Guest Post by Mac Slavo
Whether you are just starting out with prepping and are figuring out what to focus on first, or whether you are a veteran prepper tracing over your plans for potential flaws, you can always make improvements.
These videos can help you cover the essentials, boil down to the most important factors and start actually putting your preps into action.
Don’t wait until the trouble starts, because it will already be too late.
How would you survive if the food supplies stall out, the economy and digital grid crashes, or para-government forces unleash a round-up plan?
Have you made your family as secure as they can be with stored goods, equipment and a fool proof bug out plan for continuity of life off the grid?
There are some good answers on where to start and how to account for just about everything, but the point is that you must start somewhere.
For beginners, the best tip may be to start small and build up from there as you learn what you’re doing:
10 Tips for New Preppers: Supplies, Survival food and Emergency Essentials
Survival Know How explains his Top 10 Tips For New Preppers:
1. Start small. There is no need to prepare for the zombie Apocalypse if you don’t have enough supplies to last you 3 days without power.
2. Start with Food and Water. To often new preppers want to focus on guns, knives and ammo. It may not be as glamorous but your first preps should be food and water.
3. Develop your skills. Prepping is not just about what you buy but is also about developing your skill set and expanding your knowledge.
4. Build a prepper community. Talk about prepping to your friends, co-workers and family.
5. Tailor your preps to your geographical location. If you live up north you need to focus on keeping warm in the winter, if you live down south you need to focus on staying cool in the summer.
6. Develop a plan B. AKA a Bug Out Bag. Bugging in should always be your plan A. Only Bug Out if you absolutely need to.
7. Practice with your preps. Having preps is not enough, you need to be proficient with them and know how to use them when shit hits the fan.
8. Use List to stay organised. Create prepper supplies list, emergency food list and anything else. This will help you stay organized and buy everything you need.
9. Get into shape. When the shit hits the fan and you are forced to fend for your self you want to be in the best shape possible.
10. Learn First Aid. Skills in first aid will literally save your and your family life.
Even if you have everything you need to survive at home, there are many bad situations that could force you to leave your home and seek survival somewhere else – if you can make it.
Here are some important factors to consider when planning to bug out. What will the roads and highways look like during disaster? Likely they won’t be easy to travel on, and could be downright dangerous. Foreknowledge of the back roads and other alternative means of travel are essential if you are in a serious situation.
Setting up cache sites along your bug out route could also be vital to your survival plan, particularly if your travel plans hit a snag.
Bugging Out: What to Know Before You Go! 19 Tips for Preppers for SHTF Escape Planning! 
The Healthy Prepper explains her 19 Tips for Preppers for SHTF Escape Planning:
1. Know your routes.
2. Have multiple forms of travel. (car, bike, foot, zodiac etc.)
3. Preload car with bug out bag
4. Bury caches along routs.
5. Know your final destination.
6. Lay low and blend in.
7. Choose off roads, back roads etc.
8. Sleep in a different location than you cook your food or build a fire.
9. Have back up fuel on the car.
10. Keep bug out vehicle maintained and full of gas.
11. Know when it is time to go.
12.Learn to use maps, compass, star navigation
13. Expect to get lost forced off route.
14.Avoid ridge lines and tops of hills.
15. Have alternative bug out locations in mind if the first one does not pan out.
16. Practice you bug out plan with your family.
17. Know where water, food, fuel can be found along your bug out routes.
18. Be prepared for interactions with others.
19. Be prepared someone may have already pillaged for bug out location or has already set up camp there.
Realistically, you may not be able to cover all of these points, and may find some of them to be contradictions with your real world situation. Regardless, you must prepare for all eventualities.
The point is to consider the best information you can, match it up with the realities of your area, your home, your financial situation and the reliability of the people around you (or lack thereof).
Plan ahead, and avoid becoming paralyzed by fear and inaction if and when the SHTF.
Read More:
The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Complete Guide on Where to Start and What to Do
5 Mistakes Every New Prepper Makes
Or stay at your home and fight .I have no intention of bugging out
I started by getting a three day supply of food, water and essentials that would keep us comfortably in our home if we lost power, heat and the ability to cook our food inside. After I had that in storage, I felt so empowered I couldn’t stop until we moved here. Haha
Maggie, I got you the Little Willy parody, why did you give it both a thumbs down and up?
The list didn’t mention PLENTY of warm, rugged, weatherproof clothes, and blankets. I am one for quickly unloading anything that I either don’t use or don’t love, but I absolutely cannot stand to get rid of anything that can keep me warm if the boiler goes down, or if I have to be on the road. That’s why I never get rid of old sweaters, bedspreads, or blankets unless the thing is in tatters
Also have plenty of the prescription meds, OTC meds, vitamins, and other medical and first aid supplies on hand. And I don’t care how male or post-menopausal you are, always have a good supply of sanitary napkins on hand- there’s nothing like them for stopping bleeding or bandaging a serious cut.
Plenty of paper supplies- toilet paper and paper towels. I keep about 6 months worth, due to space limitations.
And do NOT rely on your car. Use your imagination- do have any idea how clogged the roads would be with fear-crazed, desperate people fleeing from one place to the other? Do you want to run out of gas in the middle of that and do you think you will be able to get more along the way to wherever you think you’re going? Don’t be crazy.. get bikes. I like 3 wheel bikes because they can carry a large basket for supplies.
Travel in a large group if possible. Now is the time to identify people you can trust, and get together with them to learn skills and devise strategies in case of the worst. This is especially important for single people- one old woman with a little pistol is easy pickings, but a large posse could be intimidating. Single parents with young children especially need to form alliances.
Let’s hope it never comes to the worst.
And, rather than have “bug out” locations far from home, which would force you to go on the road with thousands of other strangers, and into areas you know little or nothing about, look for “bug out” locations in your own city. Our older cities in particular have a number of abandoned areas where there is NO human presence. You might want to buy or rent some little building in these places, and even have hidden caches of food and supplies all over town. Get to know your city and city area extremely well- I never cease to be amazed at locals who lived in a town their entire lives and whose families go back 6 generations there, who have little idea of their cities outside their own neighborhoods. There are thousands of nooks and cranies in the typical older city, where a person could hunker down for years an never be noticed. Here in Chicago, there are vast tracts of land that have NEVER been inhabited by humans, believe it or not. I know where they are- most people don’t, including people who live within a mile of them. Most people don’t even know their own neighborhoods or suburbs that well- discover yours.
This guy is a ridiculous fraudster. He has been rewriting the same article for the past 5 years. He tells you to buy MREs and silver coins. Yet his business model is pumping out clickbait on the internet, a medium that depends entirely on a functioning electrical grid and monetary system. Hmm..
Step one should be to get rid of credit card debt and build an emergency supply of cash in small bills. If you can’t afford to repair your car then you can’t go to work. No work = no prepping.
I’m glad to see that buying PM’s did not make either list. There are many important things that need to be done before buying metals.
The one thing I don’t get about all these lists is the eternal need to be prepared to “bug out”. If you are living in a place that you deem so unsafe that you will have to “bug out”, then the first step in your plan should be to “bug out” permanently before TSHTF.
Wandering around a post SHTF world with what you can carry on your back is going to get old in about two fucking seconds and regardless of how prepared you might be, you are going to leave behind a treasure trove of goods that you will likely need or wish you had while you’re out wandering the world. If you think “bugging out” is a good plan the take a week off work and impose a week long “bug out” on you and you family. Grab your “bug out” bags and pretend TSHTF. Where are going to sleep, cook, eat, use the bathroom, find and purify water, bathe? Might as well get that shit worked out and practice if that is your plan.
Me? I’m not bugging out. I’ll go down fighting where I am or end up in shackles on a rail car.
I asked a neighbor if he has a survival or bug out plan. He said yes, it’s called Smith & Wesson. Hmmm
My bug out bag has 20 rolls of toilet paper in it. It pays to be prepared.
FYI, there are times when TSHTF so fast, it boggles the mind. I have friends from Germany, Cuba, Iran, and Syria, for example. There are many other countries, where it was a REALLY bad idea to stay at the time, that it happened.
In his zombie apocalypse series _Black Tide RIsing_, John Ringo posits a virus that drives you murderously insane, will not kill you by itself (zombies need “food” and water, and will go hibernate / finally die without both) and are driven to seek “food” out everywhere. A thinking man’s kind of ZA.
In his books, zombies are attracted by light and noise, just like normal people. They know just enough from their former lives to remember light and noise mean humans are around, and humans are food. So they are drawn to them.
In a real apocalypse, humans will be drawn to light and noise. Practice “lights-out” discipline before you need it so that the zombies might not notice you and it might be easier to get by, for a while. If they start going door to door you’d better have a shotgun ready, and really strong doors.
the tumbleweed says:
This guy is a ridiculous fraudster. He has been rewriting the same article for the past 5 years. He tells you to buy MREs and silver coins. Yet his business model is pumping out clickbait on the internet, a medium that depends entirely on a functioning electrical grid and monetary system. Hmm..
You got that right. “Mac” lives in a very large and expensive suburban home and it’s in a gated community. Isn’t that a good one for “freedom” and “liberty”? Of course, he isn’t “Mac Slavo” either. Nor are his assorted little group of writers like “Daisy the organic homesteader” who lied on an Amazon bio about it but never farmed in her life. His wife is a bonafide author though so it’s okay if he pimps her books — at least she has the basics correct.
Ain’t the internet grand? You can be anything you want.
whatever…
I never heard this guy before. Bugging out? Absurd. The house
floods, or burns down…well tough luck there.
Imagine taking to the road and drive/walk to “a safe place?” Absurd.
Ditto, IS. Reread IS comment.
“Heading for the hills” sounds romantic except:
a)There’s not enough hills for everyone
b) The people already living there don’t want you and they’re probably armed
c) Remember the scenes of the highways turned into parking lots – Houston’s Hurricane Rita and New Orleans’ Katrina. The time to ‘bug out’ is well before you know it’s time to go.