Along with your Beans, Bullets & Band-aids, pack these 2 ideas along

I'd like to share with you two ideas that I have incorporated in to my overall survival plan:

- Water; This is the ONLY 'item / resource' I will bring up, because before I turned into an aspiring survivalist, I overlooked water. Imagine if no water came out of your faucets? Will you haul water to your house in buckets? Will you expect the government to helicopter in supplies? I rest my case. At the minimum, the average person should have 1.5 gallons of water per day. You may be thinking damn, I don't even drink that much right now! Well start drinking more damn it, it's your kidneys. And the absolute minimum you should have 3 days worth of water for each person & pet in your retreat group.

- Retreat Group; Each person has strengths and weaknesses. Some people know how to work a garden, others know how to fish, hunt or whip up a great meal out of chicken shit. We each bring something to the table. A retreat group are the people in your life who you have coordinated to maintain contact with when disaster strikes. When choosing your survival group, try to choose some people in your life who have different skill sets. That cousin of yours that has bad breath may be good at gardening, or knows how to fix a computer. After deciding on your core retreat group, let them in on your idea. Believe it or not, most American's do not think about survival beyond their next paycheck, so don't be afraid to let them know you've included them in your plan when the sh!t hits the fan. They will be flattered that you thought of them, even if they think your a little nuts at first. Make a plan with each member of your retreat group on various locations and ways to meet and contact one another. If the power grid is down, and cell towers are out, you'll need another way to contact each other. Are you gonna write a letter? No, you'll need to act quickly, and have a plan on where to meet. Creating a retreat group may sound like a no-brainer, but it's an important step that must not be overlooked.

- Learn a skill; When we are shoveling our paper money in the fireplace to keep warm, the 'jobs' that we all performed so well at in our day to day lives will become useless, with little transferrable skills to take back home to feed our family. You will need some sort of trade. Be it a candle maker, basket-weaver, hunter, fisherman, blacksmith, gardener, raising livestock or so many other trades, learn something that will make you valuable. You will want to bring a value where YOU go, it will not be where your wallet goes. I have started to do this. I have been a salesman throughout my working career. I doubt I can convince a deer to jump onto my plate, so I have been honing my fishing skills, and I am getting into metalsmithing.

Unfortunately we polished off our bottle of doomsday whiskey at a party my wife put on.