#1 – You Lack The Support of Your Spouse.
We’ve covered this here and here and it is a big deal. Without support from your spouse and family it’s difficult to stay focused and to
make matters worse some will be down right hostile toward the idea. Survivors who fail to get family support, usually give up on the idea of prepping altogether.
Or if you’re like me, give up on the relationship. Some people simply aren’t compatible no matter how hard they try to “make it work” it doesn’t. This was one of the reasons for my divorce.
We had nothing in common each of us seeing the world very differently. If you’ve tried everything and it still isn’t working perhaps you should consider that alternative.
#2 – You don’t really believe a collapse will happen.
Surprisingly, many calling themselves preppers or survivalist’s don’t think a collapse will really ever happen. They look at survivalism as a hobby or an excuse to buy guns or build that super-duper bug out vehicle with camo paint job, run-flat tires and machine-gun port in back.
They prep because they think it is cool but will ultimately fail, because of a lack of motivation, skill, planning or means of sustainable self-reliance.
#3 – You fail to execute.
OK, this sounds obvious. Surely we all know that we have to take action to get somewhere.. You can read all the survival blogs and books seeking advice and knowledge, but Knowing is not enough. Having ability is not enough. You have to take action with what you learn.
Thinking about it doesn’t get it done, you have to execute, even when it is uncomfortable.
#4 – You have no plan.
Without a well thought out plan (just don’t plan so much that you never take action) you get nothing done. You run around, like a chicken with its head cut off, you make a lot of noise and stir up dust but accomplish nothing for your effort.
First you need to look at your location, skills, current supplies and threats then mind map solutions. Make a list of thing you need and things you need to do and do it.
#5 – You try to do it all at once.
When you actually sit down and start making a list, you will probably end up with a long list. Decide what is most important to your survival and move these items to the top of your list. These are the goals to start working on first.
Keep your list of the remaining goals to get back to later. Trying to do too much at the same time can be self-defeating.
What do you think?
What did I miss? Agree, disagree? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments …
{ 32 comments }
You have to have the finances and a reserve. If the bill collector zombies are after you, you’ll probably fail as a survivalist. That’s the only other thing I can think of right now.
I suspect those who will fail in the biggest way are those who don’t see that being financially secure is important. Those who are way over their heads in debt yet spend a lot on preps may lose it all.
Is there really such a thing as “financially secure” any more?
Probably not the way you’re thinking of it. It’s all very relative. Your prep expenses have to be in line with what you can afford. Spending huge amounts on preps when your income won’t support it may mean ultimately losing it all.
I completely agree. I believe that financial preparedness is a huge and often overlooked aspect of preparedness.
A while ago, I listed several dozen preparedness scenarios ranging from minor and common to catastrophic but extremely unlikely. While money would do absolutely no good in some of these scenarios (think hyperinflation or an EMP attack), money was the key preparedness factor for many others.
This point was driven home just a few weeks ago when my company went through their first round of layoffs in their 25 year history. Five weeks ago, me and all of my colleagues thought we had some of the most secure jobs in the free market. Three weeks ago, 40% of my colleagues in my work group were out of a job. While food storage can be a nice asset in a situation like this, nothing quite helps like a few months worth of income in a secure bank account.
I’d be curious to know, with regard to #5, what is it that you would put as the the top five most important items (whether things or actions) for your survival…?
Brenda,
That depends on your individual situation and location – for me paid for shelter was number one. All my survival supplies would do little good if I was forced to live in a cardboard box.
The first three things you need to survive are: Protection from harsh elements, clean driking water and nutrition in the form of food. Keep this in mind as you make your plan.
A lot of people see the whole “Big picture” and are overwhelmed. I’ve been told “Geesh, you can’t get it all together. It can’t be done.” I say it’s better to have something than nothing. Newbies need to start small with food and warmth. Get two weeks, then move on to something from the other categories.
Others fail to make the long term commitment. They start, then sit on their laurals only to discover their goods have expired, spoiled, or aged out and they never got any use out of them. Way too many times I’ve heard of someone who threw out 300 lbs of something in their mother’s basement that just sat there for 30 yrs.
I have full support of my wife, but It didn’t come easy. I had to educate her with films, and over the years she submitted. I kinda do things a little at a time these days. I have what I call my 50.00 Wally World survival basket. Today it consisted of A 50 round box of Federal Hollow point 40 cal. for my Springfield XDM 40 cal, and the other half went towards rice, beans, and several canned foods. Over the year I have managed to fill a whole pantry, and over 6000 rounds of ammunition.
I understand this isnt much, but It should kick start our survival. I recently also purchased a solar generator, and made the the roof of my shed detachable for it.
Love the blog, and keep up the great work.
Mojo
I would add “Lack of Experience”. You may never truly experience what any collapse or crisis might be, but it doesn’t hurt to pretend.
Plant that garden, don’t just store seeds – then you will make less mistakes when the SHTF.
Try various practical hobbies – for instance, I am master of very little, but I’ve sewed, knitted, built, mended, kept chickens and rabbits, repaired autos, wired houses, slaughtered animals, made sausages, brewed beer and wine, planted gardens, found wild food, picked herbs and made creams, potions, tinctures and syrups. Now is when it’s easy to learn the skills. The next course I plan on taking is butchery.
Re-enact a period in history – we used to do this a lot when I was homeschooling.
Go hiking for fitness and stamina in case you ever need to go on a forced hike. My daughter recently introduced me to Geocaching (http://www.geocaching.com/) which is a really fun way to go out and about in both urban and country locations.
In short, look for experience and acquire useful skills – even if it’s only the basics.
Jean,
Lack of Experience would be my number one reason were it listed. Although I didn’t have a garden this year, my garden last year just didn’t produce to its potential, and I blame it on a lack of experience. I grew up on and eventually had my own ranch, but I never gardened at all, and it shows. Raising livestock(beef cattle) is much different than small-scale vegetable production, but I will learn from my mistakes. Great addition to MD’s lists of why we might fail. I pray all is well with your husband. Kindest regards.
Thank you, templar knight – my husband has just come home from hospital and is improving every day.
Where do you find practical courses like butchering?
I’m in England, so it might be different for you. This is where I’ll be going: http://www.martinsjerkedmeat.com/butchering.php
I only wish to re-iterate that the time to practice and prepare is now, while we still have a fully functioning support system, the store shelves are full, we have access to medical facilities, and the gas-stations are still pumping fuel.
A lot of “preppers” are actually “gatherers” in that they spend enormous amounts of time and energy in gathering (hoarding) their supplies, but they have zero practical experience in using them.
The time to plant a garden is now, not then. If someone has stored seeds, that’s great, but if they haven’t gained the first-hand knowledge of what it takes to turn the soil, plant, and maintain a garden, then they will be in for a surprise. Plus, what does one do while waiting several months for the food to grow?
It also doesn’t take much to turn off the main breaker to your house and spend a weekend without electricity. A first hand run will quickly show you what your preparations might be missing. ( lol, I can hear it now, “But I won’t have cable or internet access without power!)
Today is the time and when tomorrow finally gets here, you will be ready.
Ignoring health issues is a surefire way to fail.
i guess i fall in the number 2 category. i admit this is a hobby for me. I’ve been doing this kind of stuff since i was a kid. Its not that i don’t believe bad things are coming I do. i just go at it in as positive away as i can. I don’t have a supped up Bug out vehicle. I don’t have a hid in gun stash. I don’t spend 2 3rds of what i have on prep. That’s because i do treat it as a hobby. doing that im able to get my family on board with out the o great dads gone crazy. the house is paid for. My wife keeps 2 closets full of long term food. She has begum our coupon goddess and thrift shop queen. help us find what we need cheap. I garden, and practice what i preach in the backyard and yes i do it cause it is fun. it also has benefits. Because i make it a fun hobby the family enjoys doing it with me and we are on the same page if there is situation that we have to manage. I am very worried about our future. I am going to prep . I ‘m just not going to let it consume me to a point of forgetting to live my life as well as possable. I wish everyone here the best.
Tiger
PS love this blog
You have a lot of great ideas as do some of the other comments. Being an unemployed student (in his fifties), it is difficult to accumulate a lot. But you have some great prep ideas that really don’t require much money, if any. Following some of those will at least get me closer to being prepared. Thanks for your work and practice of the art and sharing with others.
Lack of (read None) OPSEC.They tell everyone and thier granmother that they are stocking up.Always talking about the latest toy they have gotten.The four cart shopping trips to Sam’s or COSCO in a one horse town.
Sorry when it it hits the fan they are going to be marked has a big Fail,might has well put out a mini wally world sign on the front lawn.
Anoter thing,,lack of pratice.Sure they have all the wizz bangs with all the bells and whistles.LOL,more than likely still in the packages.I know one guy, now he has a good start with his preps,but will not use them at all,says they are for “if and when”.Ugh,took him out the guy could not even make a fire without a lighter,and well lets just be nice and say he could not it the side of a barn with a 12ga from 20 yards.
I agree with all your points- here are a few more:
You prepared for the wrong disaster; or you mistimed your preparations. There are a lot of scenarios and the preparations for one are not necessarily the same for the other. If your deep woods bugout area winds up in the middle of a titanic firestorm initiated by lightning strikes, you may not make it.
The disaster was simply too great within your area, or you had “bad luck”. Examples would include catching the “flu” that wipes out civilization. If the H1N1 had been the killer bug, I would not have made it.
You die of some other cause before the SHTF. Once people start getting into their mid-50s bad things start happening at a quicker pace and doesn’t let up until you get to your mid-70s when it plateaus. Obviously living a healthy lifestyle will help some, but in general people overestimate the amount of control they have in their health outcomes.
You go broke with your extravagant preparations prior to the SHTF. Borrowing a lot of money to do your preps would be a good way to go this route. This is a close cousin to your “Trying to do it all at once”.
The government confiscates your land. If they label you as a nativest terrorist (you do have an awful lot of ammo don’t you?) you would also have the additional problem of being in confinement when the SHTF. You could replace this with many sorts of heavy handed activities that governments like to do at times.
The SHTF somewhere else. This of course would be good. In many of the historical SHTF-events there were remnant groups that did fine. So if you wind up near a power plant that they keep running, and the locals get their together, you may never need to your plan. Arguably you could argue that this is a different type of plan, but since most of the people within these areas that survive make no (or very few) preparations I am not sure that would be accurate.
I got rid of my TV and spent alot of time trying to grow stuff in my backyard, only to find that women I dated thought it was weird that I gardened, especially because I didn’t like it, they didn’t like guns, and they could never think of anything to talk about other than TV shows I had never heard of and wouldn’t watch even if I had a TV. This happened several times. Needless to say, I’m still not married and I quit gardening when my Tomatoes died (I couldn’t keep anything else alive either).
Matt– not everybody is a farmer. Surely you have some other talent. Find it. Leather working, blacksmithing, engine mechanic, medical, etc. Look back on the Great Depression and find what kind of work paid off when others went hungry.
Well, I AM a Machinist and Firearms expert (I even work for a gun company), I just wanted to broaden my horizons a little. Thank you for the encouragement.
My wife was not only not on board but talked me into helping her start a business that I did not think would make it. Either help her or she was gone. I loved her so I decided to support her and hope that when it failed it would not be so bad. In one month she cleaned me out before I got the statements and then left anyway. Now I have credit card bills and a mortgage to pay on my own. The business failed and some of her creditors there have tried to get me to pay her bills, I did have the good sense to do the INC thing so they will have see what they can get out of a bankruptcy.
I have considered walking away with the preps I already had and going to my sisters place(good place, with room for me on another small farm so I would not be under foot for them and I can look after their other place better than the tennants that come and go leaving only trash. My home value has fell about a third in the last 2 years and nobody is willing to pay what the ex borrowed against it.
Lesson learned; even with a trusted spouse fix your credit accounts so it takes two names on the paper to access the funds/credit. People change, sometimes not for the better.
So I guess I am on the fail side of the ledger now. The only thing I have going is my family and they OWN their place as long as they can pay the taxes. I have helped them in the past and she and brother in law have begged me to give up on my place and move. It’s good to have family that cares.
That is rough. I am sorry that it didn’t work out better for you.
Small business fail 80% of the time within the first few years.
I have seen people say that running a small business is a good way to move your preps along: you will make more contacts, have more control, etc.
But the reality is that if you can be employed at an amount of money that you can live on, the owners are taking most of the risks. I have seen studies that people who start up are not risk-tolerant, they simply don’t acknowledge the risk.
If it had not been someone I thought was my life’s partner I would not have even thought about a new business. She had issues, the only Daughter had recently married and moved a state away and I believe she felt useless and had “friends” that talked her into the business. I should have stopped it and been the SOB, she even told me later that she wished I had stopped her, we might not be together but we would not be broke either. I have not had good luck with women, my first wife died of heart trouble at 37.
Number one was all about being prepared, she came from a dirt poor family and learned early on not to waste anything and to save for a bad day. She even bought me a new M1A for Christmas once. She knew I wanted one but even back then I had no hope of being able to afford one but she worked overtime for a year and saved it all for the gift.
Sorry about the wine, sometimes it helps to scribble stuff on the internet and let strangers tell you what a idiot you have been.
I am sure if my health holds out I will overcome my setback. The extra time I have has been spent in the woods and on the river so as to keep the body and mind busy. I also have great friends that have been very supportive. (except for the attempts at blind dates)
You might fail if you are into…censorship…but you won’t post it!
if i fall into any cat it would be # 2 i do believe collapse will happen i think it already is but its a frog in the boiling pot type deal so slow we dont see it as a collapse.10 years from now we will look back and see it but we are so busy treadingwater we dont. a bug out senerio may happen with a emp or atomic bomb but outside of that it will be so graduale we wont see it. i prepp now while i can afford to so when i cant i have a fallback.survivalizm is about living when others dont. prepps are for making the transition easyer.i can adapt so i will survive.
I agree with your article. Taking survival serious and maintaining that exact thinking is critical. I would never let another person’s thoughts or actions deter me from prepping for a short and a long-term situation and I would just keep on keepin’ on because I know what the end result will be wtshtf. I have been living next door to someone who knows how to take care of the home base during short-term conditions but through persistence and working with them, a little at a time, they are learning about bug out bags and long-term survival especially without a home. It is not always easy but true progress is never rapid. Not long ago they believed that because they knew how things were done that they were certain that they would do well in all situations they may encounter. After attempting to build a fire without success because they had never practiced they began to realize that what they knew did not equal experience. Their thinking is becoming more realistic and they are becoming more open to getting together to practice everything from building fires to setting up shelters in wind and rain. I never thought this day would come but I am glad that it has. What a relief it will be to know they will be able to survive when the time comes. Belief is good but without experience there is not much there to rely on.
The biggest reason I might fail is the disaster that hits you out of left
field, like a train wreck with a chlorine cloud, an accident at San Onofre nuclear power plant with the wind coming at me off the ocean. A nuclear waste truck overturning on the freeway or the big earthquake being so huge it wipes out 3 states. Everything I have seen lately, says the one that gets you is the one thing you didn’t count on. I have evacuated 3 times from my homes. Once a fertilizer fire that threatened to blow up several square miles, once from a chemical fire, and once from a huge fire storm. I only saw the fire storm coming. The other ones are what caused me to be a prepper. Had 5 minutes warning on the other 2.
6.) Mental break down
7.) Unrealistic goals not realizing that you may not have running water or electricity. No matter the amount of water you have stocked up it will eventually run out, so you need to know where lakes, rivers, and ponds are. No matter how much food you have on hand if you don’t have seeds to grow more your sol. A lot of people will have a mental break down if their lights get cut off permanently.
8.) Not having a back up plan. Example your plan to stay in your house, forced to leave, stay with friend or lake house and forced to leave by thugs, this is where your bug out bag and back up plan come into place. Your Bob should contain shelter (tarp and rope), food, water (water bottle), fire, knife. And if possible a pot to sterilize water and cook food.
9.) A spouse that is in freak out mode. Destroying survival gear eating all survival food.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” — Robert A. Heinlein
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