And If Rising Food Prices Aren't Enough...Take a Look at Gas Prices

The last post was about rising food prices. Now, to add insult to injury, take a look at this article which predicts that gas prices could rise to $5 a gallon this summer. That's all people who are already stretched thin need...
A few years ago when gas prices rose to around $4.50 per gallon, it basically changed the way I looked at almost everything. Prior to that I drove literally everywhere, had a half dozen cars in the driveway, and didn't really consider anything different than the usual "American way" to do things (ie: drive, put myself at the mercy of big oil companies, and work even more to pay the bills). Fast forward to now. I currently have no home (by choice), no debts (by choice), no permanent employment (by choice), and one car (in storage). How did that happen? Here's how:

• I saw that gas prices were about $4.50 per gallon and became offended at both the high price and the way that the government, futures investors, and others jerked the average person around with gas prices that seemed to rise and fall apparently on a whim.
• Then we were on vacation, hopping on and off about any kind of public transit you could think of (city bus, jeepney, tricicyleta, motor scooter, etc) for basically pennies per ride, and it dawned on me that I had never considered public transit in my own country.
• I made a list of what types of public transit I could reasonably use in my own city. The list included walking, bicycling, city bus, light rail, train, and car pooling.
• Next I actually experimented with each type of transportation to see if #1, these options were feasible considering my work/lifestyle, and if #2, using these options actually saved me money. I found out that the answer to both of these questions was a resounding YES.
• As I made each these differing forms of transportation a part of my lifestyle (ie: walking to the grocery store, bicycling for errands that were a bit further, riding the bus all over the city to business meetings and social events, hopping on light rail when it was convenient, car pooling quite often to meetings, and even taking a train to get out of the city for the weekend) I realized that it would be possible to cut back on the cars, the gas expense, and the total reliance on big oil for my every excursion.
• So we now have one car that the spouse and I share. Did I mention that life is much simpler now? Only one car to maintain, clean, keep track of, pay taxes on, register, insure, etc.

That's the short version. After the cars went, I considered what other things I had just accepted as fact and considered ways to turn those assumptions on its head as well. So I quit working, sold the house, sold almost everything we owned, packed up a backpack, and have decided to travel for a while as a kind of "sabbatical" from the rat race.

But back to the topic of this post... The bottom line: when gas prices begin to skyrocket again, consider what alternate forms of transportation you could take to both save money and reduce your reliance on big oil. Who knows? Making this small choice could lead you in a direction you never imagined.

Food Prices...Eeek

We were at the local grocery store in Atlanta yesterday and I saw that apples were $1.79 a pound! My first thought was that because apples don't grow in the south the price might be higher, but being from Washington, that is an astronomical price to pay for apples.
Reading the latest headlines, however, my second thought was that maybe that was but one example of rising food prices. According to this article, this article, and this article, we may be in for a bumpy ride in the food sector in the coming months. Are you prepared? Here's how:

• Cook at home. This is hands-down the cheapest way to eat. Not only is the food you eat at home healthier (you know exactly what goes into it), it is also cheaper. Also, when food prices rise, they usually get passed on to the restaurant consumer pretty quickly.
• Start a garden. Now is the perfect time to get started growing some of your own food, even if all you can have is a bucket of tomatoes on your apartment balcony; the more food you can grow on your own, the better off you will be when prices start to fluctuate wildly.
• Process your own food. An addendum to the last point, when you grow a garden, be sure to process any excess food for later use (can, pickle, jelly, freeze, etc) so that you will, once again, have a hedge against rising food prices.
• Buy in bulk. I am big fan of loss leaders. These are the items on the front page of your local grocery store's advertising circular. These prices are meant to lure shoppers in with super low prices in the hopes that they will just buy all of their other groceries there as well. I usually just go for the loss leaders (and yes, you can freeze milk and cheese). I also like to buy grains in bulk (ie: 50 pounds of rice at a time, 50 pounds of oats at a time, etc).
• Look for cheap local sources of food. A CSA program through local farms is one idea, Chinatown markets with super low prices on many staples like fruits, vegetables, and grains is another. Buy at a farmers markets, barter with friends who have a garden, forage for wild food...you get the idea. What you want to do is stock up on food as cheaply as possible (note that in many cases when you get this abundance you will need to process it for later use).
• Expand your idea of farming. Maybe you are a whiz at growing tomatoes and corn but have you thought about raising chickens, rabbits, and goats? All are a good source of protein and when they are "on the hoof", so to speak, you don't have to process them until you are ready to eat (plus eggs from chickens and milk from goats will make you pretty much all-around self sufficient).
• Stockpile food in your home. There is nothing better than having a year's worth of food at your immediate disposal. Not only is this a hedge against steep price increases, your stockpile can see you through job layoffs, illnesses, giant unplanned family gatherings, etc.
• Simply don't buy things that are too expensive. Like clockwork, a storm comes through and obliterates the orange crop, ecoli makes tomatoes suspect and nearly impossible to find on grocers shelves, there's a spinach shortage/rice shortage/corn shortage/et al. Then there is the whole commodities market that jacks prices around like crazy on occasion. Anyway, my simple rule is that if something is super expensive, I will just live without it until the price comes back down to normal. This is pretty easy to do with spinach (you can substitute easy to grow chard) but a little more difficult with things such as coffee (addictions can be tough to break).

The bottom line is that you want to be one of those people sitting pretty at home with your food stockpile at the ready, not one of the harried shoppers you see interviewed on the news who was unprepared and because of that, not able to acquire the food they need for their daily sustenance.

10 Tech Tips for Travel

We are on the road now for an undetermined amount of time. While we had at first planned to hone-base out of a relative's home, we decided to put a few things in storage then just travel for six months to a year before deciding if, when, and where to settle down again.
Technology has made long term travel, as well as earning a living while traveling, so much easier than in decades past. Here's ten tech tips for travel:

1. A GPS device can be invaluable when driving in an unfamiliar area. I always pack mine so that whatever car I end up driving, I at least know where I am going.
2. When traveling outside of the US, turn off your smart phone! I can't count the number of stories I have heard about people going on vacation only to return to a huge cell phone bill because of the roaming charges incurred when they left their smart phone on and it kept updating their email/FaceBook/etc.
3. If you have a lot of people to keep in contact with, consider setting up a FaceBook page or a blog. Instead of telling the same story a dozen times to a dozen different people or wondering who you emailed that last batch of pictures to, you can have one page to update and then just email the link to everyone who is interested in following your travels.
4. When traveling overseas I always carry a cell phone that takes a SIM card (ie: a cell phone from ATT or TMobile, not from Verizon). It's a simple process to get the phone "unlocked" then insert a SIM card used in the country you are traveling to and immediately you have a working cell phone (with rates usually much cheaper than in the US).
5. The internet makes it pretty much a no-brainer to research anything you want to know about your new location...from the broad topic of local news (www.allyoucanread.com), to local happenings and info (www.reddit.com/r/nameofcity), to recommendations for great places to eat or shop (www.yelp.com).
6. The spouse and I travel with identical tech gear (same netbooks, cell phones, iPods, digital cameras, etc). This makes the interchange of equipment (everything from charger cables and batteries to memory cards) simple and if one widget (charger, etc) gets lost you don't have to run around trying to find a new widget as you can use the other's.
7. A small headlamp is invaluable. I also carry a small flashlight but the headlamp seems to get used more. So far I have used it when I run early in the morning and it is still dark--it keeps me from getting run over by cars!
8. All of my banking, business, investing, and bill paying is done online. This is extremely convenient and can be done from anywhere in the world.
9. Besides keeping a secured file of all of my personal information and passwords on my computer, I have also scanned in all of my important personal documents (copies of driver's licenses, passports, military records, birth certificates, marriage certificate, etc).
10. I keep plenty of apps and favorites on my smartphone and netbook for anything that may be useful as we travel (currency exchange, foreign language dictionaries, travel websites, ferry schedules, city transit info, etc).

Some Subreddits You Might Like

I'm a fan of reddit. In fact I can kill an entire hour just reading through posts on the site. Best of all, instead of having one very long list of posts on every subject under the sun like other message board-type websites, the site is broken down into many "sub-reddits". You may like the following sub-reddit pages:

• Survival
• Anti-State Multi
• Conspiracy
• Disaster
• Fitness
• Gardening
• Hacking
• Self Sufficiency
• How To
• Military
• Black Ops

There's literally hundreds and hundreds of other sub-reddit pages but these hit the high points. Here's a few more to check out:

• Reddit's main page
• Reddit Assistance (if you need help of some sort or can offer help)
• Ask Reddit (if you have a question and need an answer)
• A list of sub-reddits (click on search 3,000 at the top of this page for an even longer list)

Off on a New Adventure (And Some Survivalist Lessons)

It’s been three days since we sold nearly everything we own, including the house, stored some important stuff, and packed up what was left of our belongings and headed out to see how efficient and effective a mobile lifestyle can be, especially for a pretty die-hard survivalist.
Here’s what I have learned so far:
• The government isn’t a fan of people they can’t easily find. I tried to change the address on my driver’s license, per the law in my state which requires license holders to notify the department of licensing within ten days of their move, of their new address. After trying for an hour to explain to the lady at the counter at the DMV as well as her supervisor, as well as their state supervisor, that the only address I will have is that of my private mail box because I won’t actually be living in any particular place and will be traveling for the next year or two, they finally concluded that they couldn’t help me since there were no rules for them to follow governing such a situation. Which led me to a couple of conclusions…one, customer service and logical thinking is sadly lacking in this government-run organization. And two, if they can’t even figure out an address problem, I would hate to see what the government does if they are running the entire health care system. Scary. This makes me an even bigger fan of the less government/more free enterprise fan club.
• For day to day living (granted this isn’t an after-a-major-disaster survival situation) you actually need very few things to survive. Some cash, some clothes, some toiletries, a cell phone, a netbook…that’s about all I have with me (obviously the free accommodations and lots of free food provided by our hosts while we visit friends and family helps a lot). I simply can’t think of anything else I need to run out to the store and buy.
• Eating on the road can be expensive and less than healthy. Definitely the ability to have a home/your own kitchen and space to stock up on healthier food when it is on sale, or better yet, grow your own food, is a major plus to having an actual home location. I will be looking at ways to work around this situation as we get more into the mobile lifestyle.
• People are generally astounded that we can do such a thing. The bottom line is that more than anything it takes a major attitude shift as well as the ability to “be weird”—as Dave Ramsey says—in order to make such a thing happen. You basically have to go against everything you have ever learned as an American in our American consumerist culture in order to make such a change. This means saving money instead of shopping, saying NO to debt of any kind, living without a home (definitely something quite unusual!), and checking out of the consumer lifestyle of work-buy-work more-buy more. Obviously it is also important to have some source of income but you don’t need nearly as much income for this lifestyle as you do to support a mortgage/car payments/eating out every day/shopping at the mall every other day lifestyle.
• This lifestyle is at once both much simpler and more complicated than our previous “normal” lifestyle. Simpler because there is less to worry about—no roof to fix if it leaks, no bills to pay, no local politics to get into, no work-related hassles…you get the idea. More complicated because everywhere we go we need to settle into a new routine, deal with a lesser support system of people than we had when we were firmly rooted in a community, there are travel logistics that are always a hassle, and things we take for granted with a home (mail delivery, medical appointments, etc) need more attention than usual.
That's the high points so far. I'm sure there will be many more lessons to learn.

The Economics of Being a Vagabond

In the past week we have changed from "average" citizens with a home, job, ties to the community, etc. to, for lack of a better word, vagabonds. Surprisingly the spouse hasn't mutinied yet!
While the survivalist in me is quite happy with order, a guaranteed roof over my head, a year's worth of food provisions, and all of the other things that impart security in an insecure world, the vagabond in me is currently reveling in the fact that we now own very little. Here's what's changed:

• We have no home. We completed the sale of our house and are currently staying with relatives. We will then head off to visit other friends and relatives over the course of the next few months in the US before heading overseas for a few months then coming back to the US for what may be an epic physical challenge (more on that later).
• We have one small storage shed that is holding a few of our belongings that we didn't want to part with.
• Other things have been stored at the homes of trusted friends (vehicle, firearms, etc).
• The things we technically have at this point: a private mail box which will forward our mail to where ever we go, backpacks with our meager belongings that we will bring with us, a fairly good-sized emergency fund, and a fairly good-sized travel fund.
• Other things we won't have: gas bill, water bill, garbage bill, sewer bill, electric bill, mortgage payment, cable bill, property tax payments, house insurance payments, and the need to buy loads of junk during the course of normal shopping (in fact this greatly helped to pump up the travel fund as during the past few months our shopping was basically nil because we knew we were going to be leaving and not have room to pack anything else). Of course we have no debt which is the cornerstone of the vagabonding life.
• Things that we will pay for as we go: food, sundries. Shelter is graciously provided for free by friends and relatives for the time being.
• Some concerns: not being able to carry a firearm with me on a more or less daily basis as I usually did. Not even being able to carry a pocket knife with me! Not having a giant stockpile of food in case of emergency. Not having a garage full of stuff that would be very useful during an emergency.
• Alleviating these concerns: the fact that if there is a disaster in a certain area, relocating is as easy as hopping on a plane and going somewhere else. Also the fact that if there was a disaster, we would have very few possessions to loose in such an event.

That's what's happening so far. Posting will resume more regularly this weekend after we settle into our next temporary home.

Survival Lessons: An Egypt Case Study

If you are looking for an excellent example of what happens when TSHTF or a society begins to crumble, you need look no further than the news about the situation in Egypt. Here's some lessons:

• Situations, particularly political situations, can change very quickly. A few weeks ago it was business as usual, and now it is a freaking madhouse there. So while it is nice that the evening news can give you a week or two notice about the coming winter storm or hurricane, many other disastrous situations happen very quickly (which means you need to be prepared NOW!).
• Things that are in short supply over the course of a few days: water, food, security (neighbors are now having to band together to defend their property), money (ATMs are pretty much all out of order).
• The economy has come to a standstill. All phases of the economy have shut down due to this event. Suppliers can't deliver or manufacture goods. People aren't going to work. Citizens aren't out shopping or eating eating in restaurants. The very basics of the economy are ceasing to function (think, during such an event people skip going to the dentist, they certainly won't go in for plastic surgery or visit their local barber for a haircut). In short, no money is being exchanged in the usual economy (although I am sure the black market economy especially in weapons and other critically needed items is booming).
• Going out on the streets is a lesson in chaos. When there is no sense of safety or order, you take your life in your hands when you venture out. Even though the demonstrations started peacefully enough, they have degenerated into violence.
• The rules of polite society have gone out the window. Now you will see mostly men on the streets as women and children are hidden away from the violence. The wealthy, the elderly, basically anyone who is not able to protect themself could be in danger, not to mention those in the middle of the riots.
• When there is no social order, looting is one of the first things to happen. People will take advantage of the fact that no one is in charge and the police won't be coming so they think that they can just take anything they want. Citizens have, again, banded together to prevent looting and there is no such thing as waiting for a jury trial.
• The "mob mentality" can take over quickly and people can turn on each other in a heartbeat. People can be wholly unreasonable when they are in the midst of crisis and the mob mentality takes over. Even well respected journalists have been attacked.
• Infrastructure can go down quickly. This has been a common tactic for centuries--take out infrastructure (centuries ago it was destroying bridges and stopping the flow of water, these days shutting down electricity and the internet have the similar affect)--and control the people.
• Escape may or may not be possible so other alternatives need to be planned for. During political uprisings, many people head to the airport or try to find other routes to get away from the chaos. The problem is that everyone else has the same idea and systems that can barely handle usual day to day traffic can become overloaded and shut down rather quickly.
• People end up protecting themselves since the police won't be coming. In Egypt many people were brandishing knives and clubs. I would prefer an AK and Glock (and plenty of ammo). Again, plan accordingly.

So what have we learned? That what you have been doing all along is important. Stocking up on water in case the water stops flowing is important. Ditto stocking up on food. Making sure your home/business is secure and can withstand looting attempts is also important. Having goods that can be bartered in case the cash economy comes to a halt is a good idea. Being able to communicate outside of the usual ways (ie: HAM radio) is also important. Being able to protect yourself when there is no law and order could become a necessity. Working together now, with friends and neighbors, is a good idea as these may be the people you depend on in a disaster. Having alternate escape routes pre-planned could come in handy. Being creative and being able to react in a flexible manner is also important in chaotic, fluid situations.

Whether this will be a short term glitch or a long term event that will change Egyptian society significantly is still to be seen, but the opportunity to learn from afar by watching what is happening over there is a very good idea.