Gunner Quinn
My son played lots of sports growing up and had/has a very competitive nature. Very seldom did his teams lose. When his teams lost, he was a very poor sport about it. I used to tell him winning is easy, but you learn more from losing. That is, we learn what we need to do better or differently, thus making us stronger. The same can be said about preparedness, we learn more from our failures than our successes. Here are some of my prepper follies and what I wish I would have done differently.
First and foremost, I would not have waited to find, purchase and move permanently to a Bug Out Location (BOL). Finding a “perfect” piece of property is unlikely, so time and resources to get your BOL to where you want it, will take time and money. Since we did not want the debt, we have had to wait to complete projects as resources allow.
The second thing I wish I would have done way sooner, was to complete a written plan with objectives and the tasks and resources needed to achieve those objectives. Granted in my younger days I was more mobile, especially while in the military but I wasted a lot of funds buying multiple knives and guns instead of determining what I needed in a knife and firearm I just kept buying multiples. The funds for those firearms and knives could have been better used by saving them for a BOL and the improvements to the BOL.
The third thing I would change, is that I would have done more education and training. Considering that I am only a few credits shy of a Master’s Degree in Emergency and Disaster Management, have hundreds of hours of continuing education and lots of military training and education, I still think I could have used more. Specifically traditional skills such as herbal medicine, animal husbandry, 1800s agricultural techniques, medical skills, welding, and small engine repair would have been very helpful.
To kind of go in hand with training is listening more to and learning more from my grandparents and even parents. I still remember driving down the back roads of Indiana County Pennsylvania and hearing my great-grandmother yelling at my mom to stop the car and back up. Then my grandmother would instruct one of us kids to go gather some type of plant leaf, pod, flower, berry, or other part of a plant. I really wish that I would have learned why she wanted those plant parts. My great-grandfather was a master carpenter and came from a long line of German cabinet makers. He did all his work without power tools, a true craftsman.
Additionally, I would have tried harder to gain more prepper friends.Yes, I have some prepper friends, but I think more would have been better and trying to establish a mutual assistance group (MAG) would have been a great way of getting more training and being better prepared with more Human Resources.
About seven years after starting my career, I started a “side hustle” business. The business, buying and selling military surplus wholesale, was a great way of having additional preparedness-related equipment and supplies on hand. I was promoted to a department head position at work and the new position required more time at work, both evening hours on the weekdays and weekend hours. At the same time my wife told me she was pregnant with our first child. I shut the business down and liquidated my inventory by selling it all to one of the local army surplus stores. Why I would have changed my decision to shut the business down was because it was a very good source of prepper equipment and supplies for pennies on the dollar. The business was very profitable so the extra income would have been useful to buy and better the BOL. The other reason is, now our area does not have any military surplus stores since they all closed down. I specifically chose to wholesale because we had three retail stores in the area. If I had kept the wholesale business open I could have easily opened a retail shop to fill the void. The retail business should have produced even more income for preparedness.
Since we did not buy and move to our BOL until recently we did not plant a large garden or raise animals. I would really like a “do-over” on this since over time it would have saved us money by growing and raising our own food it would have given us more time to learn more. Do not get me wrong, we are learning but these days I would much rather be a seasoned expert than an intermediate “homesteader”.
I have bought my fair share of firearms over the years. Many were just due to my curiosity on a design feature or because a particular rifle was flooding the surplus market. I remember gun shows back in the early 1990s offering Chinese Norinco SKS rifles for $99. I have no regrets for not buying a Norinco SKS but there are a few surplus military rifles over the years I wish I would have bought multiples of. Oh, and let us not forget the days of cheap surplus ammunition. I started getting into shooting the Russian Mosin-Nagant rifles and back in the day they were all less than $100. A “sardine can” of 440 rounds of 7.62x54R was about $40. But today, $230 a can is a great price. I sure wish that I would have put more cheap surplus ammunition away, back in the day. Besides surplus rifle ammunition I wish I would have picked up cases of the surplus 26.5mm flares. They used to be around $20 for a box of 10, perhaps a little more for something that was more in demand such as the white illumination rounds that are like finding hen’s teeth now.
I would also like a do-over on a lot of items that I did not buy at auction. I do not have regrets about stuff I bought at auction but rather the stuff I did not buy. Specifically cast iron before it came into vogue, two to three very nice tent structures with metal frames. There were more than once I let a nice cast iron woodburning stove slip away.
The other thing I wish that I could have done differently was not picking up my brother’s M37 military trucks. He had two, one he had restored to about 85% and the other was a parts vehicle. He was in a vehicle accident and never drove again and his wife sold them off. I told her I did not want them but about 20 years later I looked at buying one and got sticker shock.
The last thing that I’d like to mention is when we bought our BOL I had a 20×40 pole barn built with a lean-to on the south side. I did not put a lot of deep thought into what I wanted the barn for. I thought, it is 20×40 it is big enough. Well, it was not. But besides the size, I would have changed the roof to a gambrel to offer more storage space. I have space now but I have to duck and weave around rafter now. I would have also thought out a better plan for storage shelves. I purchased a number of metal shelving unit but if I had a do-over I would have built them out of rough-cut lumber for saving a few hundred dollars at least.
I was in a rush to start moving items from our home in the city out to the BOL and some of those items ended up in the mezzanine above the workshop in the pole barn. Well, then I had a great idea of building wood shelves up in the mezzanine to better use my space and organize the stuff up there. My only access to the mezzanine is by ladder. No problem when you’re a relatively young person in good health. But about two years after buying our BOL I came down with an inner-ear condition that impacts my sense of balance. Needless to say, being on a ladder is NOT very safe for me. So trying to carry everything down to clear out space to build the shelves was not in the cards. I ended up building the shelves but it was a royal pain. Then I decided I wanted a blacksmith / welding shop. The existing pole barn was not a good place to put one. So as I write this, my Amish neighbor is finishing putting a lean-to on the North side of the pole barn. I am normally a big proponent of planning but sometimes we do not realize the benefit of taking the time to logically think about what we want. Consider future needs and layouts. I hope that you learn from my oversight.
Now that I am a lot older and wiser, I just chalk up my prepper follies to being young and not thinking about the long-term ramifications. So if you are a relatively young prepper, or a prepper getting ready to buy or build a BOL, then hopefully my mistakes will save you some time, dollars, and heartaches.
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