you're spending majority of your food budget on dining out you really can't afford to do it if you'll want to start preparing and you'll want to have three to six months worth of food water in your storage areas for you and your family to enjoy in the future when things really get tough so number five on my list of the best prepping tips for the fugle prepper has really reviews and purpose I suggested I think in a previous video that that you invest in the 55 gallon water drums the 275 gallon or 330 gallon water totes and you know they can be pretty expensive I think I paid about 125 dollars from my water tote the individual rain barrels the 55-gallon drum rain barrels I think we're about 90 bucks a piece and they cost a couple extra bucks to ship because they're kind of big and bulky so you know that costs money but that doesn't mean you shouldn't store water you've got ready-made containers already all you got to do is clean them out your old milk jugs juice jugs that kind of stuff clean them out make sure that they're super super clean get your water in there make sure you've got a way to purify that water and use that kind of stuff yeah it creates a little bit of extra storage kind of a thing and I'll get to I'll get to some storage thoughts in a second here but you're going to need to really consider reusing and repurposing items that you've already got that you've been throwing away on a religious basis for a long long time learn to reuse and repurpose all those items my granddad was a success I guess during the the Depression he had a great trade he was a plumber when the Great Depression hit in the 30s he didn't really lose any work he wasn't unemployed he wasn't standing in bread lines and all that but like everybody else he had to learn how to be frugal and self-sufficient in order to get through all that rough and tumble times that that generation lived through and as I got to know him when I was a teenager and young he was one of the most frugal people I think I ever saw he would treat himself once a week to a Kentucky Fried Chicken box so he'd ordered the Kentucky Fried Chicken he'd pick it up and bring it home and it came in a little cardboard box so he'd enjoy his chicken he probably got two meals out of that chicken dinner and he'd enjoy his meal and he'd pick up a couple extra napkins while he was there waiting for his his box to be delivered and he picked up a couple extra napkins now those napkins according to him have eight corners so when you unfold the napkin you get four corners on the front and four corners on the back and for every meal okay he views a corner to wipe his chin wipe his mouth that kind of stuff if it made any spills he just use that quarter of it and he'd get it eight meals out of a single napkin because that's the way he learned how to be frugal and how to save his money and then he'd take the box that the chicken dinner came in and he'd cut it up into little pieces that were no pea sized so two inches by three inches kind of a thing and that was his notepads so he'd make notes okay here's what I got to buy at the store here's what I got to pick up at the hardware store so he'd make notes using those cardboard containers that the KFC chicken dinners came in so my hats off to my granddad for really learning how to be as frugal as you can and he died pretty much a wealthy man because of it and he enjoyed life because he enjoyed learning how to save money one of the other comments sometimes together and sometimes in a separate comment where the comments well I live in an apartment I don't have any room I don't know where I'm gonna put all this guy well it is tough we've got some friends that live in I guess what you'd call a modified townhouse over in the next town and it came with I think three bedrooms he and his wife share one bedroom he converted the second bedroom into kind of a rec room TV room upstairs and uses that closet that closet in that bedroom as part of his prep storage area he purchased a set of shelving from the local big-box store Lowe's or Home Depot of whichever one that was just about the right size to fit underneath that one shelf that goes across on the top of a regular-sized closet and it was just high enough to fit in there if five or six shelves on it and he filled it up with canned goods pasta macaroni spaghetti that kind of stuff extra coffee on it and that little shelving unit held a awful lot of extra food preps for him he could still use that closet on the other side of it to hang clothes and stuff like that but that was a great idea when we bought this house here the back bedroom the original owners had put in a set of shelving units in that back bedroom closet right in the center that were just surprisingly enough just tall enough for a court ball jar and deep enough that you get nine on a shelf so it was just wide enough to hold three and deep enough to hold three in the back so you get nine quarts of canned goods in there and just kind of by happenstance when we started canning after we'd been living here for a while so where are we gonna put all this stuff I took a canning jar up there and I looked in that closet and they said my god that's the right size so I think the original owners actually planned that to happen and that that was going to be their auxilary storage area for their canned goods there are there actual canned vegetables and stuff like that that they did have a garden they raised Tomatoes and stuff like that so I suspect that that's exactly the purpose floor we use it still to this day that whole Center shelving unit there's clothes on either side but in the center there's enough room in there for one two three four probably six shelves with nine so you're talking over 50 quarts of tomatoes or string beans or wax beans or peas or whatever you're going to can enough room for that so those are some of the kinds of thoughts that you can use to be able to take advantage of some additional space take a look at your closets and rotate out those clothes that you really aren't wearing if you haven't worn it in a year and a half then take it out donate it to the Salvation Army or the rescue mission whoever's in your town that does that kind of stuff repurpose it and give it to charity so that the folks that have less than you have a chance to look good so take that space after you've donated it take a look at that space and say how can I utilize that to store the preps that I need to invest in this is the prepared suburbanite I've been prepping for a long long time been around the block a few times learned a lot of lessons about being prepared and here's my message to you be prepared always and I'll see you all on the next video and if you like these videos please hit the like button click subscribe and leave us a comment below thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Prepared Suburbanite

Views: 17,949

Rating: 4.9599638 out of 5

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Id: JuR0SGhZnfE

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020