Prepping/Life Balance

Prepping is one of those activities that can consume you. By nature it's an anxiety-driven activity; people fear a certain event and prepare against that event. As with all other forms of anxiety, it's easy to lose control of your state of preparedness and over do it. It's important to have what I call Prepping/Life balance, a small twist on the Work/Life balance I hear about at my place of employment. Work/Life balance refers to the fact that you're applying normal, satisfactory time in your professional career, earning enough money, while at the same time enjoying life outside of work...family time, vacations, and such. A skewed work/life balance, for instance, would be working 80+ hours a week and, as a result, missing your kids music recital. That's a failure of work/life balance.

Taken during a vacation in the Smokey Mountains.

Prepping/Life balance is the same. On an episode of Doomsday Preppers (one of my favorite prepping TV shows as a guilty pleasure) which profiled a husband and wife who uprooted their children from Florida to the Appalachian mountains, an example if failed prepping/life balance was shown. The producers were interviewing the wife who, with tears in her eyes, admitted that the family had not taken a vacation in over 3 years because every single dime that was made by the husband went into preparedness. Though the wife agreed with a high level of preparedness, she clearly wanted to enjoy life with her kids as well, and a yearly vacation would have done just that.

Financial balance is key in preparedness as well. The "spending every dime in preparedness" contributes to far more stress in an emotionally sound individual than being prepared for any disruptive event which would last an unrealistic 25 or more years. Balancing strong finances along with having preps for 6+ months is ideal. Having 25 years of food stores does you no good if your car breaks down and you can't afford to replace or repair it. More on financial prepping later.

Don't let prepping cause to much Mayhem in your life.

Of course all of this type of discussion depends on a direct ratio of your level of anxiety-to-life expectations. A lone-wolf hermit living off grid in the wilds of Omaha may very well spend every dime of his income on preparedness and be completely happy, but this is rarely the case for families or even groups of families gathering together for a solid state of preparedness. The bottom line can be summed up in your level of comfort and happiness. Other factors surround your level of preparedness.

1. What type of disruptive event are you preparing for?
2. How long are you expecting to live off of your preparations? < this will drive the "how much" factor".
3. What will you need to accomplish #2?
4. How fast do you want to get to #3?
5. What are the financial resources you will need to achieve #3 & #4? Generally speaking faster = more expensive.

These are very high-level goals which make up a preparedness plan, and #4 and #5 will directly impact the timeline and expenses of that plan. These are factors that need to be considered for your prepping/life balance. For instance if you're planning for an event you anticipate to occur in the next 6 months and will require one years worth of preparations, that will dramatically drive, say, how much money you're going to have to throw at it. Achieving a base-line level of preparedness of 2-weeks, for instance, with a future plan of expanding those preps to 2 months is more realistic and can be budgeted far easier. The ratio of income you need to spend towards your preps would be lower.

With just a little bit of planning and a solid budget, along with the discipline to follow it, you can achieve both goals; prepping for your future based on your comfort level and having nice things or taking enjoyable trips. :) 

Peace.