Preparedness on a Budget: 10 Ways to Prepare Without Spending a Fortune

Do you ever feel like preparedness is something you'll get to someday... when you have more money?

You're not alone.

In this episode, I'm sharing 10 practical ways to become more prepared even when money is tight. From shopping store sales and learning new skills to building your food storage one step at a time, preparedness doesn't have to happen all at once—and it doesn't have to cost a fortune.

Whether you have $5 a month or $50 a month to spend, you can make meaningful progress. Preparedness isn't about having the biggest pantry or the newest gear—it's about taking intentional steps with the resources you have.

Resources:

Website:
https://www.thispreparedlife.com/

Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thispreparedlife/

Join the TPL Membership Community:
https://www.thispreparedlife.com/community

Home Food Storage Book:
https://amzn.to/4aMOZfH

If this episode encouraged you, I'd love for you to leave a review and share it with a friend.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to This Prepared Life, a podcast for women where preparedness feels peaceful, practical, and possible. I'm Alison, and together we're building a calmer, more resilient life, one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional step at a time. All right, raise your hand unless you're driving. If you have unlimited funds in your budget, not me. This podcast episode is going to talk about how to prepare when your budget is tight because I think that is almost all of us. I do not have an unlimited preparedness budget. I do need to rein it in. I do have a little more now in this season of life than I did 10 years ago or 15 years ago when my kids were younger. We are empty nesters now. But let's talk about what you can do to prepare when you are on a tight budget. Number one, learn and shop your store sales cycles. What's a store sales cycle? All grocery stores have their sales on a set schedule. And how often that schedule is depends on the buying power of that grocery store. A smaller grocery store is going to have a little longer time in between sales cycles than a larger grocery store because larger grocery stores go through more product, they have more inventory, they do they sell more. So learn about your grocery store and when its store sale cycles are. There are certain foods and certain ingredients that are on sale at different times of year for various reasons, whether it's holidays, as an example, Thanksgiving and Christmas, people are doing a lot of baking. So baking stuff will typically go on sale then. Come summertime, you're gonna see sales on a lot of barbecue items and snack foods and barbecue sauce and things like condiments, things like that. That's what I mean by learn your store sales cycles. You can hop onto the internet and do a search and get a general idea of when these store sales cycles are. If you're a member of this prepared life and you go into the pantry, each month has the store sales cycles listed there for you. So that's an easy way for you to print those out and know them if you're a member. Learn what the store sale store sales cycles are and start shopping those because you're gonna get more bang for your buck. Number two, learn to cook from scratch. Cooking from scratch takes more time, but it is far cheaper. Ingredients cost a lot less than convenience foods. I'm not saying you have to make all your own bread and do sourdough and make your Pop Tarts and make your pizza pockets all from scratch, but what can you make from scratch? What can you fit into your busy life? Are there some snack foods that you can make on your own and then others that you continue to buy when they're on sale with the store sales cycle? It doesn't have to be all or nothing. And I know sometimes when we pop into social media spaces and we're on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and all these places, and you're seeing these beautiful snippets of people's lives where they're making all of their own food. You're not seeing when they're like stuffing their face with Oreos behind the scene, guys. Like I eat my fair share of Oreos, okay? Social media is not real life. So that's another episode right there. We're not talking about social media, so I'm gonna step back from that soapbox for just a little bit, but learn to cook from scratch because ingredients go farther in your dollar and with what you can make with them. Three, beans and rice. I am not super fond of beans and rice, but I will eat them and I will make them delicious with spices and meats and other add-ins and things like that. Beans and rice is a great way to add cheap meals into your meal plan. Can you eat beans and rice, some kind of bean and rice meal once a week? I make this uh Southwest skillet pie that is supposed to be hamburger heavy, but I add more beans to it, and then I will also stir rice into it because I can make it with half of the meat that it calls for and no one even notices. I also like to just make the normal batch and then add the beans and the rice in, and then I freeze part of it. And so then I have a freezer meal for future me to enjoy beans and rice. What can you make that your family will eat or learn to enjoy to stretch your dollars there? Number four, focus on essentials. When you are thinking about preparedness, what do I need to prep for? What do I need to plan? And you're on a budget, it's really easy to get just overwhelmed and think you can't do it at all. And I want you to hear me that you can do it. It might take a little longer and you might have to save a little longer, and you might have to maybe not get the coolest gear that you know someone is showing off on YouTube or wherever, but you can focus on the essentials food, water, evacuation, your most likely emergencies. Most likely emergencies are the things that are likely to happen in your geographical area or location. For me, that's wildfires. All summer long. My phone is dinging, such and such road has been evacuated, such and such area has a forest fire. We thankfully have not had one near us. We have not had to evacuate, but some of the more longtime neighbors use words like, we're due. We're due for a fire here. So plan for evacuation, plan for food, plan for water, and plan for your most likely scenarios. What are those for you? That's something you can think about that costs no money. Number five, don't compare. This is something you can do for free that is going to help your preparedness journey. Do not compare where you're at with where I'm at or the finished product of your favorite YouTubers at or whoever you follow in the preparedness sphere. They have been at this longer than you have. I have been doing this for two decades, guys, almost 20 years since I started and went from I want to learn how to feed my family better to full-fledged preparedness. I've now written a book on building a home food supply. Two decades is a lot of time. It is a lot of energy, it is a lot of money. So when you look at someone's finished product or someone's almost finished product and you compare it to your starting point, it's really discouraging. So don't compare yourself to other people's journey. Start where you are with what you have and you can do it. I know you can do it because I did it. We had four kids and no money, and we did it. So you can do it. Number six, split bulk purchases. I used to want my more financially stable friends order from Azure Standard and feel a little bit of jealousy about that. Because we couldn't afford it. We could not afford Azure Standard when my kids were little. We were just trying to afford groceries and pay our power bill. There was no way I was going to be able to buy organic bulk foods to stock my prepper pantry. But you know what I could do? I could buy non-organic bulk or I could split bulk purchases with friends and still get that good discounted price, but not have to pay for the whole thing all at one time. At one point in our journey, I joined a buying co-op, and it's just a group of women who would come together and find either local farmers or local distributors who would give us a wholesale or a bulk discount on things like organic butter. We got insanely cheap through this buying co-op and it was just harnessing the power of many people to get something that you all wanted. So can you split bulk purchases? Can you find a co-op? Get what you can with what you have. Don't think that you have to order from Azure Standard or whatever. Costco, Walmart, Wing Co is amazing for bulk food. Do what you can with what you have. Number seven is reevaluate your budget and your financial priorities. We would not be where we are today if we had not been intentional about budgeting and about paying off our debt. We don't have any debt right now. And that is something that we have worked really hard towards. We don't even have a mortgage. Can you pay off your debt, get out of consumer debt, prioritize your budget so that you can spend $5 a month on preparedness supplies or $10 a month on stocking your home food storage? And maybe right now your prep is paying off that debt. Let's go back to what do I always say about most likely scenarios. And yes, usually we're talking wildfires and power outages and tornadoes and hurricanes, but financial preparedness is incredibly important and paying off your debt so that you can have more freedom in your budgeting and in your finances is huge, huge, guys. So reevaluate your budget. Can you allocate a small amount towards preps, or do you need to spend some time focusing on my spending wisely and paying off my debt? Number eight, learn skills. Skills are so valuable, and oftentimes you can learn them for free, or find someone who will teach you. Go to your church and find a grandma who knows how to can. People love sharing their skills and their passion with other people. Oftentimes all we have to do is ask. And I know that that is scary and that is vulnerable, and we don't want to be rejected. I have never had someone in my life say, no, I don't want to teach you how to do that. Like ever. Just ask. Power through, power through the scary, and ask. Learning skills, canning and preserving, dehydrating, building your food storage, water storage, all of those things, gardening. There's a spectrum on the prepper scale, you know, and like the things you're gonna learn are really gonna depend on where you where you want to fall in that. Do you want to learn to build outdoor shelters? Do you want to know how to build your own water filter out of stuff you have found on your property or in the mountains? Like those are all skills you can learn. Go check out a book at the library and learn it. Do you need to know how to backpack? Because it's important to you that you can bug out for 10 miles. What do you need to learn? Make a list and just pick one. Pick a skill and get it done. The number nine of things that you can do when you are prepping on a budget is look for used supplies. And this one is huge. If you were thinking about getting into preservation or more homestead skills, almost I would say maybe 75% of the canning jars I own, and I own a lot of them, came from my grandma. She was always giving me jars. She did keep a bunch, and then when my grandma died, like I took all her canning stuff. Everyone else was like, no, no one wanted it. I wanted it. I took her dehydrator, which was like 30 years old, but it did its job for me until I was able to buy a newer, nicer dehydrator. Funny dehydrator story. We're gonna rabbit trail for a minute. I don't know how old the kids were. They were young because we were on our way to Costco and it was a date. So the kids were young enough that going grocery shopping felt enjoyable. And I remember telling Joe, I'm like, I really want a dehydrator. We pull into the Costco parking lot, and there's this big black garbage bag sitting in the space next to us. And I'm looking at that and I'm like, Joe, is that a dehydrator? It was a dehydrator. It looks like someone went to Costco and didn't have room for their Costco trip because they have donation loaded in their car, and so they left it in the parking lot. I went home and completely sanitized that thing, and it was the cheapest, junkiest dehydrator, had no fan, no air movement. It was literally just a heating element and some stacks. I used that thing for years until I got my grandma's, which did have a fan, and then I used that one for years before I finally bought myself an X caliber when we had the money for it. So funny rabbit trail about, you know, wishing for a dehydrator and one appearing in a Costco parking lot, but it wasn't ideal and it wasn't a top of the line. And I thoroughly sanitized it, thoroughly sanitized, but it worked and it did its job and it was free. Ask grandmas, ask people at your church. Hey, does anyone have canning jars or an old water bath canner or pressure canner? Things like that that that they don't use anymore because maybe their family no longer does that. A lot of people get too elderly to lift these heavy canners, and so the supplies are just sitting there. Check marketplace on Facebook and online for used homesteading equipment. We got our honey extractor, incredibly good brand of honey extractor on Craigslist. Does Craigslist even exist anymore? I don't know. If you're watching on YouTube, comment does Craigslist exist if you know? But we got our honey extractor for like a third of what it would have cost brand new online from someone who is getting out of beekeeping. People will often jump into these hobbies and then realize, oh, I don't like this or I can no longer do this, and then they're selling the equipment for incredibly cheap. Look for use supplies. Number 10, and this one is important and it goes along with the don't compare. Be realistic with your goals. Having unattainable goals is discouraging. I'm not saying set the bar so low, it's like whatever. You know, it's like making a to-do list and writing something you've already done on there, so you can just cross it off. I love doing that. It just feels so accomplished. Be realistic with your goals. If you know that your budget is only gonna be ten dollars a month to build your food storage for the next six months or a year, don't set your goal to fully stock your layer three pantry by December because it's not gonna happen. Be intentional, be focused, have a plan, pick your next best thing and just do it, guys. Just jump in and get started. Do what you can with what you have right where you're at. If this episode was helpful to you, encouraged you in any way, please leave a review or subscribe and follow. I really appreciate you being here, and reviews help other women find the podcast because together we are building calmer, more resilient lives, one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional step at a time. Thanks for listening today.