Financial Fasting
Details
Extra Credit Second Week Bonus Drill.
Sign up for this event if you want to test your financial discipline and Prepper abilities for a full two weeks. This is more of a practical challenge and serves to drive us to practice fiscal discipline and prove to ourselves that we can break the marketing hold we all feel. We all know we can't buy our way out of a disaster with gear and supplies and money. This is a way to reassess ourselves and our Prepper priorities going into the new year. Practice promotes proficiency.
Remember to post your thoughts, findings and suggestions for others at the end of your drill.
Financial Fasting – AKA Economic Collapse Drill. Two Week Duration.
After reading an article in the financial section of my online news that spoke to the advantage of ceasing to spend money for a period of a week per year I was inspired to propose a financial emergency drill.
We plan for, supply for and train for disasters and hone our abilities to deal with emergencies but the scope of our preparations is bigger than simple adversity. We often talk to the loss of a job, unexpected medical costs and one of the ultimate Prepper events, economic collapse. This is something I haven’t trained to other than to practice a Bug-In Drill. So, in order to drill for an Economic Collapse I suggest that as Preppers we cease to spend any money for a week.
Imagine if you saw on the news the reports of runs on banks in our country. If they had to close their doors for lack of cash and the financial organizations said that dividend and retirement fund checks were not going to be coming as scheduled what would happen to you? If you couldn’t access your money all of a sudden, what would you do? If our government said that they would not be able to process Social Security Payments and credit card companies ceased to process transactions how would you be affected? Our commercial sector would close and we wouldn’t be able to purchase food, fuel, clothing, equipment and the normal day-to-day expendables. Any cash we had on hand would be useless at that point. There would be no one to buy anything from. Our medial sector would be unavailable, as well as critical services. You would have to rely on what you already had at that point. If you had the foresight to watch those reports and anticipate a level of financial crisis of that scale, what would you do right now knowing it was a few days away? How do you train for this event? How really prepared are you for something like this?
Starting January 1st, after all the holiday post-Christmas sells, which we Preppers will be picking over, and the parties and events we will stop buying anything for a period of one week. We spend no money. We do not buy anything. We do not shop. We don’t use our credit cards or our cash or Prepper gold or Bitcoins. We do not buy food, fuel, commodities or goods. We do this for 7 days, one week. You still of course pay your typical bills of the rent, mortgage, car payments, electric, water and phone & TV. Other than normal bills, we will have no other spending for this week.
Plan ahead for this drill and fill up your gas tanks, your refrigerator, freezer, your pet food, your heating fuel, your meds and anything else you would typically need for a week.
At the end of the week, post how you fared. What did you run out of that you had to purchase? What would you have stocked up that you didn’t have and couldn’t buy? What did you do without or found lacking? How did you do not being a typical consumer for a week? How much money do you think you saved? How difficult was it to not buy things or spend money for a week?
Extra bonus credit will be to go for two weeks. I would like to think that if anything serious were to occur that interrupted the finical and economic conditions in our country, being one of the richest nations on earth we as a country would get the financial machine running as quickly as we could. I would think the money would start to flow sooner than later although I may be optimistically naïve in my opinion but I still look to the American spirit as being able to overcome adversity when we need to. But, it will take more than a week for this to happen.
An article for inspiration:
Financial Fasting