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By Root 740 0

and have exemplary attendance, then you will likely have a job that will carry you all the way through a deep recession or even a depression. Some of these are low-level city and county payroll jobs. Sanitation workers, animal-control officers, sewer technicians, and highway-maintenance workers are a vital part of any society. Don’t let your family starve or end up homeless. There is no shame in accepting hard work. If you take a job that brings in only one half of your old income, consider that you’ll actually come out ahead of your contemporaries who are laid off for more than half of each year. Further, you will have uninterrupted benefits, such as health insurance.

A Home-Based Business: Your Ticket to the Boonies

The majority of preppers tell me that they live in cities or suburbs but would like to live full-time at a retreat in a rural area. Their complaint is almost always the same: “But I’m not self-employed. I can’t afford to live in the country because I can’t find work there, and the nature of my work doesn’t allow telecommuting.” They feel stuck.

Over the years I’ve seen lots of people “pull the plug” and move to the boonies with the hope that they ’ll find local work once they get there. That usually doesn’t work. Folks find that the most rural jobs typically pay little more than minimum wage and are often informally reserved for folks who were born and raised in the area. Newcomers from the big city certainly don’t have hiring priority.

I often encourage folks who are preparedness-minded to develop a second income stream with a home-based business. Once you have that business started, then start another one. There are numerous advantages to this approach, namely:

• You can get out of debt.

• You can generally build the businesses up gradually, so that you don’t need to quit your current occupation immediately.

• By working at home you will have the time to educate your children, and they will learn about operating a business.

• You can live at your retreat full-time. This will contribute to your self-sufficiency, since you will be there to tend to your garden, fruit/nut trees, and livestock.

• If one of your home-based businesses fails, then you can fall back on the other.

Ask yourself: What are you good at? What knowledge or skills do you have that you can utilize? Next, consider which businesses will flourish during bad times. Successful home-based businesses usually center around unfilled needs. If you live in a rural area, ask your neighbors: Is there anything that you buy or rent, or a service that you hire on a regular basis that currently requires a forty-mile drive to town? Those are your potential niches.

A successful recession-proof home-based business is likely to be one in which the demand for your goods and services is consistent—even in a weak economy. These include septic-tank pumping, home security/locksmithing, care for the very young and the very old, and escapist diversions such as DVD rentals. It is noteworthy that the movie industry was one of the few sectors of the economy that prospered in the 1930s.

Another category of business that prospered in the 1930s was repair work. Obviously, in hard economic times, people try to make do with what they have. So repair businesses are a natural. Perhaps there is some small appliance that you could repair that could be mailed from and back to the customer. This might include: DVD-player repair, laptop-computer repair, and so forth.

Another category is secondhand stores. People on tight budgets will be actively looking for secondhand goods rather than buying new items. A secondhand store in a medium-size town might do just fine in a depression.

Yet another approach, for those with mechanical aptitude who don’t mind strenuous outdoor work: Own one or more pieces of fairly expensive machinery that a lot of people need to rent (or hire the services of) on a semi-regular basis but that are expensive enough that they cannot justify buying one. Typically, this is machinery that sells for two thousand to twenty thousand dollars