1. Natural Disasters
2. Economic Crisis
3. Health Benefits
4. Everyday Emergency
5. Religious Reasons

Today we will be talking about the second reason, Economic Crisis, and encourage you to visit our Facebook Discussion on this topic. We learn so much more from each others real life experiences and opinions, so come on over and join the conversation. (You don’t need to be a member of facebook to read the discussions).

While Natural Disasters is what encouraged us to START our food storage, we have to admit – the concept of an economic crisis is what KEEPS us building our food storage. We feel that the likelihood of money being tight is MUCH higher then a power or water outage type disaster. Money being tight could come as a national, local, or personal emergency. You never know what could happen and it’s such a blessing to have food stored, and a plan in place for a time when you might have to live off what you have stored.

BONUS:  Food Storage Saves Money!

Awhile back we did a post on Food Storage and Money Savings. The post talks about how your 3-month supply can save you money by buying foods only when they are on sale and stocking up. You can also save on your grocery bill by actually learning how to use and cooking with your long term food supply. Buying grains and legumes and cooking things from scratch can save you a lot of money!

1. Natural Disasters
2. Economic Crisis
3. Health Benefits
4. Everyday Emergency
5. Religious Reasons

Today we will be talking about the first reason, Natural Disasters, and encourage you to visit our Facebook Discussion on this topic. We learn so much more from each others real life experiences and opinions, so come on over and join the conversation. (You don’t need to be a member of facebook to read the discussions).

So here’s our take on the “Natural Disasters” reason to store food. The truth is, this was one of the main reasons we “STARTED” our food storage program. After “growing up” and having kids we started realizing we were in charge of our families now. If some crisis were to happen, we would have had no idea how to deal with it and we were definitely not prepared.

We would ask ourselves- “If an earthquake hit and we had no power or water for days or weeks, would we have the supplies we needed on hand?” The list of potential “Disasters” is LONG! Here’s just a few that we have come up with:

Natural Hazards
Floods
Tornadoes
Hurricanes
Thunderstorms and Lightning
Winter Storms and Extreme Cold
Extreme Heat
Earthquakes
Volcanoes
Landslides and Debris Flow (Mudslide)
Tsunamis
Fires
Wildfires

Technological Hazards
Hazardous Materials Incidents
Household Chemical Emergencies
Nuclear Power Plants

Terrorism
Explosions
Biological Threats
Chemical Threats
Nuclear Blast
Radiological Dispersion Device (RDD)
Homeland Security Advisory System

WAIT! Don’t get too freaked out. We will be going into more details about all of these situations in future posts (one at a time and with tips on how to deal with them), but for now, we found there is GREAT truth in the following:

REALLY! We started out SO overwhelmed, and totally unsure of how to go about actually becoming prepared. Through BabySteps and patience we have actually gotten to a point where we feel a little more confident and not so afraid to learn more! For a little motivation take a look at Julie’s and Jodi’s beginnings only just 16 months ago. Don’t let the fear overcome you! Get started today!

We want to remind everyone of the Wondermill Hand Grinder giveaway going on. When you sign up for the Challenge you are automatically entered, and for each friend you refer to the Seven Day Challenge, you get an EXTRA ENTRY TO WIN. So go ahead, remind all your friends. We will be announcing the winner THIS FRIDAY morning, so hurry up and spread the word!

Just as a reminder the Wondermill has their $20 rebate going on with the Hand Mill until THIS Saturday. So if you don’t win Friday, make sure to hurry up and get yours before the rebate is gone! Remember we are dealers for the Wondermill and get you the lowest prices, along with free shipping* on both Wondermill Electric and Hand Grinders.

Can’t wait to start the challenge and learn from each other,

*(within the U.S. not including Hawaii and Alaska)

    

Don’t forget that all of this information can be found in our Emergency Preparedness Plan Workbook which contains simple checklists to help you develop your family’s emergency plan (download in excel format or pdf format).

As we have grown and expanded our food storage knowledge, we have continually added to our site. While the site has expanded with so much information, we still want to make sure that it’s still easy for beginners to navigate. Since we are about halfway through our Summer Crash Course we decided to give you a little break and announce some changes we made to our site recently to help you get the most out of our site.

You will see that the top navigation buttons have changed slightly. Here is a run-down of the new things to look for:

• The Start Here tab now contains helpful tips for how to best use our site and where to find the information you are looking for.
• The Checklists page now offers you a choice of how you would like to receive your checklists based off of what your preferred “learning style” is.
• We added an Emergency Preparedness tab as we have found that this is something people are looking for quite a bit, and we feel it is a prerequisite to getting started with your food storage. Check back on Friday as we will be adding some new sub-pages to this section which will include even more detailed information
• Tools and Products remain the same. We consistently put a lot of work into those sections so make sure to check them often.
• We added a tab for Recipes so that you can easily navigate to any of the food storage recipes we have tried and posted about.
• Links and About remain the same, although we will be revamping the links section soon to make it an even better resource for you.

Take a look around at the new sections and let us know what you think of the changes. We are trying hard to keep more experienced readers interested while still being able to help the brand new beginner. Believe us, we know how it feels to be getting started and get so overwhelmed with the abundance of information out there.

Well on the way home I had quite an adventure. We were traveling in our minivan which has over 150,000 miles on it but we had just had it checked out and were feeling confident that it would make the trip. On the way home on Friday things were running just fine and then all of a sudden the van completely overheated and started shaking until we stopped running it and let it cool down. We were about 20 miles from the nearest town and 60 miles from a major city in an area that had zero cell phone service and with our two little kids in tow. NOT a fun experience.

We stopped and ate at the town while we let the van cool down. Then we headed out again hoping to get to the city and pray that some kind of mechanic or auto parts store might HAPPEN to be open on Fourth of July weekend. We were able to get some new hoses which we thought were the problem but then on our way out of town it overheated again. Each time we tried to let it rest and cool down it ended up sucking the battery down to the point we would need a jump start to get going again. We were hot, miserable, and tired … just wanting to get HOME.

We finally gave up on fixing the car around 2 pm on Saturday after spending the night in Helena, Montana and ended up renting a u-haul to tow the van home. The only problem was it only had three seats so our kids had to share the middle seat and squish into the front of the u-haul cab with us and no car seats … EEEK. We made it home around midnight at the end of July 4th and missed all of the festivities. It was kind of sad but at least we made it home safely.

Emergency Preparedness Lessons Learned

What we were glad we had:

• Treats, drinks, and entertainment for the kids
• A spare jug of coolant and bottles of water to help us limp into town
• A map of Montana so we would know how far the next town was (we normally don’t carry maps with us but we had already gotten lost on this trip once so we happened to grab one)
• A small tool box my husband insisted we bring
• Cell phones and iPhone when we got to Helena (helped find the auto parts store and arrange the u-haul when we needed it)

What we wished we had:

• Jumper cables (we ended up buying another set after the 3rd jump we needed, and this is maddening because we have about 5 sets at home we had just forgotten to stick in)
• The repair manual for our van
• Spare cell phone chargers (my car charger stopped working)
• Printed directions/maps for the whole trip instead of depending on an iPhone that did not get service a lot of the time
• Hand fans to use when we couldn’t run our air conditioner
• Stuck with the caravan plan we had originally intended
• Taken the larger highway route instead of the “backroads” shortcut

Does anyone else have any advice for what could make a breakdown less traumatic? I’m SURE this has happened to more people than just my family!

To help you help your special someone come up with a thoughtful and fun gift for you we have put together a little handwritten note you can pass along telling them what you really want is a Food Storage Made Easy Downloadable Binder.

You can send your special someone this link, or print the note itself – whatever works. If your spouses are anything like ours, you’ll enjoy the letter. We finally decided hinting at things does not work so well. Read on…

Also to those of you have been asking, we finally have our bulk pricing for the Food Storage Made Easy Downloadable Binders. We had a lot of people ask about making multiple copies to share and we came up with a way to make it affordable to purchase additional “copies” of the Food Storage Made Easy Downloadable Binder. See the bulk orders sheet for more info.

This is a good time to re-evaluate our food storage supplies. If swine flu spreads to your area and you want to avoid going out in public, make sure you have actual MEALS that you can make without going to the store. Our Three Month Supply foods would be great for this.

Several of our readers have written in asking us to remind people to add some emergency items in to their non-food items list. Two of the main items recommended to help prevent swine flu are face masks and hand sanitizer. In some areas of the country you can’t even buy these things at the store right now, let alone stock up on them. So if you are still able to get them, it wouldn’t hurt to add them to your food storage.

Stay safe and check back tomorrow because we have a special handout for your HUSBANDS to help make this Mother’s Day your best one yet!

When Jodi first told me about Mozy I thought it was a great idea … for her. She could have her whole computer backed up online and it was only 5 bucks a month. She is a PC user and has had computer crashes in the past that wiped her whole hard drive clean, so I happily agreed to let her sign up for Mozy. She asked me if I wanted to sign up for it for my Macbook and I said no because I’ve never had any Mac crashes since I first got one in 1990.

Well about two weeks ago I was complaining to Jodi that my hard drive was almost full and it was driving me crazy. Once again she suggested I should get Mozy and back everything up so that I could clear it off of my computer. I still figured I was ok and just needed to do a clean install and I could just deal with it for now and do some backup DVDs sooner or later when I had time. You can probably tell where this story is going. A week ago, amid some frozen programs, I forced a reboot on the Macbook and it started back up, but just sat at a gray screen and wouldn’t do anything. None of my system install DVDs would load, and it just sat at that gray screen. About ten minutes of diagnostics in a Mac store found that my hard drive just wouldn’t boot. The computer was fine, but the hard drive itself had completely crashed. I lost everything!

Luckily for us, all of our family photos and videos were stored on Jodi’s computer. Unluckily for the company I work for, all of my work files were on that computer and were not backed up anywhere else. I do back up here and there on DVDs, but there were at least 50 GB of files that are now frozen neatly on a worthless chunk of metal in my closet. Needless to say I have learned my lesson.

Bottom line: even the mighty Mac can have a failure (even if it happens FAR FAR FAR less often than PCs, honey) and you really have to be on top of backing up your computer, whether it’s via an external hard drive, removable media, or something like Mozy. Jodi still enjoys reminding me of the fact that Macs apparently aren’t invincible after all.

-Mike

A note from Jodi: Even if your computer doesn’t “crash” it is still important to have it backed up online or outside of your home in case of a fire, flood, or other disaster that might destroy your computer completely. That’s why it is part of our Emergency Plan! If you are interested in using Mozy’s service you can get 10% off an annual or two year subscription during the month of October by typing in OCTOBER as the referral code. And you better believe Julie is LOVING this “I told you so” as Mozy’s BIGGEST FAN … have you seen her LOVE STORY about them?

The one part of getting started that we haven’t addressed until now is getting your computer backed-up. Chances are you have a lot of important stuff on your computer like financial documents, email, digital photos, music and more. Unfortunately, computers are vulnerable to hard drive crashes, virus attacks, theft and natural disasters, which can erase or destroy everything in an instant. I want to share with you my absolute favorite system for backing up files. It’s an online back-up system called Mozy. There is a free version that gives you a limited amount of space, but I HIGHLY recommend Mozy Unlimited Backup for $4.95/Month. Most of the time the free version of a website or program is good enough, but let me tell you in this case … so not true. $4.95 a month to back-up my ENTIRE computer! WORTH IT!!!

Mozy is a simple and safe way to back up all the important stuff on your computer. A copy of your data is stored in a secure, remote location for safekeeping, so that in the event of disaster your data is still retrievable.

When you sign up for Mozy, you tell the system what files or folders you wish to have backed up (like “My Documents”). After the initial sign-up you never have to do anything, your files are backed up automatically daily, including the new files in those folders. IT’S SO EASY!

I am Mozy’s BIGGEST FAN! 2 computer crashes will do that to you! Sorry this video is a little corny, but if you have ever had a computer crash you will understand!

Input OCTOBER as your referral code and save 10% off an annual or biennial subscription