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Although not normally listed as such, the ability to defend yourself is high up there on the list of survival priorities. It won’t kill you in 30 minutes, like losing your body heat will; nor will it kill you in 3 days, like going without water; you can’t even say that it will kill you in 30 days, like a lack of food can. For some, the inability to defend themselves will never make a difference at all. But for others, that lack could allow someone to kill them in a matter of seconds. A lot depends on the specific...

Building the perfect stockpile is both the perfect joy and the bane of every prepper. The reality is that there is no such thing as a perfect stockpile, as much as we all wish there was. That's partially because we never know what disaster we're going to face. So, we keep seeking perfection, knowing that we'll never find it. The good news is that seeking perfection is a worthy goal; it's not a waste of time. Each time you find something missing from your stockpile and add it, you reduce the number of problems that you'll be unprepared for. That...

If you've ever watched the program "Doomsday Preppers," you've probably noticed that each person or family featured on the program has a particular disaster scenario they're preparing for. While I'm fairly sure that all the people who are featured on the show are preppers to some degree or other, I'm also sure that whatever they are saying is being carefully edited for television. As part of that, I seriously doubt that most of them have only one disaster in mind. The fact of the matter is, there are many different potential disasters that we all face, each and every day...

Building a food stockpile big enough and diverse enough to survive through a disaster takes time, effort and money. Some things, like rice and beans are fairly cheap, allowing us to stockpile them quickly and easily. But few of us would want to try living off of just rice and beans for a month, let alone for a year. While rice and beans is better than nothing, it's not as tasty or nutritious as a truly balanced diet would be. The next step for most people is adding canned goods. Canned fruits and vegetables are plentiful, readily available at any...

Prepping is a financial challenge for most preppers. Oh, there are the wealthy ones, who are building survival retreats that you hear about. But they are in the minority. The rest of us struggle with trying to fit prepping into an already stretched budget, as if we can make each dollar go three ways. Sadly, dollars don’t do that, so prepping usually means that we’re not doing something else, so that we can use some of our money on prepping. Even then it’s a stretch for most of us to have the money to stockpile all the supplies and buy...