“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” -John F. Kennedy

For the final month, you'll practice bugging out and relying on your bug out bag, review what you've learned about food and water, look over the tools and supplies you've gathered, practice your social skills, and work on your mental resilience.

BUG OUT BAG

Rotate Items In Your Bug Out Bag

It has now been 10 months since you put water in your CamelBak (if you have one), and it has been 9 months since you put food in your bug out bag. If you haven't already, replace the water and check the expiration dates on foods and medications and replace anything that's about to expire.

Although some preppers recommend checking your 72-hour kit and bug out bags every 6 months, I recommend checking them every single month. If you try to do it once every 6 months, you're likely to forget about it. But if you make it a monthly routine—say, checking them on the 1st of every month—then you're more likely to remember and won't end up with expired products in your bag.

Also, remember to replace the clothes in your 72-hour kit and bug out bag occasionally, depending on the season. Pack warm clothes in the fall and lightweight clothes in the spring. And that's it! Just keep checking your 72-hour kit and bug out bag every month, and you'll always be prepared for the most common disasters.

Bug Out Drill

This month, you're going to practice bugging out. By doing this, you'll discover any flaws in your bug out plan, and you'll get faster at bugging out so you won't waste any time when a real bug out scenario happens. Here's what to do:

1. Set a Scenario – Choose a realistic scenario, such as a natural disaster, power outage, or civil unrest, that would require you to bug out.
2. Simulate an Alert – Announce the start of the drill, mimicking how you would be notified in a real emergency (phone alert, radio announcement, etc).
3. Gather Your Gear – Everyone in the house should grab their bug out bags and any additional things like pets, documents, or personal items.
4. Evacuate – Leave your home as quickly as possible, following your pre-planned evacuation route. Drive or walk to your designated safe location using a paper map.
5. Assess and Improve – Time the drill and note any issues such as delays, missing items, or confusion. After the drill, review what went well and identify areas for improvement.
6. Repeat Regularly – Conduct this drill a couple times per year, maybe once in the summer and once in the winter.

Practice Relying On Your Bug Out Bag

When you're done with your bug out drill, you can just go home. But instead, you could go to a campground and practice getting through a day with nothing but your bug out bag.

By doing this, you'll discover any problems with your bug out bag or its contents. You'll also get better at finding what you need, keeping things organized, and using your gear. Plus, camping is fun, so why not?

FOOD AND WATER

Review of Food and Water

This month, we're going to review everything you learned about food and water over the last year and make sure you have enough of it to last 90 days.

By now, you should have:

• 3 weeks of of drinking water.
• 11 dinner recipes you can make without gas or electricity.
• Enough ingredients to make each dinner recipe 8 times.
• 3 months' worth of breakfasts.
• 3 months' worth of lunches.
• Water purification gear and supplies.
• Off-grid cooking gear (camp stoves, cast iron skillets, etc).

Go through your emergency food and water and use a calculator to make sure you have 3 months of food. If you have inventory, do this anyway and make sure your stockpile matches what's in your inventory.

You also should have done the following:

• Rotated your water at least once.
• Stored food in Mylar bags or vacuum-sealed bags or jars.
• Practiced cooking food outdoors.
• Practiced cooking food indoors (without gas or electricity).
• Organized and labeled your food.
• Rotated through your food (eating what you store, storing what you eat).
• Found a way to collect and transport water.
• Practiced two different ways to purify water.
• Hidden some extra food in case the rest is stolen or destroyed.
• Practiced canning and/or dehydrating food (this one is optional).
• Practiced sprouting seeds in jars.
• Grown at least one herb and at least one vegetable.
• Practiced cooking anything you've grown (don't let it go to waste).
• Learned what wild edibles and small animals live in your area.
• Practiced cooking some wild edibles and/or small game or fish.

If there's anything on this list that you skipped or didn't pay much attention to, go back and work on it this month.

If you did everything on this list, go back and do more. Learn a new way to cook food during a power outage. Learn another way to purify water. Try preserving a food you've never preserved before (whether through canning, dehydrating, or another method). Try growing something you've never grown before.

It's up to you, as long as you learn something new. That's your job for every month from here on out—to keep learning. Preparedness never ends. There is always more you can know, so every month, make a point to learn something new about food and water in survival scenarios.

More Resources

Remember, this guide doesn't contain everything you need to learn about food and water in a survival scenarios. You'll have to do your own research. And keep in mind that the Internet may not always be available, so I recommend getting some of the following books:

• Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving
• Beginner's Survival Gardening Guide: Grow, Harvest, and Store 15 Crops to Guarantee Your Own Food Supply for Years to Come
• Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide to Over 200 Natural Foods
• Foraging Wild Edible Plants of North America: More than 150 Delicious Recipes Using Nature's Edibles
• Harvesting Rainwater for Your Homestead in 9 Days or Less
• Herb Gardening for Beginners: A Simple Guide to Growing & Using Culinary and Medicinal Herbs at Home
• Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game Bible: The Ultimate 6-in-1 Comprehensive Guide
• The Beginner's Guide to Dehydrating Food, 2nd Edition: How to Preserve All Your Favorite Vegetables, Fruits, Meats, and Herbs
• The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook, Revised: 40 Ways to Cook Crickets, Grasshoppers, Ants, Water Bugs, Spiders, Centipedes, and Their Kin
• The Forager's Pantry: Cooking with Wild Edibles
• The Lodge Book of Dutch Oven Cooking
• The Old Farmer's Almanac Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook
• The Prepper's Cookbook: 300 Recipes to Turn Your Emergency Food into Nutritious, Delicious, Life-Saving Meals
• The Prepper's Ultimate Food-Storage Guide: Your Complete Resource to Create a Long-Term, Lifesaving Supply of Nutritious, Shelf-Stable Meals, Snacks, and More
• The Prepper's Water Survival Guide: A Complete Set of Life-Saving Methods You Can Depend On in Any Emergency

Food and Water Checklist for Month 12

• Check your water, rotate it.
• Check your food, rotate it.
• Reread everything in the Food and Water section in Months 1-11.
• Dig deeper into any topics that interest you.
• Practice everything you've learned about food/water storage and survival cooking.
• Buy some books on food & water storage, off-grid cooking, gardening, etc.
• Store at least 2 days of water.
• Try some new off-grid recipes.
• Choose one recipe and get enough ingredients to make it 8 times.
• Stockpile 8 days worth of breakfasts.
• Stockpile 8 days worth of lunches.

SKILLS AND SUPPLIES

Evaluation and Inventory

Supply Inventory

Every month, you should look through your emergency tools and supplies. By now, you should have the following things stockpiled (listed in the order that they were mentioned in this guide):

Look over each of these areas and make sure you have everything you need, nothing is expired, gear is working properly, and everything is well-organized so you can always find what you're looking for.

Skill Assessment

You should also reassess your skills on a regular basis. Here are some of the skills you should have learned by now:

Every month, look over this list of skills and ask yourself which areas you need to work on the most. Practice that skill or skills throughout the month, then at the start of the next month, look through the list again and repeat.

Miscellaneous Skills

Social Skills

Many preppers—myself included—tend to overlook this skill. We tend to have a “lone wolf” mindset, which is often the result of being surrounded by friends and family who don't understand our interest in preparedness.

However, during a major disaster or long-term crisis, the people who try to go it alone are the ones who are least likely to survive, no matter how prepared they are. Humans are social creatures, and we need each other. With that in mind, there are a few things you should start working on this month:

Get To Know Your Neighbors

This is the first step. These are the people who will be closest to you in an emergency, and a good relationship with them could mean mutual aid and support during a crisis.

Join Local Groups and Meetups

If there are any prepper groups in your local area, join them. If there aren't, find other groups to join—a hiking club, a cycling meetup, a gardening group, whatever. The more people you get to know in your local area, the more support you'll have during tough times.

Volunteer

If there aren't groups to join, you could try volunteering. This is a great way to build trust with others and connect with your local community. It's all about networking. If you make connections with skilled people, you could barter with them for their services during a major crisis.

Mutual Assistance Groups

A mutual assistance group (MAG) is a network of preppers who share skills, resources, and support when it's needed. To form a MAG, you have to carefully select trustworthy people who bring diverse skills to the table—think of people who are good at first aid, gardening, fixing vehicles, etc.

In order to have a successful MAG, there are a few things you must do:

• Define Clear Goals and Roles – Make sure everyone knows their responsibilities.
• Have Regular Meetings and Training Exercises – This will help strengthen the group's cohesion and preparedness.
• Establish a Code of Conduct – This includes things like consistent attendance, active contribution, honesty and transparency, respectful discourse, confidentiality, accountability, and so forth.

If this is something you're interested in doing, check out the book, MAGS: The People Part of Prepping: How to Plan, Build, and Organize a Mutual Assistance Group in a Survival Situation by Charley Hogwood.

Mental Health

The majority of people living in developed countries have never gone through a major disaster. Nearly everyone has experienced a power outage or a car accident or another common crisis, but few have been in a scenario where countless locals have died, law and order has broken down, and food and water are almost impossible to find.

If you want to be truly prepared for a scenario like that, you can't just practice skills and stockpile supplies. You also have to prepare yourself mentally. Here are a few things you should do.

Be Realistic

No matter how prepared you are, you won't be able to anticipate every possible scenario, but that's okay. It's important to find peace in knowing that you've done what you can to prepare. Accepting that some things are beyond your control can reduce stress and anxiety during a crisis.

Also, remember that a major disaster won't be fun or easy. Some people like to imagine themselves as heroes during a crisis, picking off looters with their rifle and rescuing their neighbors, but that's a Hollywood mentality. It won't be like that.

And while it's nice to imagine communities coming together in a harmonious, post-collapse utopia where people sit around the campfire and sing songs, it's not very likely. Disasters are incredibly challenging, even if you have a lot of help.

You should mentally prepare yourself for a time of hardship, scarcity, conflict, and the loss of conveniences. As I've said before, you should regularly shut off your utilities and practice living without modern conveniences for a day or two. You should also go camping with nothing but your bug out bag. Get used to “roughing it.”

Having a realistic mindset will help you stay grounded and resilient when a major disaster finally happens.

Escape Your Addictions

Addictions like caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, THC, and prescription drugs could become a serious liability if access to these substances is suddenly cut off. Without your addiction of choice, you'll struggle to think clearly, focus, and make good decisions during a crisis.

To prevent this, you should work on weaning yourself off of these substances as much as possible. If you can't quit completely, at least cut down to a minimal amount (only one cup of coffee or only a few cigarettes per day). The less dependent you are on addictive substances, the better you'll handle life without them.

If you're struggling, get help from friends, family, a professional, or a support group like alcoholics anonymous (it's for people with all sorts of addictions, not just alcohol).

Mental Resilience

If you're the kind of person who loses it when the store runs out of your favorite brand of coffee creamer, how are you going to react when the store is closed altogether? This is something you should really think about. It's easy to imagine yourself handling a crisis well, but would you really?

There are many things you can do to improve your mental resilience, such as:

Meditation

Specifically, mindfulness meditation. This is where you sit still and focus on one thing—such as your breathing—and nothing else. Every time you catch yourself daydreaming, just notice those thoughts, then focus on your breathing again.

By doing this, you'll get better and better at catching yourself when you're in a negative thinking pattern. And if you can observe your own thoughts, you can learn to defuse negative thoughts before they take hold. That's why meditating a little bit every day can improve your mental health, and there's research to back it up.

There are all sorts of apps that can teach you to meditate. I recommend Waking Up and Insight Timer.

The 4-7-8 Breathing Technique

This is something you can use when you're extremely stressed out or having a panic attack. It's simple: You inhale for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, exhale for 8 seconds, and repeat until you feel calm (or at least calmer).

This works because you're essentially tricking your nervous system into thinking everything is okay. When the body is stressed, it tends to take quick, shallow breaths. But if you're breathing slowly and deeply, your body will think it must not be that stressed, and you'll begin to calm down.

Stoicism

There are all sorts of philosophies that can help you cope with hard times, but recently I've found Stoicism to be very helpful. It's an ancient philosophy that originated in Greece around the 3rd century BCE. It was later developed by thinkers like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

Of all the philosophies of life, I believe Stoicism is particularly good for preppers. Here are some of the basic teachings:

1. The Dichotomy of Control – Recognize that some things are in your control, and some aren't. Focus your energy on what you can control (your thoughts and actions) and accept the things you can't control.
2. Mindfulness – Develop an awareness of your own thoughts and feelings.
3. Negative Visualization – Imagine worst-case scenarios. This will help you appreciate what you have now and prepare for what may happen.
4. Practice Gratitude – Learn to acknowledge and appreciate all the good things in your life, from daily comforts to loved ones.
5. Amor Fati – Learn to not only accept your fate, but to love it. It's not about what happens to you; it's about how you react. Become a person you can be proud of.

Obviously, there's a lot more to it than that, but hopefully you can see how Stoicism could be helpful to anyone preparing for a disaster or crisis. If you want to learn more, I recommend the book, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine.

Month 12 Checklist

• Rotate perishable items in your bug out bag.
• Do a bug out drill.
• Practice relying on your bug out bag.
• Review your food and water, make sure you have what you need.
• Go back and practice any skills you missed.
• Review your tools and supplies, make sure you have what you need.
• Assess your skills, identify areas you need to work on. ‘
• Work on your social skills (join groups, meet your neighbors, etc).
• Work on your mental health (be realistic, escape your addictions, etc).
• Work on your mental resilience (practice meditation, Stoicism, etc).
• Set aside $40 cash.

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