Listverse is often intelligent and informative, or at the very least, entertaining. However, it’s Top 10 Tips to Prepare for a Depression is utter crap. It’s #1 tip is “Buy a Gun.” Why?
“You can use it to protect your family and belongings, as well as to kill animals for food.”
A gun, like any other tool, is only as valuable as the skill of the user. Do you know how to track a game animal? Is your aim good enough to hit a bird in flight? If you did manage to kill something, would you know how to butcher it? If you answered yes to these questions, you probably already have a gun. If you answered no, just owning a gun isn’t going to transform you into a hunter. If the tip had been “Learn to Hunt” it might have some practicality. In that case you’d be learning a potentially valuable skill and probably meeting people and making friends, and spending time outdoors getting some exercise as well. But just buying a gun isn’t going to help you. Even learning to hunt might be all that useful in and of itself. If you’re too poor to buy food, you’re probably too poor to pay for electricity. So, if you went out and killed something, you’d have know how to dry, smoke, or can that animal before it rotted. Knowing how to hunt, kill, butcher and preserve animals could be excellent skills to have in time of crisis. However, these are skills that people spend their lives working on. If this is something you honestly think you might need to do, start right now. Buying a gun and then waiting until your family is starving and expecting that gun to do you some good is a stupid idea.
Other ideas in the list are similarly stupid. “Stockpile Drugs?” Even if it were a good idea, how exactly would one go about doing that? I don’t know about your doctor, but mine only gives me prescriptions for amounts of drugs that I can use within a limited period of time. I really don’t think he’d agree if I said, “Give me a prescription for ten years of Vicodin. I need to stockpile it for the upcoming Great Depression.” Even if he would give me that many drugs at once, drugs lose their effectiveness over time so stockpiling them would have limited value. Better advice would be “Get healthy, stay healthy.” If medical care might be limited in the future, doing everything you can to reduce your dependence, or possible future need for drugs is worthwhile.
I could go on about the 8 other bad ideas on the list, but instead, I’m going to give you my own list of useful, practical things to do to prepare for a depression.
1. Start Biking. Driving a car costs money. When you start calculating the cost of gas, insurance, parking, registering, inspecting and maintaining your car, even a short trip is can be costing you several dollars. Fortunately, bicycling is great for short trips, and it can be cheap-as-free! However, getting started biking requires an initial investment of time and money. You can pick up a bicycle for a couple bucks at a yard sale. Or, you can spend hundreds on a shiny new bike from a bike shop. I recommend the latter, if you can afford it, because having a nice, light, well-tuned bike is more fun and takes less energy to ride than a heavy old clunker. While you can bike in cut-off jeans, sneakers, and an old cotton t-shirt, if you bike any distance you’ll be a lot more comfortable in padded bike shorts a sweat-wicking polyester shirt, and bike shoes with clipless pedals. None of this needs to be very expensive, but it does cost money, and in the short run, you won’t see any savings over driving your car. A good bike and good bike gear will last for years, though. A car never stops costing you money. A bike costs next to nothing after that initial investment. If times get tight, it’ll be great to have such an affordable way to travel! If they don’t you’ll have a fun way to stay in shape!
2. Start an Organic Garden. If you’ve never gardened before, the idea of having a garden can seem like a colossal undertaking. Gardening is actually quite easy once you get started and you can produce a surprisingly large amount of food with just a small amount of land. The caveat is the “once you get started” part. Getting the garden started will require an initial investment of time, money, and physical and mental effort. Clearing a garden space where there’s never been a garden before can be a heartbreaking effort of turning over hard-packed soil, and digging out roots and rocks, and mixing in amendments. A garden requires the right balance of “stuff” in the soil, and the things you add to attain this balance, like compost, lime, greensand and so on are called amendments. Figuring out the right amendments to add requires research. Figuring out the right tools to use also takes research (or a good teacher). For example, can you call a spade a spade? A spade and a shovel look almost identical to the untrained eye. The two are quite different, though, and using one when you should be using the other will mean you’re working a lot harder than you need to be. You’ll need both. As well as a rake and a hoe and probably a gardening fork… If you don’t have these things, it’s going to require an investment. Your first season of gardening could well cost you lots more than if you just bought the vegetables at a store. However, invest in good gardening tools and you’ll be passing them on to your grandkids! Once you’ve built your garden beds, maintaining them takes a fraction of the effort that making them did, so that massive initial effort will pay off for years to come. Having an organic garden specifically, as opposed to using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, makes sense all the time, but especially during a depression. Organic gardening maximizes the resources you already have. Instead of raking up leaves and putting them in the trash, you compost them and use them as mulch instead of buying sheets of black plastic to use as mulch. Instead of buying fertilizer, you make your own by composting table scraps and lawn clippings. People who own horses will often let you cart off horse manure for free. That stuff is gold in the garden! Organic solutions to pest problems also tend to be free, or at least cheaper than chemical solutions, without putting you, your pets, or your children in danger. Plus organic veggies taste better!
Because of the initial investment having a garden requires, you’ll want to start it now because it’ll be a lot harder to do in a depressed economy. Winter is a good time for research and planning, and most garden supply places will be selling stuff at clearance prices during the off season. If GD2 doesn’t hit, you’ll still have a great garden!
3. Learn to Cook. In a financial decline, one of the first things to go is good food. For many Americans, this means instead of eating at a good restaurant, they’ll go to MacDonalds or another fast food joint. It’s the American equivalent of Haitian mud cookies (a mixture of mud, salt and vegetable shortening eaten by Haiti’s starving poor): eating a substance with minimal nutritional value to fill a hole. It’s a horrible alternative to actually eating real food. The key to good health is good nutrition. During a depression, your body will be under a whole lot of stress just from the increased anxieties of day to day life. You don’t want to add a bad diet on top of that at a time when you literally can’t afford to get sick! At the same time, depressions mean that life is generally less pleasurable. You have to eat to stay alive, but that doesn’t mean that food can’t still be a source of joy, something that sustains both body and soul! Fortunately, you can have food that tastes great and is good for you while spending less than you would eating fast food. The key is to make it yourself!
When you buy food that is processed or prepared, you’re paying for someone else to do the work for you. There are varying degrees of this. A bowl of soup in a restaurant will be the most expensive. A can of soup is cheaper, but if you bought a can of beans and a bag of frozen, pre-cut veggies, you could toss them in a pot with a little seasoning and get even more for your money. Start with dried beans and fresh veggies that you wash and chop yourself, you’ll save even more. Nicely, the food you make yourself with fresh ingredients will taste a whole lot better. The more food is processed, the more it loses its nutritional value. So even though your spending less, you’re eating healthier, more delicious food!
This is something that takes research and practice. There are many good cookbooks out there, and following a recipe to the letter is a good way to start learning. But most recipes are written as if you were a gourmet chef in a five-star restaurant with unlimited access to ingredients and cookware. They’re not geared toward making due with what you have. Figuring out the “nice to have” ingredients from the “need to haves” takes practice. But once you’ve got it, you can work magic in the kitchen with very little at hand. With less than a dollars worth of dried black beans and brown rice and a few spices, you can whip up a tasty and filling Red Beans and Rice. Add some onion, a tomato, a little more water and a few more spices and you’ve got a lovely chili. Those same ingredients with different spices and a handful of pasta becomes a wonderful Pasta e Fagioli. Add a carrot, a potato and a stalk of celery and you’ve got vegetable stew. With a little effort, you can feed your whole family a great home-cooked meal for less than what lunch for one person at a fast food place would cost!
4. Learn to Sew. New clothes might be a luxury for a while. Buy clothes that are made to last, and be ready to patch them when they start wearing out.
5. Learn to Get Along with Your Family. I spent some time down in Guatemala a while back. Fewer than 5% of the population of Guatemala makes over $500 a year. Even though the cost of living is less than in the USA, it’s not that much less. Most everyone is really, really poor. What surprised me, though, is how much more enjoyable their lives were than they might have been. One of the ways they made their lives better was with their strong family ties. Three generations would live in the same house. In the US we might see this as a horrible sacrifice. The Guatemalans made it work, though. For example, while both parents worked, the grandparents would stay home with the kids. Think about this from a practical standpoint. It eliminates the cost of daycare and nursing homes. The family resources are spent on a single dwelling instead of being spread out over several. How nice must it be to know your kids aren’t being dropped off to spend the day with strangers, while your parents aren’t lonely? If GD2 happens, it only makes sense that we’d have extended families returning to live under the same roof. This could be a stressful tragedy, or it could be a wonderful thing. It’s all up to you.
6. Start Playing “Classic” Games. I don’t want just to survive a depression. I want to have fun while I do it! One of the ways people have fun is by playing video games. In terms of entertainment value, however, video games are kind of crap. They’re crap because they’re finite. $60 will buy you a game that loses most of its entertainment value once you’ve beaten it. Some games, like World of Warcraft, offer more potential for extended play because they feature ever-expanding worlds. However, these games also require monthly fees. In a depression virtual worlds might do alright by offering a retreat without the drawbacks of drugs and alcohol. But that seems rather loser-ish to me. All video games share the drawback of requiring power. If we’re trying to save money every way we can, that’s one expense we can do without. A pack of playing cards offers an infinite variety of games for under a dollar, and it doesn’t need to be plugged in. Also, the games are never “beaten.” You could spend the rest of your life improving your poker game and never finish. Likewise with games like chess or go.
The drawback to these games is that they require other people. On the plus side, you’ll be interacting with real live humans, face to face, which I understand can be quite rewarding.
7. Invest in Getting Off the Grid. Whenever it looks like we’re heading for a downturn, you get the same advice, like, “Diversify your stock portfolio” or “invest in metals.” This seems like crap advice. If we are, in fact, heading towards a time when our money is worthless, then a diversified portfolio of worthless stock is still worthless, as is being able to sell your gold for worthless money. The more you invest in getting off the grid, however, the more you make what happens to the economy irrelevant. Your house will be warm, you’ll still have electricity, even if the infrastructure collapses completely! Getting off the grid in the 21st century is very different from the “Back-to-the-land movement” of the 70s. It doesn’t have to mean moving out into the woods. Great strides in active and passive solar power, geothermal energy and many other discoveries and innovations provide individuals with ways to reduce their dependence on the grid without leaving the neighborhood. Getting off the grid doesn’t need to be an “all or nothing” proposal. It can be a series of small steps. Each step you take will bring you closer to independence. A good place to start is by reading up on permaculture.
8. Raise Chickens. You don’t need a farm to raise chickens. They can get by on a very small piece of land. They don’t smell bad or make a whole lot of noise, so they’re “neighbor friendly.” They’re cheap. A freshly hatched chick will cost you about a buck. Chicken feed is inexpensive, and chickens will cheerfully supplement their diet with any bugs they come across and most table scraps you’ve got left over. A single chicken can produce hundreds of eggs for you over its lifetime, returning your investment in it many times over. A half-dozen chickens will likely give you more eggs than your family can eat, giving you plenty of extra eggs to barter with, or to sell. The most expensive and challenging part of raising chickens is the chicken coop that you’ll have to build. But chickens aren’t too picky. You can build it out of scrap wood. It doesn’t have to be pretty or expensive or all that well built, as long as it keeps the weather and predators out.
9. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Old School. One of the stupid suggestions on Listverse was to stockpile food. The last Great Depression lasted 10 years in the US. Do you know how to store ten years worth of food? Can you keep it fresh and edible and keep the pests out? Do you know how much food you’d need for ten years? Do you have a warehouse to store that much food? Our predecessors may have had cellars full of food, but they weren’t stockpiling it so much as saving it. They didn’t let anything go to waste. Everything from the garden got canned or dried. They wouldn’t have had a catchy phrase like “reduce, reuse, recycle.” They would have said, “Waste not, want not.” Instead of stockpiling, find ways to reduce what you need, re-use what you have, and let nothing go to waste.
10. Don’t Panic. We may be heading into a depression. This will be a horrible and traumatic event if we’re stupid about it. If we handle it intelligently, if we stop and breathe and think about what we’re doing, it can be an inconvenience that we get through together, and tell stories about to future generations. A Great Depression is nothing new. Our predecessors survived it and while it wasn’t always a great time, they managed. With imagination and intelligence, we will too!
