[UK] Prepping on a budget, would appreciate pointers

Posted by IHateFACSCantos@reddit | preppers | View on Reddit | 28 comments

Hi all, complete noob here. I'm getting into prepping and have lots of ideas on how I want to tackle it but we are in a vulnerable position financially (long story but basically we bought a house and got reaaaaaally badly fucked over by the owners lying about the condition of it). Although our income is stable, after mortgage, loan payments, living costs etc we have maybe 20% of our take home left, so until 2027 (when we have paid everything off our disposable income will quadruple!) I am trying to triage the most important things first. My main concern is H5N1 - while CDC still assesses it as low risk to the public, if the CFR when it jumps to humans is anything close to the current 50% it will make COVID look like a fender bender. And as someone with a life sciences background I am really getting a 'pot about to boil over' gut feeling with the recent news of it spreading to the fucking antarctic, into goats and cows etc.

I've started by killing two birds (so to speak) with one stone - purchased a load of DIY tools that I already needed to repair the house and car, build battery packs, SMD components to build circuits with, I can solder and weld etc
I was very lucky to acquire a lab microscope from a work clearout so I have the ability to do some basic microbiology. For medicines, we have various fish antibiotics and a several month stock of our routine meds, don't think you can legally get "human" antibiotics in the UK unlike those special made prepper kits in the US? Oseltamivir would be a good one to get hold of though not critical as I know its efficacy in influenza is questionable
Downloaded an offline copy of Wikipedia and various other bits. I don't trust AI in day to day work but I think I may need it to help design electrical circuits in addition to Wikipedia, has anyone figured out how to get an offline instance of such a thing running (is it even possible with current consumer hardware?)
I think next I probably need to start building up food. What's the cheapest way to get full nutrition with a relatively long expiry date - MREs? I can't grow my own at the moment as our garden is a disaster and the security sucks anyway.
For power - is a petrol generator a better option or a big solar battery?
There's a ton of other fuckery I want to engage in like investing in a drone to get supplies to friends and colleagues (most live within a 5 mile radius) but I'm resisting the urge til money is better lol

Thanks for reading what is probably a heap of bad ideas, interested to hear your thoughts on cheap/free ways to sustain ourselves!

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Irunwithdogs4good@reddit

I work in the health field. The vaccine is already made and ready to go if the virus jumps to humans. Just get the vaccine and be ready for a lot of BS. The immune system and the vaccine that stimulates it is your best protection. Cloth masks are worthless and medical masks only good for a few minutes if you have an N95 or better respirator custom fitted to you, that might give a bit of protection if you know how to use it and the other quarantine gear. Otherwise it's worthless and is touted as a solution by the not so bright, crocodile grinning, narcissistic politicians of various countries who don't want people to stop working or worse stop shopping and spending money.

Generally you should have a way to store water, and a month's supply of food. I find the MRE type foods to be very poor quality. I tried one and I will never spend money on that again.

I do have an ample supply of dried beans, a 25 lbs bag of rice, and 25 lbs of flour with 10 lbs of whole wheat flour plus a bag of rye or buckwheat for pancakes. I grow green low calorie vegetables and have freezer and fresh veggies including onions, carrots and potatoes. I make batches of Kimchi on a regular basis. ( increases nutrition and is a good way to use the otherwise blah green cabbage which is a staple around here) Most of the veggies I have I could toss the ends or eyes into the ground and get more of the same. Beans can be planted and eaten fresh or dried. You can plant celery ends, carrot tops, potato eyes, and cabbage stems to get more of the same.

We have canned milk and prefer it to dehydrated. We keep porridge on hand. We have 2 close neighbors which commercial egg laying chicks so fresh protein isn't a problem. I like porridge over cold cereal, it's cheaper tastes better and is generally healthier.

I am going to take up cheese making so I have my own supply of my favourite food. :-)

I have a couple months supply of medication on hand at all times.

If we loose fuel supplies we have a woodstove, and bicycles with panniers. We have multiple springs in cycling distance and I can always go to work which has a big generator for a shower or medical supplies in a pinch. ( they provided services like this during the hurricane a couple years ago)

The world isn't going to end over a flu epidemic. It just gives CNN and FOX something to get excited about. The press is like a terrier. If nothing interesting is going on, they will make up something to create some excitement in their otherwise boring desk jockey lives. If it makes people afraid so much the better because they will pay rapt attention to the news in that state. Best thing to do is ignore them. If quarantine measures are taken you will hear about it one way or another.

wanderingbutnot@reddit

The better your skills, the less gear you need

goozy92@reddit

Food and water are definitely a top priority.

Food- buy an extra can or two of something every grocery trip and set it aside.

Water- same as food, every grocery trip get an extra gallon and set it aside until you have 5 gallons per member of your household, or what i do is, we shop at Costco and their 40 pack of water bottles is only 4 bucks and they're 5 gallons a pack. We have one open and two in reserve at all times and rotate as needed.

Medical should be your next priority.

You can get some good budget stuff on amazon, until you can afford the good stuff and then use your budget stuff as training aids. Just remember the golden rule. Two is one, and one is none.

After that self protection. Even though personally, this one is a top priority for me. If you don't have any firearms buy a budget 9mm pistol, like a psa dagger or taurus g2c or g3c for about 300-400 or I recommend the best selling handgun in America the glock 19 for around 500.

Aside from firearms one thing you do right off the jump is practice hand to hand combat, like boxing or grappling or even knife fighting. Just something until you can buy a guy

wildernessladybug@reddit

He’s in the UK, we don’t have firearms 😂

Substantial_Base6224@reddit

You do if you join a gun club or develop a keen interest in country sports. Just be sure to have your firearms license up to date.

deepcoralreefer@reddit

Here is a good book to read. It comes with lists, video links, a free video course on sporting greens, how to set up a pantry that you rotate through, plan for power loss, water filtration, all the basic stuff in a calm and methodical way.

https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Disaster-Ready-Home/Creek-Stewart/9781507217368

There’s also some great links here. I recommend the free disaster preparedness course

https://www.coursera.org/learn/disaster-preparedness/home/week/1

So far all the H5N1 spread has been direct contamination from mammals predating dead birds. (Seals, mink etc) or dead birds have contaminated the water supply (recent dairy herd outbreaks ).

H2H not happening so far AFAIK.

Tradtrade@reddit

Garden. Allotment. Rabbits if you want the ultimate meat making machine. Learn your forage . Rice and beans.

NeighborhoodSuper592@reddit

carefull for rabbit starvation.
better of having a different protein source

Just literally anything else at all it’s such a massively overblown issues

LevainRising@reddit

Yeah, like beans.

theNewLuce@reddit

Rice and beans, a pair of 50 lb sacks in food grade 5 gallon bucket is cheap long term store and lots of calories/nutrients per $ and space.

Kodiak64-jon@reddit

Out of interest, do you live in a town or city? Because with all that's coming, I personally think getting into the countryside would be half the prepping battle won.

Superslim-Anoniem@reddit

For the AI, check out ollama.

_pseudoname_@reddit

Do you know how to get Ollama or another AI to work off-grid or is that not feasible yet?

If you got power, it absolutely is feasible. Ollama lets you run GPT's locally.

Can you recommend resources for learning to make an offline one?

Its offline by default after standard setup. All the standard tutorials will work.

IHateFACSCantos@reddit (OP)

Thank you for your input everybody, really appreciate it :-)

SunLillyFairy@reddit

You’ve got a lot turning in your mind! That’s a good thing, but I know it can be hard to sort out. I have a mind that works like that; it really helped me to start a spreadsheet with tabs on different topics (food, first aid, water storage, home defense, go bag, ect). On each tab I included things I wanted to do or buy… from there I could prioritize based on risk, budget and what I thought I needed/wanted most.

Regarding budget… there is SO MUCH you can do that costs little or nothing. The first two being fitness and education. Having printed books (which you can buy online at great prices) and “how to” guides (prints from computer research) are also valuable. Topics such as: first aid, camp cooking, herbology, home/car repair. I don’t know about in the UK, but in US there are several ways to buy used goods that greatly reduce the expense of prepping gear.

Regarding food- there are a lot of posts on here regarding “deep pantry.” If you search that phrase there’s a lot of talk about how to buy more of what you already eat and rotating. There are a lot of lower cost options for buying and storing foods that have a very long shelf like (like 20+ years), such as beans, rice, wheat and nonfat milk powder.

Happy prepping!

AlgernonsLilies@reddit

I’m still new too but small extras at the grocery store really add up! I purchase maybe $5-$20 in “prep” foods like canned vegetables and meat, dried rice, etc. and extras of shelf stable things we love. We rotate through but in just three months, we’ve amassed enough extra to feed four people for two months.

hikerforlife@reddit

This is how I started out too. It's a great way to food prep on the budget.

At the time, 2011, I would use $10 per week of my regular grocery budget to stock up on foods I normally eat that happen to be on sale. I would allow $20 per week now due to inflation.

It's surprising how quickly you can build a nice stockpile of food without busting the budget with this method.

prepsson@reddit

When i was unemployed I had less than a shoestring budget after all bills were paid.

Most of my gear were picked up during sales and/or from second hand shops. As an example, I picked up some heavy duty china-made trangia clone for 10 SEK (\~1€) NIB. This was about 20 years ago so it was made before they realised they can skimp on the quality and still make money.

MRE and freeze-dried food i pick up during sales, but I mainly consider that when (or if) i need to be on the move. When travelling I keep it in my bag "just in case"

Petrol generators (or diesel for that matter), i'd say yes depending on the price. It's noisy and will attract attention. I picked one up for about 900 SEK but it's in need of some service (hence why i got it cheap). If you plan on running anything sensitive then you'd need something with a pure sine wave.

As for solar, a combination of this and a petrol generator perhaps? Solar is quiet ;)

Drones for delivery, i'd say no to that one. Too noisy and you'd need a pretty chonky drone to carry anything bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It's also easy for people to spot and follow. Someone shooting it down is probably the least of your concerns.

plentyofeight@reddit

Look at this months general shopping.

The food you buy that is in tins. Buy (say) twice as much next month... build this up.

Also buy tinned fruit and veg.

Fresh food - what can you grow?

Do you have a freezer?

Have you a garden?

Depending on size:

Buy Garden pots online, not at thd Garden Centre. Plant herbs Plant fruit bushes Plant fruit trees

Buy medical stuff that is within your skillset - plasters, burn cream etc. Paracetamol, ibuprofen. Oragel etc. Buy toothpaste and some spare brushes.

silasmoeckel@reddit

Wikipedia, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix it's pretty trivial to get a complete copy and fits on a modest sized flash drive.

MRE's etc are a horrid choice unless your traveling. Deep pantry is the goto here store what you eat 6 months is practical, you will need to supplement for dairy and proteins but those have longer shelf lives. Generally speaking shopping sales this should be a minor cost savings.

Power, solar + battery and gen should save you a lot of money. It's tricky to get them to put in something that can properly work with a generator a lot of shopping around for somebody with a clue as to how off grids should work. Price wise it's about the same so your saving money day 1. On a smaller scale gen is the only thing that works no matter what, batteries lets you use less fuel. Propane/lng are the preferred fuels as they dont go bad. Honda eu2200i's are the gold standard here for small quiet gen sets that use very little fuel and are reliable, pair it with a victron inverter/charger and a stack of lifepo4 batteries. Ecoflow has combo battery and generator setup but they are very new so generator quality/reliability is unknown.

How are you set on water have a well?

NeroJardini@reddit

I totally misread your post and thought that you started your prepping journey by killing birds with stones lol.

Royal_Sheepherder69@reddit

1) Stop trusting the liars who stole your Government. The GLOBALIST Goldman Sachs Filth who runs your country was not even elected, and must be forcibly ejected.

Interesting-Record92@reddit

If you search within this subreddit there are extensive discussion threads on most of the things you brought up. Your financial situation doesn’t actually sound that bad. Even if there were undisclosed issues with the house, you own the house and will have a lot of debt eliminated in three years. During that time your asset is appreciating and it’s sounds like you are skilled enough to remediate some of the issues with the house yourself.

man4evil@reddit

Generator needs fuel, needs oil to be changed in about 50 hours but it’s cheaper to buy. Solar battery might sound interesting but it’s small and expensive. Look into hybrid inverters and lifepo4 batteries. This allow to use cheaper solar panels on your house roof and have it support your usage daily