How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It - James Wesley Rawles [106]
If your local zoning and fire regulations allow it, buy your own gas and diesel fuel tanks. Also consider installing oversize propane or home-heating-oil tanks. When getting competitive bids from tank suppliers, be sure to ask them to lock in the price per gallon for the initial fill for each new tank. To win your business, the tank salesman might be willing to commit to a price that is a few pennies per gallon below current market. See Chapter 6 for more on fuel.
Learn to Barter
Barter, by its very nature, shields you from inflation. Instead of using depreciating paper tokens as a means of exchange, you are directly exchanging a tangible for another tangible, or a service for a tangible, or a service for a service. I strongly advocate stocking up on extra items for barter. However, it is with the proviso that you do not embark on buying goods dedicated for barter until after you have your family’s essential beans, bullets, and Band-Aids squared away, following a well-balanced logistics plan.
To be useful in barter, choose items that have most or all of the following seven attributes:
1. Appeal/usefulness to the majority of the citizenry. Nearly every family uses soap, but just a few need #7 Singer sewing-machine needles.
2. Immediate recognizability. Name brands need no introduction. All others are suspect.
3. Longevity. Keep shelf life in mind. If you cannot barter it all away before it goes bad, then you are buying too much. Even coal has a shelf life.
4. Easy divisibility. Boxes of matches, boxes of cartridges, coils of rope, balls of twine, and cans of kerosene are perfect examples. If you plan on dividing a commodity in barter transactions, then be sure to have the containers needed for parceling it out.
5. Relative compactness and transportability at reasonable cost. Toilet paper has great appeal, but just five hundred dollars’ worth would nearly fill my garage.
6. Consistent quality. For example, precious metals, coins of known purity, or ammunition from a major manufacturer such as Winchester, Remington, or Federal.
7. Limited availability. In North America, jars of freeze-dried instant coffee would be ideal, but in Central America, they would probably be worthless.
Learn Several Valuable (Barterable) Skills
As discussed previously, every family should have at least one home-based business that they can fall back on in the event of an economic recession or depression. Concentrate on skills rather than goods for barter. The beauty of having skills to barter is that most of them don’t require much raw material, so unlike with barter goods, you will never run out. A profession or skill that also requires a specialized tool set is fine; however, if the skill also requires delivering a factory-made device to complete each transaction, then you might consider doing something else. For example, installing burglar alarms might be profitable as long as you have a source of resupply, and as long as the power and telephone networks are functioning. But in a grid-down TEOTWAWKI, how long could you continue running such a business?
Avoid developing a skill that appeals only to wealthy customers for discretionary spending. Those are the purchases that will be delayed or skipped altogether in an economic depression. Hence, shotgun checkering and engraving are poor choices, but septic-tank pumping is a good one.
Concentrate on a business that can be operated without the need for grid power. It is notable that most of the businesses in this category existed in the nineteenth century. Who knows? Maybe buggy whip makers will make a comeback in the Second Great Depression.
Bartering
Being ready to barter is not just a matter of having a pile of “stuff” to trade. While barter and charity logistics are important, what is even more important is what is between your ears. Bartering takes practice. Dickering