This came in email today;
I was wondering how you came to decide on your quota/budget/allocations you do for things like gold, silver, ammo, IRA’s, cash, storage food etc. You just figure a percentage of income to each category or? Was wondering if you did some research to arrive at your system or perhaps you have tweaked it over the years?
So, really, a couple questions there…how do I decide on quotas, budget, and allocations.
Well, there’s a ‘baseline’ level.. I want to have X amount of food on-hand. I want X amount of money in the bank. I want X amount of silver set aside. That process is pretty much a “sit and think, then guess” sort of affair. Food? I’d like at least a years worth, right? Okay, so think about what I like to eat and how much a years worth of it looks like. There’s your quota, or total. Same for everything else. Establish a baseline amount and then add to it.
Example: I wanted the ‘Dave Ramsey’ style emergency fund. Started with $1000 in the bank. Ok, that covers most small immediate emergencies. Now what? Well, I’d like to have $5k by the end of this year, $10k by next year, $15k the year after that, and I’ll call it ‘fully funded’ when its at $20k. Alright, that looks like $416 a month to put away for emergencies. So..I do that. Extra money comes in, I put it towards that, which reduces the amount I need to come up with each month. If I get a windfall..say $2000…and finish my goal for the year early, great…now I can use the resources that would have gone towards that for other things.
Budgeting is easy….You know youre going to make, say, $3000 this month. Spend it all on paper at the beginning of the month. $1000 rent, $400 food, $300 utilities, etc, etc. until you’ve spent all $3000 on paper. Thats your budget. Every greenback has an assignment or mission. There shouldnt be any money that doesnt have a task assigned to it…even if that task is just ‘fun’ or ‘preps’ or ‘hookers-n-blow’.
Allocations are very haphazard. Once I write out my budget, I know I’ll have, say, $375 available to me each month for prep-related stuff. Ok…15% to silver, 15% to gold, 40% to food, 15% to gun stuff, 15% to other gear. Its arbitrary but thats the numbers I choose…you can choose whatever you want….50/50 guns and food. Or 20/80 food and gold. Only you know what your goals are. Unexpected windfall? It gets spent to the same allocation.
My budgeting and allocations are based on a yearly budget. If I want to have $5k in the emergency fund by the end of this year, and I get that $5k in the bank by September. Do I put those resources to next years emergency fund budget and get an early start on getting next year done? Not usually. I treat each year on its own. If I finish early for this year, then I work on one of the other goals for this year.
I can’t tell you what to do, I can only tell you what works for me. But if you want my suggestion, I’d tell you exactly how I do/did things:
1) Establish a baseline amount of the item you want. It could be a period’s worth of food, a dollar value of cash, a weight of silver/gold, a quantity of ammo. Whatever. Just get a number to start shooting for as a goal.
2) Figure how much you need to do of that thing each month to get to the end of your yearly goal. X ounces each month, X dollars each month, X gallons each month…whatever.
3) If those amounts are do-able, do them. Follow your plan as religiously as possible. If the amounts aren’t do-able, revise your end-of-year goal so that the monthly contributions are do-able.
4) Set the goals for several years out. I go two years out past the current one. Life happens, you may not meet your goal in a particular year…carry the unfinished parts through the next one and try harder.
5) Decide what happens when your goal is met. I met my emergency fund goal a while back. Do I stop contributing? I could…I met my goal, the amount in the bank is good enough to cover 99% of any emergency. But…you can’t have too much money, so my modest goal is to increase it by 10% every year. An easy enough goal. Some things, like certain guns for instance, when I hit my goal I’m done. Divert the resources elsewhere. Only you can decide what items are ‘enough is enough’ and what items are ‘at desired level, now just maintaining and slightly growing’.
Thats really it. Just open a spreadsheet, make a list, and start budgeting. Once you’ve got your budget, You’ll know how much you can spend on a particular need. Stick tot he plan, stick to the budget. Sometimes you gotta go off-script, but if you can stay on the plan, stay on the budget, it makes life a lot easier.
Another example of how bookkeeping and logistics are more important than guns
As Commander has said – $50 Dollar bills are needed more often than 50 cal!
Ceejay
Must have guns to protect yourself and the things on the books .
How many can you shoot at the same time?
You gotta have a budget and stick with it. Without it you will be spending willie nilly. and end up without funds before the month ends. I speak from experience. Went with the Dave Ramsey method many years ago and have not regretted it at all.
Another way to do it is determine your minimal budget(housing/food/utilities-absolute minimums), from there everything else is a luxury. If a sale comes up divert resources to stack deep(years supply of canned veg @.39/ 10 cases of ramen for$5/silver or lead cheap) if you are frugal,watch sales,learn supply cycles and have a plan for needs the excess funds can accumulate fast. This is the method I got out of debt with,quicker than most thought possible .
Just a comment, part of the problem is storage, both shelf life and bulk. There are some things that are important , with long shelf lives that you know will get hard to find early., can lids. TP, as examples There are others that will only be a problem later, salt, for one. ( Your State highway garage likely has a pile of hundreds of tons). Put some thought into it and you will realize if you can be a few steps ahead of the mob there is a lot of stuff you don’t have to have early.
Trying to eat road salt will be a dentist’s nightmare.
A good part dirt and gravel, just saying.
I’ve tried boiling and filtering 50 pound bags of bulk salt.
Much work for something that tastes odd at best,
Salt — actual food-grade salt — is absurdly cheap and literally lasts forever if kept clean and dry. Less than $5 for 50 pounds. Buy a couple of hundred pounds — some iodized, some uniodized (for pickling, etc) — and pack it in 5 gallon plastic pails, then set them in the attic, garage or similar. Heat’s not going to hurt it, or cold, bugs and rodents aren’t going to bother it…
At work are about 20-#2500 totes of pickling quality salt that can’t be disposed of (environmental regs). In a SHTF situation it is a good trump card.
Well, the food part is sort of easy. But figuring out future utility bills are harder – we’ve seen our bills go up at least 50% this past 5 years. Pretty much the same use, didn’t purchase any energy hogs, just higher bills. Satellite and internet cost especially.
Property taxes – another big ?. The home property costs and rural property have gone higher as well. We save more but they tax higher too. Its a moving target. Inheritances really upped the game, the land property taxes on those also hit us pretty hard.
We started with the Dave Ramsey budget method many years ago and it works , It enabled us to pay off everything including the house and let us retire a lot sooner then we expected to .
Salt — actual food-grade salt — is absurdly cheap and literally lasts forever if kept clean and dry. Less than $5 for 50 pounds. Buy a couple of hundred pounds — some iodized, some uniodized (for pickling, etc) — and pack it in 5 gallon plastic pails, then set them in the attic, garage or similar. Heat’s not going to hurt it, or cold, bugs and rodents aren’t going to bother it…