The Grand Unified Theory of Self-Reliance

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Ten years ago I seemed to be looking for some way to identify and link all aspects of self-reliance into…what, exactly? I’m not sure what I was thinking way back then. Some amazing infographic? Some impressive looking model? Was I planning to write a book on the subject? A competing tome to Thoreau’s Walden? I don’t remember any more.

But I’m not sure it matters. While I may not be that much more self reliant now than I was ten years ago, I’ve learned a few things. One of those things is that sometimes looking at the entirety of a problem only serves to stress people out. There is nothing simple about self-reliance, no matter what I may choose to call my blog.

The important thing with self-reliance, as with many other useful endeavors, is to start. Just pick someplace and start there. As I mentioned the other day, my return to pursuing self-reliance began a year and a half ago when I decided to gain better control over my money. It wasn’t a conscious effort toward self-reliance; I just wanted to see if I could find more money in my budget. I identified a pain point and started there.

That, I think, is the key. It’s fine to look at the whole picture and recognize your ultimate goal, but you can’t start everywhere at once. It’s much better to start with what’s bugging you most right now. What’s the one thing that you wish you could fix. Start there, and ask yourself, “What do I need to do to become more self reliant in this one area?”

That exercise may lead you somewhere else first, but at least you’ll know why. For example, if your goal is to become more self sufficient in food storage you may look at that more closely and realize you don’t have the money to build that up as quickly as you want. Perhaps you may want to look at your budget first. That may lead you to determine what you really need is a better job, and to get that you need to work on your networking skills. It doesn’t matter where you end up, so long as you determine a single place to start, a single goal to pursue.

So yes, I imagine sooner or later I’ll sit down and hammer out all the areas I feel are part of self-reliance and share that with you all. But for all that, this blog is about simple self-reliance. It’s about making it all manageable, about getting there one step at a time. In reality self-reliance isn’t binary. You don’t suddenly hit a point where you are now officially self reliant. It’s a continuum, an incremental process. You steadily work at becoming more self reliant than you were before. It’s as simple as making sure you have a full month of toilet paper next time there’s a run on the stores instead of being caught with only a few rolls left. It’s making sure you have enough savings to cover your next car maintenance bill instead of having to put it on the credit card and pay it off over the next few months.

It’s not about reaching a point where you can say, “There’s nothing I can’t handle now.” It’s about being able to say, “If X happens I think I’ll be okay. I’ll have enough cushion to be able to avoid panic while I figure out how to overcome this.”

And that’s the other thing about self-reliance: what I have to do to achieve it may look different from what you need to do. The problems I need to plan for may be entirely different from what keeps you up at night. Up here in Utah it’s safe to say I don’t need to have a plan for hurricanes. Down in Florida you probably don’t have to worry about your pipes freezing if your power goes out in the middle of winter. There’s no single solution to self-reliance, at least not at the detail level.

Ultimately I don’t think I can come up with one Grand Unified Theory of Self-reliance. I’m always going to miss something simply because my perspective is limited. I may be able to take into consideration every possible scenario in the United States, but there will always be something I have no experience with, such as locust swarms in Kenya or poisonous snakes in the dunny in Australia.

I think all I can really do is show you what my goals are and invite you along for the journey of getting there. I can try to provide a place where we can share ideas and learn from one another. If this helps someone else along the way it’ll be worth it.

Dusting off the old blog

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I spent some time reading through my old posts here. What a walk down memory lane, for better and worse. So much has changed in ten years. For example:

  • A majority of the blogs and resources I cited and linked to are no more. So much information lost. So much experience and perspective gone. And my efforts to not borrow too much from anyone, but rather refer readers to those sites instead has left my own blog largely useless. Perhaps I should have summarized and quoted more, just in case. Lesson learned, I suppose.
  • My sister, aka TaxiDriverMom, passed away from cancer a few years ago. I had forgotten she’d had a blog–and that I’d guest posted on it. Not all walks down memory lane are cheerful ones.
  • I cringe a little now at my bold declaration, upon setting out on my short-lived consulting career, that I was now liberated and would never go back to corporate America again. Though I’m technically a successful entrepreneur, I’ve been entrenched in corporate America for the past eight years.
  • My little kids have grown. My oldest is in Canada, living on her own, and studying concept art. And I failed to buy her a basic tool set when she left, though mostly because the dormitory she lives in doesn’t give her much chance to need them, but also because space in her luggage was at a premium. Perhaps when she graduates or moves into her first full apartment situation.
  • My business (or rather, my fourth attempt at a business), VIP Gamestore, will turn ten years old this year. I’m proud of what my partners and I started, even though I’m more of a silent partner these days. The residual income has been a real blessing through the years.
  • Our house here in Sandy, Utah, hasn’t proven to be as great for storage as I’d hoped, even after I built another shed. The shed is my best one yet, however.

One of the main impressions I came away with was that I was very unfocused and hesitant to offer any personal experience on the topic. It was a discussion of theory, of concept, but I turned to everyone else for substance. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I do hope to have some substance of my own to add now.

Let’s do the timewarp again

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Holy moley, where has the time gone? Today I got a little curious and decided to take a look at just what I have on my Simple Self Reliance Facebook page. There were a bunch of links to content on a website. I had honestly forgotten that Simple Self Reliance had once been a blog. I had forgotten that I had once cared deeply about self reliance.

Thing is, I still do. I didn’t for a while–not so much, at least. Moving to Utah opened a whole new chapter in my life that pulled me off in different directions. And here I am now, nine years later, caring deeply about self reliance again.

Back then self reliance was more about weathering the financial storms of life. The biggest problem I had faced to that point was regular bouts of unemployment. When we moved to Utah I likely thought that problem was behind me for a while. I also resurrected a writing career I had talked myself out of in college, and my blogging attention went in another direction on a different blog.

More importantly I largely forgot about self reliance. In spite of a new job that paid more we never seemed to have the money to put into building up our food storage and getting other emergency items together. The kids were getting older and more expensive (teenagers do more than just eat a lot!), and in spite of what they told me at the time, the cost of living is considerably higher in Salt Lake City than in Boise. We’ve been getting by okay, but perhaps we’ve been too comfortable.

Whatever the reason, self reliance has not been foremost on my mind.

That has been changing, however. Around a year and a half ago I began to realize I was losing control of my finances. Nothing serious, mind you, but I found I was only tracking our expenses, not really monitoring them, and not doing anything to improve our financial situation. I’d been investing in my 401K at work, but my over-all financial goals had largely fallen by the wayside. A lot of unnecessary things had crept into our budget.

A little over a year ago a pumping station in our city water network malfunctioned and dumped some chemicals into our water supply at hazardous levels. We were unable to drink water from the sink for over two days while they sorted out the problem. We had some water storage, but we suddenly had to wonder if we had enough–and if it was still good.

For the past several years our neighborhood electrical grid has been unstable, leaving us without electricity for five or more hours at a time, and usually during prime electricity-usage hours. We had plenty of light, but dinners (we have an electric stove) were a bit of a struggle. Once my wife had to go out to find food from a restaurant outside the blackout area which, being vegans, was tricky to find.

Then, of course, 2020 arrived in all its horrific glory. Last October I was informed my job with the bank would end at the beginning of the year. My most recent round of unemployment was, quite fortunately, also my shortest. The day after my job ended I got a job offer, and I started work a week and a half later.

The Coronavirus caught us a little off guard. We’ve generally been pretty good about keeping a few weeks or months ahead on our food supply, but when our state started implementing restrictions the timing was poor. The panic-buying and hoarding began while we were at a low point in our purchasing cycle. We’ve been okay, but we’ve had to carefully monitor our usage on a few things.

In the middle of all this our metropolitan area experienced a 5.4 scale earthquake. Though we live more than 15 miles from the epicenter and only felt the initial quake and one of the many aftershocks, it was a wake-up call all its own. We live next to a major fault line. We might not be so lucky the next time.

The last week or so I’ve been getting very serious about emergency preparedness. My wife and I have made a goal that we will never be so unprepared again. Finding this blog just now seems too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. It seems like a good time to start writing again, to capture our journey as we get serious about self reliance once again.

Financial records and “continuity planning”

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Most businesses have established (or at least should have) business continuity plans for ensuring the business can continue operating in the event of a localized or general emergency. This is the case with households, too. Emergency evacuation plans and 72-hour (bug-out) kits are essential. But there is another emergency that is far more likely yet far less often planned against: the death of a spouse.

A recent article on Yahoo! Finance brings this home:

A case in point for not making big decisions soon after a spouse’s death is Maureen Saunders. The financial chores following the death of her husband, Hubert, from pancreatic cancer in 2006 at age 65 were crushing enough. Although Saunders, now 58, balanced the checkbook, her husband was the main financial decision-maker, especially when it came to investments. His death left her “in uncharted waters, not only emotionally and spiritually but also financially.”

Saunders had to wrangle with the life insurance company, which didn’t believe she was her husband’s beneficiary. She had a “total meltdown” in the bank when she discovered, after bouncing some checks, that the Social Security Administration had rescinded Hubert’s latest direct-deposit benefit payment. She proved that her husband died after the deadline to be eligible for that month’s payment, but it took weeks for the government to return the money. She did not realize that she would not be eligible for a survivor benefit until she turned 60. “You’re so vulnerable and raw, and there is always another form to fill out,” says Saunders, who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla.

This is an area I can certainly do better on, even though I’ve discussed it before. But our recent mortgage application, relocation, and trying to find stuff after the move has reminded me that there is a great deal of financial information my wife would not know how to find if something were to happen to me. I need to get everything organized, document where to find everything, and then sit down with her and go through it.

On the bright side, we did find out that our efforts to establish credit in my wife’s name have paid off. She’s from another country, having moved here as an adult, and as such did not have a credit history. We started working on that, and during the mortgage application process we found out we were not only successful in establishing credit, her credit score is higher than mine!

Getting organized, however, is essential. Probably the best place to start would be to get her acquainted with the regular bill-paying, and then move toward the bigger, long-term items. We have time, of course, but then everyone does–right up until they don’t.

 

Home food production – Begin with the end in mind

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There is one good thing about uprooting your family and moving to another state: You get to choose a new home. Having lived in two previous homes, we’ve learned a few things about what is important to us. One important factor is home food production. Even if it’s a small garden to supplement our grocery purchases, it’s important to us.

So when I went house shopping in our new town (I say “I” because my wife was 400 miles away and only able to offer guidance based on the MLS listings or from photos I sent) one of the main considerations was either the presence of food production space or the potential for it. In some ways, the having the room to put in gardens or trees was preferable, as we didn’t want to inherit any bad placement or planning.

As it was, though, the house we chose has both–established fruit trees and dedicated vegetable garden space and room for more if we choose. The house itself was nice, but one look at the yard and that clinched it. This house had “us” written all over it.

I’m sure we’ll find some of the former owners’ choices don’t work well for us, and some changes will need to be made, but few things indicate “this will work” as well as fruit hanging on the trees and a garden rapidly approaching the point of harvest. We know you can grow food here because we see it being done. We are literally enjoying the fruit of someone else’s labors.

So whatever difficulties our new situation may introduce into our plan to return to self-reliance, at least our yard is not one of them. In that regard, knowing what we wanted up front has paid off already.

Step Two – Financial baseline

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When starting a new job simultaneous with moving into a new home in a new state there is a certain amount of chaos wrecked on the home finances. There are unexpected expenses in moving out, unexpected expenses in moving in, and extra start-up costs for all the new services, not to mention replacing all those things you threw out before you moved thinking you wouldn’t need them in your new place.

And there’s always the unexpected house repairs for things that the inspector missed.

It suffices to say that for the first month or two you’ll be doing well just keeping track of whether or not you have money, let alone how much and where it needs to go. Chances are your paycheck will fluctuate for awhile, too, as taxes, shared costs on benefits, and other items kick in.

The sooner you can make sense of the chaos the better, of course. Any and all information you can collect will be helpful. Start up a list of all the recurring bills that have come, along with any you are still waiting to come. At the very least you’ll be able to establish what you don’t yet know.

Then as your bills start arriving, start recording the amounts, noting what expenses are one-time start-up costs and what are more likely to be the ongoing amount. Start using this to put together a baseline of what you think your monthly living expenses will be. Then over the next few months start validating your list, adjusting as needed as you get more data. If you’re lucky you’ll have a fairly solid baselin within a month, but expect it to take at least three months for things to really even out.

Obviously if you see problems popping up (ie. more expenses than income) you need to start making adjustments. You may wish to over time anyway, even if your cash flow is positive. For example, our original plan in moving in was to get cell phones and skip getting a land-line this time. But further research quickly showed that IP phones, cable DSL, and other potential money-savers weren’t such bargains after all. And our cell reception at our home is a bit spotty. So now we have a land-line and cell phones.

Even when we just had the cell phones we didn’t use nearly as many minutes as I had expected. Chances are we’re going to pare back our service. It’ll only save us $10-20 a month, but every bit helps. $20 a month toward food storage goes a long way, for example.

Right now we’re not through our first month, so our baseline is still fairly unstable. But I’ll be tightening it up as quickly as I can. It’s driving me nuts to not yet have a reliable budget. I must have ORDER!!!!

Step One – Shelter: Update 2

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We have closed on our new house, moved in, and have been there a week and a half. It’s been an adventure. Our air conditioner blew a fuse our first weekend here. We have numerous electrical outlets that don’t work. Our phone lines worked for a few days, then croaked. The connection to the house is fine, so the phone company won’t help. I’m currently pirating my own phone service by running a cable from the outside box to my DSL modem, which in turn connects in one phone.

And we have an ant problem.

Some of the “loveableness” of the house has rubbed off, but I still like the place. It will be a great home once we get things settled in, some things repaired, and some things banished back to the depths of hades from whence they sprang. We still have ample room for storage, and that will be a very good thing once we get into a position to capitalize on it.

Stay tuned.

 

Update: Step One – Shelter

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This weekend we entered contract to buy a house. It’s been a bit of a challenge, and it wasn’t looking good there for awhile. But we did it, and now we’re in the application and documentation stage.

The first problem came when I went out with the realtor to finalize which house we were going to pick. There were three to choose from; two we’d already seen and liked, and a third that we’d noticed and wanted to look at. At the first two we noticed problems we’d not noticed before, like signs of water damage, broken windows, evidence that the air conditioner was broken, etc. The third house, however, was looking pretty good.

And then suddenly it wasn’t. We realized that while it might be relatively close to my work, it was not going to be close to anything else that mattered to us. The layout started to feel wrong. Soon about the only things I felt good about were the neighborhood and the yard. We changed course and tried looking in some different parts of town that we’d not really considered all that much previously.

Oddly enough we found the best house yet on the first try. It’s got everything we find important: lots of bedrooms, good layout, plenty of storage, lots of mature trees, a big yard, a designated garden (well-cared-for and growing vegetables, no less), fruit trees, and room to practice baseball with the kids. It’s two blocks from the kids’ elementary, four blocks to the junior high they’ll attend, and four blocks to the high school. And while perhaps not as close to work as some of the others we were looking at, I’ll have several more options for my commute that may prove handy.

So we put in an offer, with several other parties supposedly hot on our heels. No other offers materialized, however, and while the sellers counter-offered, it was still acceptable. And we’ve found a lender who thinks he can get this closed in less than a month. So we’re ready to roll, full speed ahead.

We are going to love this house.

Step One – Shelter

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With my new job comes relocation. I’m not looking forward to it, and other than my new job itself, it demands the bulk of my attention every day. There are a lot of decisions to be made, and a lot of information needed to make those decisions.

There are four main issues here. First is that we have our current house. The housing market has not been good in our city, and even though we put 20% down when we bought it six years ago, we now owe more on it than we can likely sell it for. We have two options: Short sale, or rent it out until the market comes back.

Second is finding a place to live in our new city. The family is still in our old city, which makes it a bit difficult to look at houses together. Here the decision has been largely between renting a place for awhile or trying to somehow buy a house.

Third is the fact that we don’t have a lot of money left. We’ve been living on our savings for over two years, and we were just about hitting the bottom when I got this job. We don’t have much money for a down payment, and houses here are not cheap. Their “low” prices now are at the “high” range we hit in our old city before the real estate bubble burst.

Fourth is the fact that we are rapidly coming up on the start of another school year. We would very much like to get our kids into school on time down here.

In spite of the hurry we’re in, we’ve had to take it a bit slowly, trying to find out what we don’t know and then find the information. We’re putting together the pieces, and I hope to get the last pieces in place this week. We’re finding we have options, but we may not be able adequately satisfy all our concerns. The kids may have to start school a little late, perhaps. It may cost us more money to get what we want now than if we were to wait and build up our resources.

But other than the job, the place we choose to live is also very essential to achieving self reliance again. We want to place ourselves in the best situation we can for regaining a measure of security. This next week will be very important.

Stay tuned!

A New beginning (hold on to your hat!)

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Posting has been non-existent for the last few months because I’ve been very busy and very stressed. But barring some bizarre glitch out of nowhere I have landed a good job after over two years of un- and under-employment. While I will deeply miss the game store that my partners and I have dragged into profitability, I’ll be making significantly more than the game store is likely to provide any time soon.

The only trouble is that the new job is in another state. We will need to relocate. Subordinate problems include the fact that we are within a few thousand dollars of the bottom of our savings, the housing market locally is still fairly poor, and the cost of real estate is higher where we are headed. We’re also getting rather low on our food storage. And we’ve got perhaps a month and a half before school starts up again.

So we will be starting over practically from ground zero in a brand new place, and needing to do it quickly. On top of that, I feel a sense of urgency to get back to at least the level of preparation we were in before the recession hit. There are no guarantees that we’re not headed back down again, and I’d like to be able to ride it out again if necessary.

This blog will be taking a bit of a chance of direction. It’s now going to focus on my quest to achieve self-reliance as quickly as possible while trying not to drive my family crazy with severe austerity measures. It’s been a hard two years, and we need a little budgetary relaxation to help us decompress. At the same time, we’ve learned to get by on next to nothing, which will help us stretch my new income farther if we don’t relax too much.

So stay tuned! This could be fun! Oh yeah, on more thing, just to make things interesting: If there’s a “Self-reliance and Emergency Prep Mecca”, it’s Salt Lake City, Utah, and that’s where we’re headed. Self-reliance is practically a tenet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (of which I’m a member), but the Utah “Mormons” have made an industry of it. Some of it is good, and some of it seems rather exploitative. I’ll try to explore the culture and the businesses surrounding it a bit, and call it like I see it.

I may be out of touch again for a little while, though. I start work next week, and my time will be somewhat limited while I prepare to move myself, and then my family. I’ll post when I can, but I make no promises as to when or how often. Thank you for your patience.