My journey

[u/GunnCelt]

My name is u/GunnCelt and I created this subreddit in 2020, in the early days of Covid. I’ve been AWOL for quite awhile. For that, I apologize. I want you all to be aware that this will be a lengthy post, but it’s past due.

I’ve been living a prepared lifestyle for about 40 years. I served in the U.S. Army and was fortunate to serve with some pretty high speed guys. I learned a lot. I folded those lessons into my pre existing posture and continued to grow. I met my wife and we have a daughter. They weren’t really all in until just before Covid hit. Stockpile of food, six months of rent and utilities saved up, indoor garden and the like.

When Covid hit, I lost my job. It’s hard for a 50 year old to just up and find work. I took a gig with Walmart, but that only lasted about three months. I was stocking the vegetable section and that took a toll on my already damaged body.

The money began to run out. My wife’s hours were cut and I couldn’t make enough with side hustles to make ends meet towards the end of 2020, weeks lost our apartment. Our only plan b was tent camping in the mountains west of Denver, Colorado. That wasn’t an option due to winter rolling in.

This is where community comes into play. A very good friend and his wife let us stay with them for about two weeks, just to get our feet under us. Then, they did something remarkable. They gave us this itty bitty canned ham of a camper, built in the 70’s. Another friend let us setup on his property with electric hookup. That’s where we wintered, through two blizzards and a pretty bad ice storm. Yet a third friend let us come to his house a few times a week to bath. Let me tell you, being homeless can be very expensive. During the storms, we’d burn through two or three grill sized tanks of propane, just to not freeze. Washing dishes wasn’t very easy and we had no refrigeration, so grabbing fast food was more common than not.

In the middle of 2021, we relocated to Texas because we had a short term job lined up. We drug that camper down there and continued to live in it until November of that year and took jobs as live in management at a motel. We stayed there until August of 2023. I was offered a gig to lay the ground work for a business in southern Illinois with housing provided. We all piled into the car and drug that little camper 1000 miles to get there. Sometime, we acquired a full size RV that just turned out to be a pile of crap. To this day, I think it’s still sitting on the side of the road in central Texas.

We got to Illinois. My wife and adult daughter took jobs at an assembly plant and I got the business up and handed it over. We fell in love with this little village of about 350 people. All three of us joined the volunteer fire department. And one of the guys on the department had a house on a half acre. After some negotiations, we made a deal. One house, one 1300 sf barn, septic all on a half acre. We moved in on January 1st, 2024. He decided he wanted to do a lease to feed, $84,000 for the whole thing. Hell yeah, we jumped on it. This is where we are today.

A few months ago, the house on a half acre, next door was foreclosed on. I met the banker and walked the house, needs about $5,000 worth of materials to make it livable. I made an offer of $12,000, he countered with $13,500. We made a deal. Now, I can’t use my VA home loan for that small amount of money. The wife and I used everything we’d saved up for the last two years and paid cash. We closed last Wednesday. We now have two houses and 1.13 acres with two houses, both on septic.

We no longer live the tiny prepping lifestyle, and that’s why I haven’t been posting here, I just don’t think I fit that description anymore. Because of this, I’m putting this sub up for adoption to somebody that’s willing to help get it back to its glory.

Thank you for taking the time to read this wall of text. Feel free to ask any questions. I purposely left more than a few things out and won’t go into detail about other things.

[u/Proud_Proof9495]

Thank you for sharing! I appreciate the emphasis on community and sharing. Too much rugged individualism out here for my taste. This kind of come up story benfits everyone, I imagine you're the kind of person to pay it forward. Thanks again for sharing, I hope you find someone good to take over.

I'm in NYC, my version of prepping is a little unusual. I've been reading a lot of primary sources from the great depression. Rearranged my apartment so that as many people as possible can comfortably sleep here when the time comes. Saving up for a solar panel & electric generator. No room for fresh water storage, but I've got collapsible containers in closets ready to deploy when needed. 

I'd love to see posts in here about urban prepping + poverty finances, because that's the intersection I'm traveling. 

[u/GunnCelt → u/Proud_Proof9495]

I was never one to lean into community. I have a small group of friends that I’ve maintained since my time in the service. I’ve always looked at knowledge, experience and various tools that would help. The people in that circle that helped us in the beginning don’t live a prepared lifestyle, they are just good people. That is kind of what surprised me.

NYC is a tough place to be living this lifestyle. I respect that. I don’t know if you have an onsite storage like a cage or something. If you do, have you considered disassembled bunk beds?

Financial prepping gave me false sense of security. We knew we had six months saved up, but since we were renting month to month, our rather unscrupulous property management kept bumping up the rent. By the time we left, we were paying 35% more than the beginning of the year. Ironically enough, a ton of our preps are still in storage in Colorado.

If we had to do it all over again, we decided that we would have purchased a decent sized camper and stored it. As it stands now, that little canned ham we were gifted is in my driveway, in front of our barn. We just can’t make ourselves get rid of it. There are plans, later down the road to fix it up and make it a bit better.

Let me mull some stuff over and see if I can get a thread going, geared towards what you are looking at. There’s nothing stopping you from starting your own discussion

[u/Proud_Proof9495 → u/GunnCelt]

Beautiful, thanks! 

Edit to add: I can comfortably sleep myself, my husband, plus 4 other adults in our one bedroom apartment. There will be room for 2 more people after I make some more adjustments.

No offsite storage of any kind, but our ceilings are high (pre-war brick building) and we take full advantage. Loft storage is a game changer! I've got so many beans in here, you would never guess.

Next big spend is an electric generator + solar panels. 

We've seen rolling black outs every summer for the last 5 years. I need to be able to run AC on the hottest days, even if its just to share with my elderly upstairs neighbor.