If you have come here expecting to be blown away by a well written article by a journalism or english major, sorry to disappoint. The name of this Blog is Ramblings of an active mind, and that is what you will get.
First off I am going to give a little background on my understanding of the philosophy of modern prepping and then I will explain why I believe insurance is an integral part of prepping.
Modern prepping means many things to many people. I fondly follow the explanation given by Jack Spirko of The Survival Podcast http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/ . Which is "Helping You Live The Life You Want, If Times Get Tough, Or Even If They Don't". In this we are not prepping for the big event, SHTF, or whatever you wish to call it. The modern way of prepping is to prepare for every day life which includes the many small emergencies you may encounter along the way. It is not about living underground or in a cave but it does hold that having a personal bugout (place to go to) location in mind and set up in case natural or man made disasters make it unreasonable to continue living in your current home for a short to extended period of time. Another facet is that instead of stocking up on food and things which you may never need or use, to instead "store what you eat and eat what you store" as Jack often says. A few examples would be to have not only the food on hand but also a means of preparing the food if you couldn't go shopping at the local grocery store. Another example might be to have an emergency source of power in case the electricity went out (as is often the case in disasters). Too many of us rely on the fact that local or federal disaster management teams will come in and help us out, but what do we do in the meantime. Besides relying on someone else may leave you without even the basic necessities.
So how does Prepping and insurance go together you may ask. Well here is my view on the subject, prepping is like insuring you and your families ability to survive a disaster and insurance is a means for replacing what you lose. Now many of us have or have heard horror stories in regards to insurance companies and their repayment practices, and some of us may even bristle at the regulations requiring us to posess certain types of insurance. Let me start with car insurance and I will not be using actual names although I will use actual cases. A friend of mine (lets call him William) was on the road when he got a call that his wife had been in an accident. Well William rushed back to town to see his wife in the hospital (big huge bill), as things were being discussed it came out that his wife had decided to save on monthly expenses and drop the car insurance (against the law). Now the accident was not his wife's fault, but the other driver didn't have insurance or a job. When his wife dropped the insurance she also dropped the under/uninsured portion that came with it. The other driver being unemployed is not a good place to go looking for reimbursement either. So now William has to come up with the money to replace the vehicle and for the enormous hospital bills. Fast Forward a couple years and his wife was leaving work and pulled out in front of a vehicle and was T-boned. The wife who was clearly at fault had also forgot to maintain insurance once again. Now William has two more cars to replace and more hospital bills. He still hadn't got the first accident completely paid for. One accident without his wife's fault, one with, no insurance, no means of recouping his money. Oh yeah and no preps to help live through the troubled times. If this family had built up preps it might have made the reduced income period a little easier. The other event was that happened was the 2008 bank failures which reduced his personal income from 70+ thousand a year to less than 40 thousand a year. Maintaining auto insurance and preps would have made this a much more bearable situation.
Life insurance (by this I mean term life insurance) is a way to insure the loss of income that may be derived from the physical loss of a family member. This should be considered mandatory by you for the main bread winner but also for the secondary breadwinner. Their may be an event where you lose the main breadwinner in the family and life insurance will help to cover the financial loss along with the secondary breadwinner working some, but what if they are both lost in the same disaster. Having a good supply of preps may also make the transition of losing someone go easier.
Now for the recent incidences we have all been dealing with. As many of you know there has been a whole heck of a lot of natural disasters going on around the country lately. They don't seem to be leaving any area untouched. Many people have been relying on both their insurance companies and the emergency management groups to restore some semblance of their prior life. But as evidenced by this article (well I couldn't find the article again) but it spoke of the fact that a town in South Carolina (I think ) was prohibiting FEMA from bringing trailers into the city limits. People were living in tents next to their destroyed houses. This is a good example of why insurance needs to go along with prepping. Use your preps to get you by until you can replace things like your home using insurance.
On any given year we hear about areas losing power from days to weeks. On top of this we hear about people dying from expossure from not having a way to heat their houses to getting stuck somewhere without any means of providing for their basic needs. Let's face it freak storms are becoming more frequent. One may catch you away from your house. Something as simple as AAA (another form of insurance in my opinion) may be a lifesaver. If you are stuck in a blizzard with a disable vehicle AAA may be the best friend you can call on. In my many years and miles of traveling for a job I have always found that the most likely place for a breakdown is in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, in the worst weather. Of course since I spend more than 120,000 miles on the road a year you might say I have a greater likelihood of a breakdown. Please remember however that my truck goes in a shop on a monthly basis for maintenance.
Having preps should not be like having insurance. You shouldn't just spend the money hoping to never use them. Preps should be gone through on a regular basis to check their integrity and validity. It is like a story Jack talks about in which many people had generators for Y2K but not the gasoline to operate them. Gas stations are computerized too. They also run on power. How do you get the gas out of the tank without power. What good does it do to have a first aid kit with expired medications? Of course people also fail to keep their insurance updated. When was the last time you checked on your beneficiaries. Does your policy still cover what it needs to? Do you have an updated list of your personal posessions? Have you made copies of family photos and such and placed them in a secure location. I prefer a copies in a location a large distance away from your current. A tornado can take out a large area at once, place your stuff a few hours away for better safekeeping.
By having things such as a B.O.B. (bug out bag), one or more vessels holding essentials that can be grabbed in a hurry on your way out of the area. A bug out location that you can stay at for a short to long period of time. Insurance to replace things that become damaged or missing. And last but not least a PLAN for you and your family in the event of a disaster, you will come out of most disasters on top of the hole instead of at the bottom digging yourself out.
In this line from Wikipedia "In law and economics, insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss." we see that even prepping is a type of insurance. Please insure yourself and your family. Commercial insurance cannot replace a life, but preeping can help to insure against the loss of that life.
I cannot tell you what you need to do in order to help your family not just survive but to also thrive, but I hope this has given you a few things to think on.
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