17. Preparedness: Affordable First Steps for Beginner Preppers

This episode isn't just about chopping wood and battling fevers; it's a journey through the wilds of my youth, the cabins I crafted with my own hands, and the financial turbulence that eventually steered me back to the homestead dream. With tales that traverse from the tangible—like constructing our abode from the forest's bounty—to the philosophical, pondering our role within our families and the natural world, this conversation is a call to embrace the resilience that self-reliance gifts us.

Then there's the practical side of things—you know, the nuts and bolts of making it through unexpected hardships. I'll take you back to the days of my naiveté, holed up in a remote cabin with nothing but a shotgun, my dog, and a sparse pantry. Learning the hard way, I realized the immense value of being prepared. In sharing the essentials of food and water storage, from the five-gallon buckets of grains that could mean survival, to the security of a trusted water filter, this episode is packed with hard-earned wisdom. As we talk about the peace of mind that comes from a well-stocked larder and the freedom found in self-sufficiency, you'll come away with actionable insights that ensure you're ready for whatever life throws your way.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I'm still feeling under the weather. Every Christmas I tend to seem to get colder flu from family, and this year was no exception. Sounds like it's been going around everywhere with everybody. I haven't seen anybody really since, or other than families. You know us, I don't know. Two weeks and you can hear it my voice I had really low energy for probably three days, I guess, and then body aches, like back aches, which was weird, and then, yeah, just fatigue Mainly, and then this congestion now. But my wife, she was out. She was completely bedridden for I think two full days, and One of my daughters was bedridden for I think a couple of days as well, and then the other one was she was at a commission for three days, I think. Anyway, everybody we know has been so. Push my way through it like I always do, I don't. At least I'm getting fresh air. I got in to get as bad as everybody else in the family. I think mainly that's the reason I was working probably too hard and adding too much stress to my body to fully fight it off, because I was cutting firewood and stacking firewood for the bunch of days leading up to the snow that we've got now. So I'm not getting not to not resting properly. Anyway, welcome back to the cabin. If you're new to the channel, my name is Shawn James and I'm the owner, I guess, of myself reliance, and this year, this is the year that I've decided especially on this channel. I'm just going to talk a lot more about self-reliance and becoming more self-reliant as a person, family and community, and why I think it's important, really important this year and probably for the next five or ten years, especially like compared to the last 50 years of my life I'm 53 and and what I'm doing to Continue on our path to self-reliance, but also what I recommend.

Speaker 1: 2:18

If I was just starting out and I did start out, so my background is that what I was young, like a teenager, I used to spend a lot of time in the woods, so we lived in a small town. On the north end of that town there was a Rural community or a real township, and I'd walk into that township and, well, starting I guess at 15, I got my hunting license, so I started hunting back in there, or 16, I guess, when you could legally hunt alone. But I grew up building shelters and sleeping in them and even as I don't know what I would have done that first, maybe ten years old, sleeping in the woods mile from the house. So I spent a lifetime in the woods. But when I was late teen bought a piece of property and I built a cabin on it on an island. Not a log cabin, just a little stick frame, 10 foot, probably 10 by 10 cabin or 8 by 10 or something, and I don't have any pictures of that. That was well before digital cameras. I think my mom might have pictures of that place, actually because she went up one week with my niece before I sold it and, yeah, I spent a week there, I think. No utilities and there's nothing on the island other than this little cabin. I didn't even have an outhouse.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Anyway, sold that and then at 19 bought a mainland piece of property with my sister five and a half acres and she ended up walking away from it so I ended up with it alone. So I built a cabin there. It with the intent of moving and living there forever. But my parents had other ideas for me and they came and got me out of the bush after three months Now. But I built this log cabin and I really wanted to continue and I always wanted to get back to that life, but then met my wife and had kids and so on, and then, 20 years later, finally got back to this lifestyle.

Speaker 1: 4:11

So back to building a cabins, log cabins and living in the woods, so full circle, living what I think of as my dream life right now. And I've done Somewhat well financially during those 20 years. And then had some rough years, really rough years, and I got back on my feet and now Not retired like I couldn't. I don't have enough savings to retire. Like I said, I'm only 53, so I don't have enough money to to even invest and live on the interest of those investments. So I have to continue to earn an income and hence this was not intentional, but YouTube is became my sole source of income and it's what I've been living off of recently, but Point being that have lived really poorly. I started this life off poor, I came back to it somewhat poor and now I'm doing well again and I'm able to start accruing things that are making it easier to live this life.

Speaker 1: 5:17

And when I say this life, my, I do have, like I said, a wife and two daughters, and, and I built a, or we built a house four years ago, at the beginning of COVID for the family and While I was building this alone. So I was building this alone and then working on that. Actually, when we started that my wife and I were living in the cabin and then we're building that home For the family. Then COVID hit and the whole family moved into it, sleeping on the floor and showering out of a bucket and everything. That was really interesting part of our lives.

Speaker 1: 5:52

But Everybody's kind of moved on, still have that homestead and now all the infrastructure they started building there still exists, like the garden and the workshop, the maple syrup, maple sugar, bush it's that cellar, it's head with the cellar. So that's still all there. And In the meantime, like I said, while I was working on that, we use some subcontractors for a lot of the house construction. But I had to do all the interior framing and all the wood. It's all wood walls. We don't like drywall and didn't want drywall and didn't want to hire a drywall or so it's completely wooden stone inside, just basically like this. So that's sort of the family home. But I'm still trying to get this place 100% finished so that this is livable, so that we can shoot my wife like wife and I can choose where where to live. My girls have moved down closer to the city and they're kind of starting their adult lives down there, so they're less of a factor, but it's always in the back of my mind that, with all that's going on in the world, I think they're going to end up back in that the infrastructure that I'm setting up, in all the food systems that I've been setting up Sustainable food systems are going to benefit them and their families as well, so that's why I'm working so hard.

Speaker 1: 7:09

The point I wanted to make, though, like I said, about not having money If you go back to when I start off and then when I start off again that first cabin, for example, I was donating some of the materials. But even if I wasn't the entire cost, if I had bought those, those cedar posts, those 12 foot cedar lugs that I use for that cabin I think is a video that I did on that if I recall, I think it was $6,300, I figured the entire cost of that cabin was, and the land was 50,000 for 20 acres. Now, that's not something I could have afforded. No, the mortgage I guess I could have when I was younger, because I did have a 46,000 other property. So yeah, the 50 grand plus the 6,300 was the total cost of that and then, when we had neighbor issues, sold it at a really crazy profit margin and that was not intentional, just the way the market worked out when we had the neighbor issues and we had already bought the two other properties this one and the other one it's hunting properties or future investment properties enabled and we're kind of we're able then to transition really quickly into To a new homesteads and leave the old one behind. But again back to that financial part that I'm trying to say is that I would, because I've been broke.

Speaker 1: 8:28

I started off building things and living really really cheaply, frugally and Kind of adding things as I needed them or as I wanted them or as I Wanted to make my life a little bit easier. So, for example, about a tractor recently. So I did without that and I could continue to do without that. But now that I'm getting older it's nice to have a piece of equipment that I can use to Help build the other buildings that have to build. But especially do the logging around here, not for firewood and lumber and habitat improvement.

Speaker 1: 9:05

So that's um sort of backstory, but I wanted to make the point that to start off with self-reliance, or to start become more independent and self-reliant and self-sufficient there's you really have to take care of basic needs and then start adding incrementally onto that. So one of the things I thought about okay, if I was starting off right now let's say I was a young man, I didn't have a family and I wanted to start pursuing this path and I couldn't afford to land A couple things and I mentioned this on a podcast recently I would work really hard. That's basically how I got my very first property when I was in my teens, working construction, when everybody else was doing little retail jobs, in fact, my summer or pre-summer job. At that time I was making five dollars an hour working at a gas station and then five bucks an hour working doing what do you call it hang during the hang season in June and working at a driving range picking up golf balls, driving a tractor around. So I was like 16, I guess 17, 16, 15, something like that. But anyway, when I was 17, I started working construction in the summers, making. I think this is a long time ago now. I think I was making 12, 50 or something an hour, so I was able to start accumulating money really quickly and then I basically dropped out of school at 18 and started working full-time. So I was able to pay for a lifestyle, pay for a land and hunting and fishing equipment and stuff like that pretty quickly.

Speaker 1: 10:44

But when I moved to that cabin I thought I could live off the land. I was really naive. Despite the fact that I'd spent a lot of times in the woods and I've a lot of time in the woods and I've been hunting and fishing since I was like four or five years old fishing I thought I could live off the land. So I brought a shotgun and a dog, a golden retriever, and I had no money and I bought bought you bags of rice and cases of tuna. So that was, I thought, just going to be supplemental feed, but it ended up being my primary food.

Speaker 1: 11:22

So what I would do now if I was in that position, and even if I was living in the city and just living in an apartment and working in a typical job, I would want now, especially with the impending maybe wars or maybe cyber attacks, maybe just grid down situations or pandemic situations again, anything like that I'd want to have enough food on hand that I could survive for at least a month without having to go out or without having to spend money, because it's also inflation, really high food prices and also scarcity at times, like we had four years ago. So what I would do is buy at least one pill of a few things, so five gallon pill. You can fit 40, 30, 40, 50 pounds, depending on what it is of food, in each of these five gallon buckets. I would buy rice 40 or 50 pounds of rice, which is enough, literally enough calories for one person for an entire month. So one five gallon pill, an entire month's worth of food. I would buy probably smaller bags but dried beans. I'd fill that five gallon pill with dried beans as well, which again is about enough calories for one person for one month. So just the beans alone. So combine the bean and the rice and you basically have a complete meal. Now that'll sustain you and it would be enough then for two months, because one month per bucket If you added a 50 gallon, 50 pound or 40, let's hear about the math exactly say 40 pounds, five gallon pail anyway of oat growth, so not crushed oatmeal or rolled oats, but the whole oat, like when you buy it to like in a.

Speaker 1: 13:07

If you go to the feed store and buy a bag, it comes. You can buy it different ways, but you can buy it just as whole oats to feed livestock. You can buy it like that for human consumption as well. When it's only holed like that, it's nut processed, it will last. It could last 25 years if you keep moisture and air out of it. So that is another 50,000 calories or 60,000 calories, enough again to survive for a month. When I say survive, I mean it's enough calories to survive. But if you're working hard and if you're a male of you know, say 180 plus body weight, then you're probably going to burn more calories than that. But anyway you could live on that and anyone else in your family. Because if you do have a family and you're watching this and you have your wife or daughter or daughters or sons or girlfriend or whatever boyfriend, depending on who's watching this, then you know always try to provide for them as well.

Speaker 1: 14:05

So beans, this is, you've seen what I have. Just here's the seller video up here and I'll put it in the description below as well. But if you go there you'll see that we have. I've got my wife and I have. Now we have 60, 60 pills, maybe more than that, and each one of those, like I said, is a month for a person. So we've figured 20 pills per month per person. So we had 40 pills for the two of us and then we had enough for the girls as well. That's on top of all the meat. So on top of that, if you had a freezer, a pound per person of meat would also provide a month's worth of calories if you had 50 pounds. So we have enough meat on hand. This year, because it was had a very successful hunting season. So downstairs in the freezer and the other freezer and the other seller, or in that shed with the solar power and solar panels on it, got enough meat for four of us for the year. So that starts adding up.

Speaker 1: 15:06

Now what the other things we have down there in the seller, here and in the other homestead in the seller, is. So we've got rice beans, hard wheat, which is again, if you buy it whole, so they call it wheat berries, but it's just the full seed. That will last almost forever now. So we got full pills of that. The full pills is soft wheat, which is what you would use for baking, so the hard wheat would be for bread, which we make sourdough bread with, and the soft wheat would be for baking. We have some quinoa like that. Oh, pasta same thing, massive quantities of pasta, which is again a really good thing to store.

Speaker 1: 15:49

Um, try to think what else. We have lots of different stuff because we've been freeze-dried as well. So some of those buckets and the totes are just full of freeze-dried me at full meals. But, um, yeah, one of those five gallon pills is raw milk powder. I'm thinking we probably have it in mylar bags inside that pill. So now, that's basics.

Speaker 1: 16:14

I would suggest start with that. If you 40 bucks I think it is enough would buy you enough non-organic Oat grotes to fill that pail. So that's almost. Anybody can afford that. So it's by just by that, sticking the closet in your apartment or wherever you live and and has have that as security, as backup and Along with that. So the very basic needs would be that and water right.

Speaker 1: 16:39

So I would always have a filter on hand. I've got the burky water filter right here, got a couple of spare filters over here and also got several filters stored as well, and these things are ridiculously expensive. You can buy burky filters or even buy some other filters, put a, put holes in the bottom of five gallon pails and melt these Filters in there and filter your water that way. So that's a good way to do. Quantities you can boil water and if you're collecting it just from the stream or something like I did here, do here. But if you can find spring water I've got a spring on the edge of the property here that's completely safe water, like an artesian spring that feeds the creek and that has been tested by the local hunters over the years, over the last 70, 70 years literally and it's safe. So I've got that.

Speaker 1: 17:30

But one thing we discovered when we were living in the cabin, just my wife and I I was collecting five gallon pails of stream water and that's what we were using for bathing and cooking or bathing and cleaning, but for Eventually, what we found for drinking is that we could go to the local fire department. There was two fire departments that we, as we were shopping, we go into town, take these five gallon pills but also proper water storage totes I've got here and we'd fill up at the Outdoor spigot at the fire department. So that was handy. And then having portable water filters as well. So I use a Katahdin B free filter. It's little Water bottle, basically. I've got a gravity filter, I think, maybe from the same company. I've got the Sawyer mini in another Sawyer water filter. These things are easy to carry, they're relatively cheap and they'll save your life. Basically, the other thing you can do is just get iodine pills or chlorine pills and you know water treatment tablets and do that as well, or do that as well as the filtering. So a few options there.

Speaker 1: 18:40

So, anyway, I think that's gonna be it for this video. I want to talk more like this, to give you a lot more tips like where I would Start if I was starting over again, like clothing, for example, I want to get into. But I think Cut this short. I've already rambled on enough. But if you want, if you're more, if you're interested in hearing more of these types of tips like where to start, how to start, what to focus on, how to make more money, how to yeah the investment you had to pay off debt. I've got all kinds of things because I've done it all my lifetime a lot of failures and Now success. So I'm hoping I have something to offer. Anyway, that's it. Thanks for watching, appreciate it, and I look forward to seeing you back here at the cabin next time. Take care.