For the past week, George’s son (who we call G3) has been job-hunting and working with his dad at the ranch in East Texas.  He missed the snow and ice storm back home in Seattle (doggone him) but being in Texas gave the two George’s some time to bounce around ideas about what’s really important.   You know.  Father and son stuff.

So while they were talking, the subject of prepping to save lives came up.

Of course both are diehard preppers but when it comes to saving lives, the younger George is the expert.  Today we share his thoughts on what he likes to call “lifesaving prepping”.

The more medical supplies you have the better

George aka G1:  Do people have any idea how seriously under-prepared they are – both in terms of materials and brainpower to deal with a medical emergency?

The younger George aka G3:  I work as an EMT and often times patients and/or their families thank us for saving a loved one or for just doing a good job.   What they don’t realize is that we are absolutely nothing without our equipment and our supplies. With our equipment we are a lean mean lifesaving/disability preventing machine.  Without our equipment and our gear we are just regular guys and gals in good looking uniforms who know a lot about hands-on first aid.

G1:  Can you share with our readers some of the must have equipment and supplies that are needed in an emergency situation?

G3:  Yes, of course.  I could go on and on about the exact supplies you would need but for the sake of not making this article to long I will give you the short list:

• Wound care supplies: All kinds of bandages, ranging from regular size Band-Aids to huge abdominal pads.
• Broad spectrum antibiotic cream/ointment (AND LOTS OF IT!)
• Q-tips
• Sterile saline wound wash,
• Tongue  depressors (these are great for splinting fingers and applying antibiotic cream)
• Medical tape of all different sizes
• Containers of bleach (lots of uses for bleach, from making water drinkable to disinfecting just about anything)
• A GSW (gunshot wound) kit, this contains
  • chest seals
  • tourniquet
  • a rapid clotting agent (like Quikclot which  is available at Amazon)
  • medical instruments (forceps, tweezers & scissors)
  • Israeli Battle Dressing (6-inch)
• Soap (the more the better)
• Surgical scrub (Betadine surgical scrub)
• Tampons
• Digital and regular thermometers
• Over the counter medications:
  • ibuprofen
  • diphenhydramine
  • acetaminophen
  • Pepto Bismol
  • cold medicine (with nasal decongestant)
  • Splinting supplies (you don’t really have to buy these you can make a good splint out of anything if you are creative)
  • Epinephrine mist (last resort asthma and anaphylactic shock treatment)
• Blood Pressure Monitor
• Portable Defibrillator (AED)

That is a short list just to get you started and to get an idea of the kinds of things you will need. There’s more, but first you need to get the knowledge committed to memory of what to use when.

Which means . . .

Learn as much as you can about medicine

G1:  How much time should a person spend learning medicine basics?

G3:  As much as it takes.  Let me explain that a bit.

Medicine covers a vast area of subjects and here is a starting list of things you should study now and be proficient in:

Basic first aid.  This is the start point for your medical training and an important subject. Let’s say you’re out cutting little pieces of wood into kindling, you have a slip of your knife and you cut yourself. It’s not a big cut but if you don’t clean it and bandage it like you’re supposed to, then it could become infected and you may end up losing your finger, hand or lower arm due to infection. Yes a little tiny cut can turn into a raging infection (I have seen it and it is not a pretty sight).

So if you get a cut you want to clean it with soap and water (or irrigate with sterile saline or various wounds washes that are available on the market these days). Then you want to apply some kind of broad spectrum antibiotic cream (like Neosporin or the generic version and keep it covered with a sterile bandage. You also want to clean it daily, applying fresh antibiotic cream with a new bandage daily as well. (Your first lesson – on the house.)

Emergency medicine:  Read an EMT text book or even take an EMT class. This will give you the basics on how to care for yourself or someone else.

Continued study: After you read an EMT text book and/or take an EMT class and you want to go to the next level in understanding emergency medicine I recommend reading this book: Emergency Pathophysiology: Clinical Applications for Prehospital Care , by Samuel M., Jr. Galvagno.  The book takes everything you learned in EMT class and breaks it down on the physiological level, yet is easy to understand.  It will also help you understand medicine better overall.

Public Health:  Yes!  This is an area of medicine!  It is a broad subject but the areas you need to focus on are sanitation and disease prevention.  Where to put the latrine and how to maintain it. How to protect yourself from getting an airborne virus / bacteria, how to prevent getting an STD or even HIV (even when the world is ending people are still going to be having sex and if you get an STD and there is not treatment available you are going to suffer greatly or die).

Another tip: make condoms and lubricant part of your kit.

General medicine:   There is a great guide called Healthwise Handbook Take Charge of Your Healththat is a good manual for common medical issues that arise.

Pharmacology:  Before I give any patient a medication I ALWAYS ask, “Do you have any drug allergies?’ You should also adopt this life saving habit. The first rule in medicine: DO NO HARM. The more you know about medications that better.  Here is a link to a free e-book  from the Wilderness Medicine Training Center to help get you started: Basic Pharmacology.

Also, here is another a very good book about medications: The Pill Book: New and Revised.

G1:  I have to put in a pitch for a book – which of all of them I’ve read – gave me the best insight into the public health and immunological issues which might accompany a society-threatening event: “Control of Communicable Diseases Manual”  which is a follow-on sourcebook to the Abram Benenson classic “Control of Communicable diseases in Man” from back in the mid 1980’s.

Health conditions and medications

G1:  What about getting ahead of problems before the worst case shows up?

G3:  Before the worst happens you need to know your own health status and if you do have a health condition you need to fully understand it and get it fully under control.  For example:  I have asthma and a lot of people don’t know that about me. Why is that? Because I completely control it with the proper medications.

We all as preppers understand that if the worst case scenario happens, medications will be hard to come by (if at all) and that is why I keep at least a year’s supply of the medications I need.

G1:  I’m glad you touched on that. I know people who are insulin and tissue rejection medication-dependent that keep a 2-4 years of meds on hand and rotate through them.

G3:  I also hoard every prescription medication I can get my hands on because maybe someday I or someone else I am taking care of will need it. But if you start hording meds you need to know when and how to use that and at the correct dosages! If you have extra antibiotics in your supplies you better know everything about them, like if they are for gram negative or gram positive bacteria, what type(s) of infections they treat and, like I said before, the correct dosages.

If the worst happens, prevention is KEY.

G1:  You and I don’t see eye to eye on vaccines. I  tend to be a “no thanks” guy, but I know you have more faith in medicine and don’t look at the world through the financial glasses like I do. So what’s your take on vaccinations?

G3:  You are a worrywart.  Worry about the right problem, dad.  First off, I recommend that you get up to date on all your vaccines. I  know with certain groups of people (like you and Gaye) vaccines are a hot issue yet I have had more vaccines then anyone I know.  I have even had some that were and still are experimental.

These are all the vaccines I have had (and nothing is wrong with me!):

• Hepatitis A+B
• Meningococcal (meningitis)
• MMR, (measles, mumps, and rubella)
• Pneumococcal polysaccharide (pneumonia vaccine)
• Herpes Zoster “shingles”
• Tdap (diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis)
• Varicella vaccine (get this if you have not already had the chicken pox)

The key thing is I am – and keep – current on all of these. I work as an EMT/patient care technician with the local public health department and when the H5N1 (bird flu) scare happened, I received the experimental vaccine for that,  And speaking of influenza, I get a flu shot every year.

If you can prevent it, PREVENT IT! The old saying “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Working in healthcare really drove that that into my thick skull.

Side note from Gaye aka G2:  I have to agree with G1.  I am a “no thank you” type of gal myself.  My recommendation?  Research and education yourself first then have a heart to heart discussion with your personal physician.  If you are against a vaccine, stay the course and be 100% convinced before taking the plunge.  Me personally? Except for Tetanus, I am vaccine-free.

G1:  One thing you did not mention is to watch for vaccines that have mercury-based preservatives in them.  A typical allergy (which I have) is to Thiomersal.

On the other hand, I do keep my Tdap current, since there’s always something rusty around the ranch here.  And a loudmouth like me never wants to see lockjaw.

G3:  Got that right!  Also pay attention to what you are doing and use good judgment! People take a lot of risk driving fast and doing other things that could turn out tragic but if it all comes falling down, that emergency room that was ten miles from your home will not be there anymore.

So drive slower, watch your step and don’t put yourself in a situation where you could become injured. You could be walking in a field, not paying attention to the terrain, trip on and large root and now you have a broken wrist and there will be no one who can fix it.  And all because you were not paying attention!

Or, you could be walking out of harm’s way and step on a snake. You can get basic snake bite kits, but people seldom think of that.  It is really is amazing to me as a healthcare profession.

You may get tired of me saying this, but here it comes again: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” How this applies is this:

“An ounce if paying attention will prevent a broken wrist or worse.”

When no help is available, every action and every step must be thoroughly thought through and within the range of actions based on supplies on hand. Otherwise best case you’re miserable and worst case you’re dead.

Moving someone up to a higher level of care

G1:  OK, suppose something really ugly happens:  Nuclear terrorism, global war, bird flu goes airborne, something like that.  What then?

G3:  As an EMT it is my role to assess a patient, stabilize them and then move them onto a higher level of care. Over the years I have developed a very good sense for which patients need to get to the ER immediately an which are stable enough to treat on scene.

EMTs doing box-time (riding mobile units) call this “Load and go!” or “Stay and play.”

Someone you’re caring for may get so sick or injured that nothing you do will improve their current situation and that is why you NEED to have a plan to get that someone to a place that has the capabilities that will improve their condition or even save their life.

Another saying we have in EMS regarding traumatic injuries is this: “We don’t save victims of trauma, the operating rooms does!” We get them stable and get them moved up the medical food chain.

G1:  Goes without saying, taking an inventory of doctors within a 3-miles range of your home would make sense.

Communications in an Emergency

G1:  That gets us to how are you supposed to find help when there’s pandemonium all about?

G3:  In the worst case scenario you will have no cell phone, no house phone and no internet. That is why you need to become an expert in other forms of communication. Amateur / ham radio, GMRS, commercial radios and CB radio are all things you should have at your disposal.  You should also be (or have access to) an expert in knowing how to use the different radio services.

This applies double to medical emergencies which happen as a subset of larger emergencies (flood, tornados, earthquakes, terrorism) because you can’t call for help if you don’t have the right equipment to do it with.

G2:  And for ideas on communications, our last two weeks of discussion of ham radio might be worthy of review.

And to Summarize it All

The Two Gs, George and Gaye, would like to thank the younger George for sharing his thoughts on prepping to save lives.  And the take away?  Peruse the list of supplies and compare them to what you have already set aside in your emergency medical kit.  Read up and educate yourself so you are prepared with knowledge to act appropriately and quickly if needed.

And last?  Pay attention, be alert, and above all, be prepared.

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

. . . Your comments welcome

Like this? You might also like:

Spotlight Items:   Many of the supplies mentioned in this article are readily available online.  There are also complete kits available if you are just getting started.  Whatever you decide to do, start collecting your emergency medical supplies now, before you need them.

Quikclot Sport Brand Advanced Clotting Sponge:  A must for any first aid or emergency kit, Quikclot Sport stops moderate to severe bleeding until further medical help is available.

Israeli Battle Dressing, 6-inch Compression Bandage: This is another inexpensive, yet critical item.  Combat medics, trauma doctors, and emergency responders all recommend this Israeli Battle Dressing (IBD) for the treatment of gunshot wounds, puncture wounds, deep cuts, and other traumatic hemorrhagic injuries.

Where There Is No Doctor:   Hesperian’s classic manual, Where There Is No Doctor, is perhaps the most widely-used health care manual in the world.  About $20.

Lifesource Digital Thermometer with Fast Read:  This is another one of those inexpensive items a lot of people forget to include in their medical kit.

First Aid Only Triple Antibiotic Ointment Pack:  Gaye prefers to purchase antibiotic ointment is single use packets.  That way you can keep a couple of packets with you wherever you go.  Your mileage may vary – the tube type works fine too.

Adventure Medical Kits Pocket Survival Pack or Adventure Medical Kits Outfitter Kit:  Adventure Medical Kit products are well priced and with an excellent reputation among outdoor types such as fishermen and hunters.  This is a good place to start if you are looking for a kit.

Philips HeartStart Home Defibrillator (AED):  Pricey?  Yes.  But and AED can save a life.  If you or a loved one has a heart problem, this is a must have device especially if you are located far far away from medical help.

Omron Series Blood Pressure Wrist Unit:  We personally would not be without one of these units,.

The Pill Book (15th Edition): New and Revised: For nine bucks, there is no reason not to have this book in your emergency medical kit.

Want to help support Strategic-Living?
We earn a small commission on your purchases and for that, we thank you!

Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

Of course not everything can fit in a single bag. After all, you still need food, a sleeping bag, personal comfort items. No worries. With the help of Kelly at Survival Gear Bags, we have put together the basics and then some. Using this bag as a start, you can enhance and customize as time and budget allows.

Need more info? Check out the kit now by clicking here or head on over to our Strategic Living Kit page where we show all of the components and a bit more info as well.

Prepping to Save Lives: Thoughts of an EMT is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

Frankly, we debated long and hard on whether to join the protest and the SOPA blackout.

While we applaud the Wikipedia action (which could be read here) there are several roads to successful opposition to SOPA and PIPA – IF they can be stopped at all.

Our reason for concern is that SOPA and PIPA are cornerstones to a global attack on intellectual freedom and rights to fair use.  They are cut of the same pretentious cloth that permits corporations to claim patents on “life” itself, which is the height of absurdity.  Crossing a shellfish DNA with wheat isn’t invention, so much as perversion, as we see it.

SOPA and PIPA are designed to quell widespread discussion and public awareness of the corporate-government agenda.  We have seen this in other countries at other times.  Thoughts of Germany and Italy in the 1930’s and 1940’s do not bode well for humans.  It didn’t then and it certainly does not now.

So while we applaud Wikipedia, we find it’s equally if not more compelling to “stay online and fight.”

Going black is good.  Saying (perhaps in memory of George Carlin) what SOPA is is just as good:  “It’s bullshit and it’s  bad for you.”

But you’d expect us to say that:  We’re not political hacks, ambulance chasing IP lawyers, or cyber security empire builders.

We just figured out how to say it in black type on a white page with the same kind of impact.

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

. . . Your comments welcome at The Electric Tribe

Like this? You might also like:

Spotlight Items:  Today we suggest some books for your survival library.

Holding Your Ground: Preparing for Defense if it All Falls Apart: An instructional guide and planning tool that addresses defensive preparation of a location. If the government can no longer protect your home, farm or property, Holding Your Ground will teach you how.

SAS Survival Handbook, Revised Edition: For Any Climate, in Any Situation:  Newly updated to reflect the latest in survival knowledge and technology, this handbook is the definitive resource with strategies for coping with any type of disaster.

Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse:  From James Wesley Rawles, a thrilling narrative depicting fictional characters using authentic survivalist techniques to endure the collapse of the American civilization. Reading this compelling, fast-paced novel could one day mean the difference between life and death.

The New Create an Oasis with Greywater: Choosing, Building and Using Greywater Systems – Includes Branched Drains:  Create an Oasis describes how to quickly and easily choose, build, and use a simple grey water system for as little as $30 and a free afternoon.

Build your Own Free-to-Air (FTA) Satellite TV System: An interesting read – do you think you could do it?

All New Square Foot Gardening: Growing you own veggies in a limited amount of space is a no-brainer with the Square Foot Gardening System. The bonus is that it requires very little water and yay! there are virtually no weeds.

Want to help support Strategic-Living?
We earn a small commission on your purchases and for that, we thank you!

Special Edition: The SOPA Blackout is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

With that in mind, last week we began our series on the “Magic of Radio” with a discussion of some basic shortwave radio equipment, including general shortwave listening gear and weather radios.  This week we present part two of our two-part series .

Gaye aka G2:  This week we want to move on to the next level of the hobby so how about starting with an explanation of antennas.

George aka G1: Sure!  Easy to understand and it only takes a few paragraphs to get the basics.

When it comes to antennas, there is generally only one number you need to remember – 468.  Here’s why that number is important:

If you know what frequency your radio is tuned to, you can use the formula 468 divided by the frequency (f) in MHz to come out with a value telling you how long a ½ wavelength antenna should be.

Say you really wanted to put up a good ham radio antenna for the 7-MHz band. How long would it be? The answer is (468/7=) 66.857 feet. But, since we don’t happen to have a tape measure handy calibrated in 1-10^th or 1-100^th of a foot increments, we save the 66 feet and add 12 inches times .857 to convert that ugly decimal into 10.28 inches – and since .28of an inch is close to a quarter inch in decimal form, we would round it off as 66’ 10 ¼ “ and call it good for overall length.

But there’s one more thing to do.  We have to cut this in half so we have two pieces of wire, one connected to either end of a center insulator. So two wires of 33’ 5 1/8^th” would be good. As a matter of practice, we might add 4 to 6 inches at the end so we can wrap around the insulators which go at the ends and at the middle. Our feed line – oftentimes coaxial cable – would attach at the center with the middle conductor going to one side of the antenna while the outer shield and braid going to the other.

For listening, you don’t need to be so precise. In fact, a 33-foot piece of wire makes a dandy antenna by itself, and even better if the radio is connected to a good ground, such as a ground rod or copper cold water pipe. Now you’re talking first-class shortwave reception.

Remember our formula? The antenna lengths for the AM broadcasting band gets to be a lot longer. A radio station on the AM band, on 710 KHz, for example, would have a ½ wavelength of (468/.77 =) 659 feet!  So the optimal length for a wire receiving antenna on the AM band is about 330 feet and a good ground.

It’s about here that practical physics strikes both the broadcaster and the home listener when it comes to antennas.

On the broadcasting side, a dipole isn’t generally used on the AM band. Instead, if you take half of the half-wave antenna and mount it vertically (as a tower) you can “fool” the antenna into thinking the ground is the other half of the antenna.  Still, this is a very useful fact to know: You can make an educated “guess” as to an AM radio station’s operating frequency by simply looking at an antenna and inferring the operating frequency:

G2:  Wait a minute! How come my AM radio doesn’t have a 330-foot wire on it?

G1:  There are special cases and one of them is the AM radio band.  Since – as you probably know – the antenna should be so long.  Is there a way to shorten it? You bet! Wind a bunch of antenna wire (thin stuff) around a special hunk of powdered iron or magnetically suitable material called “ferrite”. Interesting stuff, this ferrite and you can read the Wikipedia entry on ferrite core products here.

The ferrite core wound antenna provides a compromise: The size is smaller, but so is the performance. Although I do have to say there are some dandy radio antennas for AM distance listening (called “DX’ing) which are pretty interesting. One of these is the CC Radio Twin Coil Ferrite antenna  which runs about $100 from Amazon while the other is the Kaito AN-200 Tunable Passive AM Antenna which runs about $25.

G2:  Are there packages that have everything included in them?

G1:  No, not generally. The reason is a lot of people like to “roll their own” package after reading reviews of shortwave gear.

But you can get some good guidance by looking at what people are pairing the external AM antennas with. For example, one combination seems to be the Twin Coil antenna along with a CC Radio 2which covers the AM band, FM, weather frequencies, and the two-meter ham band. Great for local listening.

On the other hand for about $100 less, you can get a Tecsun PL660 radio which has shortwave with all of the shortwave bands.  It includes single sideband, Morse code capability and has aircraft too.  On the other hand, you don’t get the weather band and the two-meter band.  In case you didn’t notice, it’s hard to find an all things to all people set-up.

But for a shortwave basic set-up, the Kaito AN200 antenna, the Tecsun radio and the Sangean wind-up shortwave wire antenna can get you going for about $155 (not counting shipping).

G2:So what do some of these different signals sound like on shortwave and what’s that about?

G1: The earliest radios – back in Tesla and Marconi times – were continuous wave radios. What we would think of as “carriers” getting turned on and off – that’s the essential of Morse code. You can get a sense of what stations communicating in Morse sounds like from this YouTube video though the bells at the beginning are not code.  And you can hear some of the different modes on the Tecsun from a Lithuanian location here.

Although AM is the mode of choice for some shortwave broadcasters, there are other mode of operation. Single sideband voice, for example, gets rid of the wasted power of one sideband of an AM signal and tosses out the carrier too, so you get nothing but talk power.

By the way, if you want to see what a ham radio contest sounds like with good equipment and a first-class operator driving the gear, take a look at the SSB contest run rate in this video and realize that that virtually everyone of those contacts being logged by K5TR is a different state, plus a handful of foreign countries.

The application of computers to frequency control and multi-frequency modem technology is called automatic link establishment which you can hear on a military radio starting 13 seconds into this video.

A much more practical marriage between computers and HF ham radio is something called BPSK -31. It’s really cool because it allows you to have a keyboard chat – without using the internet. A demo video here on YouTube is really good and you can hear what the signals sound like in background.

G2:  But George, what is the point?  I am getting lost.

G1: Well, at the low end of things, you can get yourself into a position where you’ve at least input as to what’s going on in the world that’s independent (to some degree) of governmental or corporate filtering.

At the next level up it is a technically challenging hobby which provides important backup (and sometimes primary) communication during emergencies in places like Joplin, and so forth.  Using a ham radio satellite, for example, here is a video of a guy standing with a handheld radio in one hand and an antenna in the other talking to a distant state and talking to Mexico, as well.

And, at the highest level, with the hobbies combined, shortwave, ham radio, and electronic & computer hobbyists have helped push the envelope of how we can communicate with one another.  And it’s this “urge to communicate in new and novel” ways that I find most interesting because outside of equipment costs, it is possible to personally communicate worldwide with very little filtering by “establishment” or paradigm-defenders in between people of one country and another.

I think there’s great value to this because even though we presently seem likely to see the Intellectual Property and Stop Online Piracy Act come down on shared information if it’s from an IP-defending source, humans still have an underlying urge to communicate and get to know one another regardless of political divisions, most of which are highly artificial constructs, anyway.

The more ways we are able to communicate amongst ourselves, the more we will evolve as humans and learn to share and celebrate our common desires. So, yeah, I think this communications stuff – far beyond the routers and internet-based systems – is an important backup as well as being a frontier all of its own.

G2:OK, where to from here?

G1: Lately, my studies have been along lines that support an evolution into capitalism 2.0 – a world where most efficient means are used, rather than the most controlled or most profitable means. I know that sounds like academic gobbledygook, but two words sum it up: More Change.

The changes to come – are not necessarily going to come politely knocking on the front door. Nor, are they all likely to be encompassed by non-profit domestic media. And once the SOPA regulations are enacted later this year and China-style internet controls are in place, there will be a great stifled voice of the people.

Even on AM and FM radio in most major cities, if you drive around, you can still occasionally find “pirate radio” stations serving a neighborhood or local interest ground. If – as some have postulated – there is a generalized decline in government money available for “enforcement” of various laws and “regulations” we could well see a whole next-generation of “pirate radio” springing up, depending on how hard SOPA is when implemented.

There’s evidence from lots of countries, revolutions, rebellions, and change states, that radio is one of those tools which is hard to turn off, hard to control, especially when coupled with a computer.

I assume you know that on eBay there are 20-watt AM transmitters to be had for less than $700 including shipping? This means a person with a USB microphone, a laptop, and power can set up and move an AM transmitter around an urban area. I’m not promoting it, but when the general population and the governing powers of many countries have gotten out of “synch” far enough, pirate radio is something that can – and has – happened. I even saw a 300-watt transmitter set up for 105.9 FM stereo for $1,250.

Just seems to me that getting used to tuning around will be a way to “keep your ears on” because it might give you some very important clues about the kind of future that will arrive about the same time.

G2:  What next?

G1:  After you’ve gotten a sense of what’s out there – the next stop would be the national ham radio organization the American Radio Relay League. Their site has tools to help you find a local “Elmer” – a kind of radio buddy – who can coach you a bit on the ins and outs of the hobby.

Oh, and listening to fire and police calls on a Friday night, especially when it happens to be when welfare checks hit and a full moon, is endlessly interesting, too.  Scanners like the Uniden BC340CRS 100-Channel Clock Radio Scanner – which is $80 at Amazon make another good way to get the drop on current events, too.

G2:  And if someone wants to come at this from the police and fire scanner side?

G1:  Then a basic scanner would be good, but then transition into a ‘grown up’ ham radio like the Yaesu 857D or the Icom 7000 – both of which have many followers. Either radio will get you on the VHF ham bands and in additional have killer shortwave and HF ham radio transmitting and receiving capability. The only downside is the price.  By the time you get radio and a 25-am 12-volt power supply for it, you’re pushing $1,200 by the time you and your “Elmer” get an antenna put up for the HF bands, but that’s the high class route.  It just costs a lot of money.

The last two hints would be to visit www.eham.net and read the equipment reviews and visit manufacturer web sites. The reviews may seem harsh but there are some manufacturers which may lean a little toward snake oil on some of their antenna claims.  You just need to read some.

And so to summarize . . .

Even if you never plan to get your basic ham radio license, there is a whole world of information available to you from the perspective of other people and other countries.  This information is available for free (other than the cost of equipment) day and night via shortwave radio.

To that end – the free, uncensored flow of information – we hope this has been a useful discussion of the nuts and bolts of shortwave radio.  One last thing:  keep in mind that any radio that’s you plan  to acquire as part of your “prepping” should run on 12-volt power.  Otherwise, should main power fail, you’ll have a very high tech paperweight.

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

. . . Your comments welcome at The Electric Tribe

The Basic Setup for about $155

TECSUN PL660 Portable Radio

Kaito AN-200 Tunable Passive AM Antenna

Sangean ANT-60 Short Wave Antenna

Spotlight Items:

C Crane Co CC2B Radio-2 AM FM/Weather and 2-Meter Ham Band:  This $150 radio is designed for long range reception and emergencies.

Uniden BC340CRS 100-Channel Clock Radio Scanner:  The battery operated scanner is a multi-featured conventional channel scanner that can be used to monitor police, fire, emergency, marine, air, amateur, and other radio services.  NOAA weather too,   into 100 channels over ten banks. The scanner also lets you listen to NOAA weather broadcasts for valuable information specific to your location.  Pretty cool for $80.

Ham Radio For Dummies: This could also be called “Ham Radio for Gaye” or other newbies.  It is never too late to learn and if SHTF, this may be the only reliable form of communication available.

Build your Own Free-to-Air (FTA) Satellite TV System: An interesting read – do you think you could do it?

All New Square Foot Gardening: Growing you own veggies in a limited amount of space is a no-brainer with the Square Foot Gardening System. The bonus is that it requires very little water and yay! there are virtually no weeds.

Want to help support Strategic-Living?
We earn a small commission on your purchases and for that, we thank you!

Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

Of course not everything can fit in a single bag. After all, you still need food, a sleeping bag, personal comfort items. No worries. With the help of Kelly at Survival Gear Bags, we have put together the basics and then some. Using this bag as a start, you can enhance and customize as time and budget allows.

Need more info? Check out the kit now by clicking here or head on over to our Strategic Living Kit page where we show all of the components and a bit more info as well.

The Magic of Radio Part 2: Nutz and Bolts of Radio is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

Today we present the results of one of our recent chats with George (G1), the expert at all things radio and electronics and Gaye (G2), who likes to think she is the expert at everything else but is just putting up a good front.

Gaye aka G2: One of George’s serious diseases, masquerading as a hobby, has been his just shy-of-50-year involvement with ham radio – that and over 45-years in broadcasting, starting from the engineering side.

As he has written many times,

“Radio Disease: starts off innocently enough – perhaps with an innocent spin across the shortwave bands and hearing news from faraway places. Then it evolves to listening to what amateur radio operators (“hams”) around the world are talking about. Next thing you know, there are classes at the local ham radio club, a short test (and no Morse Code requirements – that went away years ago) and then you’re off climbing the technical ladder.

As you climb, the level of technical expertise increases, the complexity of radio gear increases, along with antennas and so on. Even so, for an investment of less than $600, a person can put together a wide-ranging home radio installation which will provide day or night communications around the world.”

So, given my aforementioned curiosity, I decided to have George answer some questions which people frequently ask about shortwave communications (knowing full well that ham radio hobbyists are almost universally willing to share their expertise.)

Okay then, George, curious minds want to know:  What do you mean when you say understanding “global communications and the news” works?

George aka G1:  Being able to monitor a wide range of radio (and companion satellite television and audio channels including network feeds) is extremely important to any person who wishes to become well-informed relative to what is going on in the world around them.  So when I talk about the “magic of radio” we have to recognize that this is a very, very wide-ranging topic.  Furthermore, the proper analysis of the magic is  dependent upon what aspects of personal information you wish to focus on and manage.

Let’s start with the hobby side of radio.

Some people get into radio from the technical side.  In my case, I started listening to tugboats on the Elliott Bay waterfront in Seattle with my clock radio when I was 12-years old.  This was my entry point to communications as a hobby.  But that was me.  These days,  most people don’t want to tear apart radios like I did back in the day.  As a result, perhaps it is best if we come at the hobby from the standpoint of an urban dweller who has a job – or not – but who just knows there something more going on than is alluded to by their current collection of media inputs.

To begin with, a regular citizen of the U.S. may not realize the amount of social filtering which is applied by U.S.-centric media.  This is not to say it is specifically bad, or even deliberate.  (Gaye’s note – yes it is!)

It’s just that someone who is an American in a foreign country will tend to report events around them – breaking news in particular – with and through the social filters implicit in coming from the highest income per capita and highest standard of living in the world.  The eyes of an American and typically, a rich man’s eyes.

The problem distills down to the fact that the US media, being clock-driven and revenue reinforced, is very limited in the number (and depth) of news stories reported.  So those that truly want to be informed, look for more.  They turn to shortwave.

If you have never listened to shortwave radio, an easy way to sample what shortwave listening is like would be to listen to some of the already available in-depth news sources, like National Public Radio.  When you do, you will find that what we’d call “long form” radio is much different than network “Sound Bite” news.

G2:  So how does this relate to preppers, prepping, and leading the “strategic life”?

G1:  Just this:  A first stepping stone on the path to getting conscious control of your personal information platform is deliberately seeking out new sources of information that may/will challenge your current underlying (that is to say branded at the preconscious level) belief sets that control your expectations of how the world operates.

There was a dandy article in the Wall Street Journal recently which asks “So, What’s Your Algorithm?  Since your brain is in essence an Input/Output processor, you know where this leads.

So back to prepping.  Before you start thinking about worst-case communications and buying equipment, you might consider whether you would use it if you had it during non-survival times.

Which is not to say that dependable short-range communication with ham and shortwave radio is about talking to strange people (and sizing up strange ideas) from faraway places.  That is why I personally tend to watch foreign television news shows on Free to Air television – programming directly from China, Russia, Israel, Iran, and every other country that has some skin in the game we call “The Future.”

Side note:  if this interest you, there is a great book I’ve mentioned before: “Build Your Own Free-to-Air (FTA) Satellite TV System” by Dennis C. Brewer.  About $500 up front for the equipment, but after that, there are no monthly bills.

Like anything, there’s an investment/payback to be considered in shortwave and ham radio. If you can develop a taste for it, then you can spend some money on it and really enjoy it.  On the other hand, if you only want the basics, such as a weather radio, an $82 dollar radio like the Grundig S350 will meet your needs for long range worst case listening.

G2:  That’s a load of theory, George, how about something more – you know – practical?

G1:  You bet. One of the shows I have listened to on shortwave for years is one that is on weekdays and is broadcast on shortwave called “As It Happens”.  It is done by the BBC.  At one time it was only on a limited number of Canadian radio stations (and shortwave) but nowadays, thanks to the Internet, you can hear the program via the CBC website here.

This is a dandy example of the kind of quality you can stumble into on shortwave and then fold into your personal media blend.

G2:  Okay then, if a person gets to the stage where they actually like NPR for in depth news, and they have sampled some programs from a few foreign shortwave sites, what then?

G1:  I always start any discussion of shortwave radio by recommending that you walk around your home with a portable AM radio which is tuned to the low end of the AM broadcast band.  Don’t tune into a station. What you want to pick up is the general noise level around 550 to 600 on the AM radio dial.

The reason you need to do this is that you won’t want to pour a lot of money into a shortwave set, especially if you live in an electrically “noisy” environment.  A good shortwave radio – like the Eton (Grundig) 750 which is about $265 at Amazon – will not be a good investment if you can’t hear anything due to noisy electrical appliances.  Fine for camping trips or if the power goes out, though.

Using the cheap hand-held portable radio on the AM band, you should be able to hear which appliances generate radio noise.  Light dimmer switches are notorious for wreaking havoc on both AM and Shortwave bands.  So before you invest in a good radio, you’ll want to sniff out – and resolve – those noise issues that you can.  In most urban areas, you should be able to hear stations at the low end of the broadcast band pretty well, although the Big Radio Migration – from AM to FM which got underway in earnest in the early 1980’s, has been bad for AM stations which have continued to decline in popularity.

One first “radio project” we might as well do is a fun “get your feet wet” exercise:  Since most small portable AM/FM radios use a ferrite bar antenna inside for AM reception, you can use even that cheap little portable as your first real “direction-finder.”  It’s really simple: hold the radio in a stable position while you’re standing in your yard while tuned in to a local AM station during the day.  Generally, where the station reception is weakest is indicates the direction of the radio station.

A little practice with three or four local AM stations, if you have them, plus using Microsoft Streets & Trips and finding out where those AM station towers are, will quickly acclimate you to your new-found direction-finder.

Which sums up our first bit of radio learning: finding noise and the use of direction-finding capabilities.  I know people who have made it to Hawaii on sailboats just using an AM radio and looking for clouds over islands which form in the afternoon in the tropics.

G2:  What if I find a lot of noise?

G1:  That gets to be difficult – depending on what the noise source is.  If you go through the house and by turning off appliances you can’t find the noise source, you might try (after finishing this article!) turning off your computer gear.  The reason is the power supplies in most computers are high-speed switching devices which can “back-feed” noise down the power cord.  Anything that plugs in may be considered suspect until proven innocent.

G2:  So if my “noise floor” is low, and I order a radio, what next?

G1:  This is the easy part.  If you’re ordering the radio from Amazon, also pick up a copy of WRTH – the World Radio Television Handbook.  All kinds of interesting shortwave channels are listed there.

Then, if your computer is not wiping out the AM and Shortwave bands, you can hit online a site like Prime Time Shortwave.

People often ask me “which radio?” and that’s a hard one to answer.

Yes, the CC Radios are good, as are the Grundigs.  But consider your long-term interest in the hobby, too.  It may not make too much sense to invest in a shortwave receiver-only, since if you’re committed to long distance High Frequency ham radio operation, you need to save your money for an HF transceiver.  Almost all the modern HF ham gear includes shortwave bands as part of their “general coverage” claims.

For general purposes, I’d recommend you buy a good NOAA Weather Radio, since in the event of a real disaster, official news and information is likely to be disseminated through this channel.  The NOAA Weather radio is something that works almost everywhere and because it’s a narrow FM signal (which is more noise resistant) and because it’s a VHF (very high frequency) radio operating around 162-163 MHz.  It is a must-have.

Another thing:  leave it on all of the time with the alert feature set.  This is especially a good idea if you live in areas subject to hurricanes or tornados.

G2:  Why is it that some shortwave bands work during the day and different ones work at night?

G1:  There are two kinds of radio propagation commonly used by consumers.

Direct (or line of sight):  This is how your cell phone works because it’s a UHF (ultra-high frequency) signal. Police and fire radios are also line-of-sight, too, since they typically operate in the 150-180 Megahertz (MHz) range, the 450-470 MHz range and a few are on what are called trunking systems up around 800 MHz.

FM radio, by the way is line-of-site and when your FM radio is scratchy-sounding it’s usually because you have a weak signal and a reflected (or bounced) signal is arriving at a slightly different time.  That’s what causes ghosts in old-style television as well.

Ground Wave:  AM radio is mainly ground wave.  Low frequency signals come out from the station’s tower along the ground and tend to fill in shadow areas behind metal buildings, and such.  But at night, the ionosphere starts to lower the frequency at which it will reflect signals back to earth. This is the “Sky Wave”. That is why at night you can often hear far away AM radio stations.

The same is true of shortwave. During the day the 19 meter band (15.1 to 15.8 MHz) range may bounce a signal from a station in Asia.  But at night, as something called the Maximum Useable Frequency [MUF] drops, the 19-meter broadcasts stop reflecting and just goes off into space.

But while the distance on the 49-meter band may be limited to a few hundred miles during the day, when the MUF comes down at night, you can hear stations from all over the world between 5.9 and 6.2 MHz.

There’s also some seasonality to the MUF (and thus which bands work best) depending on how many hours of ionizing daylight there are.  In the summer time, the higher bands (like the 19, 16, 15, and 13 meter bands) stay “open” (good for long distance listening) longer.  In the winter, the lower bands rule and night time in the winter is when 120-meter listening is best, from 2.3 to 2.495 Mhz.  The HAARP signals are just down a ways from there, by the way.

G2:  Tell me again, George.  Why would a person want to have a shortwave radio, practically speaking?

G1:  If America ever had a really worst case kind of event, like an electromagnetic pulse attack, a shortwave radio could get you news and information from halfway around the world.  You would have the ability to know what is going on.  That could be important if all official news and information sources have been destroyed or damaged.

The same thing would be true if there were massive power failures.  As you know, this is not an altogether improbable event.

The other thing – and my favorite reason – is that to some folks, shortwave radio is just plain fun.  It gives you a chance to brush up on your trend spotting skills.  New music, new politics, new ideas – they often show up first on obscure shortwave stations or satellite television channels.

G2:  That’s probably enough to start thinking about for this week.  This is somewhat technical and I need absorb what you have said.  But promise me that next week we will get into more practical items like how to get the ham radio license, a discussion about antennas, and some of that radio jargon that can frankly sound pretty daunting.

G1:  Okay Gaye.  I promise not to make things difficult or daunting.  And when it comes to that jargon, I will teach you about two dozen basic terms for your learning enjoyment.  But, as we used to say in vocational education, the best way to learn is to get out and “do” something.

G2:  Stayed tuned.  Over and out (or whatever it is you are supposed to say in radio-speak)!

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

. . . Your comments welcome at The Electric Tribe

Spotlight Items:

World Radio Television Handbook:  An absolute must if you are interested in finding the most interesting shortwave channels around the world and in obscure locations.

Grundig S350 Deluxe AM/FM/Shortwave Radio :  For $82, George’s pick for someone wanting to get started with shortwave radio.

ETON Satellite 750 AM/FM Band Radio:  Moving on up the line is this $265 model.

Kaito Voyager Solar/Dynamo Emergency Radio:  Not shortwave, but the perfect hand crank, solar weather band radio.  No external power required and a must have for the survival kit.

Build your Own Free-to-Air (FTA) Satellite TV System: An interesting read – do you think you could do it?

All New Square Foot Gardening: Growing you own veggies in a limited amount of space is a no-brainer with the Square Foot Gardening System. The bonus is that it requires very little water and yay! there are virtually no weeds.

The Dukan Diet: 2 Steps to Lose the Weight, 2 Steps to Keep It Off Forever: This is our diet book of choice. Low carbs but also lost of dairy and after the first week or so, veggies and more. You can lose 10 pounds in two weeks on this diet and feel great.

Want to help support Strategic-Living?
We earn a small commission on your purchases and for that, we thank you!

Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

Of course not everything can fit in a single bag. After all, you still need food, a sleeping bag, personal comfort items. No worries. With the help of Kelly at Survival Gear Bags, we have put together the basics and then some. Using this bag as a start, you can enhance and customize as time and budget allows.

Need more info? Check out the kit now by clicking here or head on over to our Strategic Living Kit page where we show all of the components and a bit more info as well.

The Magic of Radio Part 1: Why Shortwave Radio Matters is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

Here is the Strategic Living bucket list for 2012.

#1  Buy a Vote

We did some recent checking at www.opensecrets.org and were horrified to learn that in 2010, more than $3½ billion was spent by lobbyists “buying” legislation in Washington.  While it appears that there has been a huge drop this year ($2.45 billion at press time) the sad reality is that 1) all of 2011’s strong-arm money won’t be reported until well into the New Year and 2) it wasn’t a presidential year.  2012 seems destined to hit the record once again.

A moment or two with a calculator will help explain 80% of what goes on in American politics:  The lobbying industry (it is an industry) spent more than $6 ½ million for each member of the House and Senate.  With that kind of money being thrown around, is it surprising that genetically-modified foods are allowed which could forever damage the environment, or that no-bid sweetheart deals are cut to “plan” for a series of national detention centers?

Of course not.

Cash talks.  Or, more correctly, it screams, rants, and raves and absent a caring constituency at home that picks up the phone at least twice a month to weigh in, and seldom shows up at district meetings, why shouldn’t it?

Is there a way for “We The People” to reclaim ownership from the advance of heartless, tax-dodging transnational corporations that pay no tax while job-jacking our futures?

$11.22 for each man, woman and child in America would do the trick.  Call it $50 for a family…that would be a huge step if invested in the causes we believe in, not those which will fatten the key contributors back in the home district.

Your wallet has more power than a gun.

#2  Read or Watch the Foreign Press

The US media view of the world is corporate-centric.  In other words, US Mainstream Media (the MSM) does not present all sides of all news.  That’s because they know which side their bread is buttered on.  It is buttered by those same folks who write the checks to DC law firms to help “explain” an industry position also who enjoy interlocking directorships; that’s the “good old boy” network that maintains and defends the status quo.

For “Acts of God” news, such as floods, fires, and so forth, they generally do a good job.  But on issues like “Why did we go into Iraq in the first place?” and “Other than opium money and pipeline rights, what justifies the war in Afghanistan?” they don’t fare very well.

Where there’s a war, there is a line of Fortunate 500 companies.  And not all, but many of them, will directly profit from solving international problems with a stick instead of a carrot.

Foreign web sites, Free to Air TV including the book on Amazon “Build your own Free-To-Air Satellite TV System”put free TV within everyone’s reach.

#3  Promise to be in Better Shape Next Year

Not everyone needs to lose weight.  But, almost everyone can eat better, exercise more and get a check-up.  Even if you can’t afford it, most fire stations will put on a blood pressure cuff and tell you how you’re doing on that score, even if you’re homeless.

We hold to the idea that in order to help others, we need to first help ourselves.  So with these first three resolutions for the New Year we figure there will be some physical, intellectual and political health beyond where things are this year.

This one – being in better shape – isn’t a matter of money in most cases, just a matter of commitment.

#4  Grow Something – Anything

Oxygen levels worldwide are declining.  Almost six years ago Peter Douglas Ward came out with his book “Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere”.  In Chapter 2, he notes, in part, that “…not so far back in Earth’s history, perhaps only 5 million years ago, oxygen levels were significantly higher than now, while less than 100 million years ago, oxygen levels were significantly lower than today…”

We’re looking down the barrel of a centuries-long gun on environmental issues, whether we like it, or not.  Peak Oil will occur at some point and it’s likely to set off global war over remaining resources.  And what’s continuing around the world today is the wholesale conversion of a sustainable future into today’s marketable products.

Whether it’s growing food or planting trees, or perhaps even going to meetings on open spaces or public agriculture such as “pea patch” plots, please grow something this year.  It’s cheap, too.

Remember:  Forests and almost all the varieties of food we eat managed to perpetuate themselves without corporate assistance for millions of years.

#5  Turn Your Time Into Money

You may not think about this one very often, but the fact is, most people have three states of being:  Making money, spending money, or sleep.  We resolve to sleep more fitfully and to turn down the spending money time to increase the making money time.  Check out Kill Your TV for some ideas.

#6  Take Action Against Patenting Life

When the day finally arrives that a scientist can walk into a closed lab, make their own air, and armed with only pure ingredients whip up a batch of a life form, then we might be inclined to reconsider.

But until then, corporations are taking the world down the path to a new kind of food-enforced neocolonialism by patenting life.

That all existing forms of Life are in the public domain should be obvious.  So are any and all possible combinations.  Consider if you will the Minotaur imagery of ancient Greece.  From those fanciful moments forward, any combination of once “live” elements is in the public domain.

The rest, sadly, is greed-driven exploitation of the financial system for corporate gain.  We would not mix poisons and jellyfish into our plants unless there was an economic incentive to do so.  Nature spent millions of years optimizing the planet and to think the lab coat clowns can improve things may be true in the very short term.

We’d offer their track record on fighting cancer – actively fighting innovations like those from the Burzynski Clinic -  or in the the lab coat boy’s “peaceful use” of atomic energy as experienced in Japan.  (Be thankful you’re not a seal.)

Your action doesn’t have to be expensive:  Support of organic farmers, saying “No!” to Gestapo-like raids on fresh food dealers, or if you’re on a jury in the coming year, listening with your heart instead of being guided solely by laws which were bought and paid for by Franken-food lobbyists.  Tell your Home Owners Association it’s OK to keep a couple of chickens in the back yard, too.

Vote with your wallet.

#7 Resist the Police State

The War on Terror is a massive employment scheme.  We get that.  We know that a few radicals somewhere else in the world could be a problem here in America.  But does it make sense to strip-search people in their 80’s and 90’s who are no more terrorists than the Man in the Moon?

Americans were sold a bill of goods with a side order of political correctness.  All 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia.  None from Afghanistan and not one from Iraq.

This coming year, as ever more intrusive and unreasonable searches are propagated by a power-thirsty TSA which is now reaching into bus and railroad stations, cooperate only to the degree required by law – no more – and then vote in November according to your experiences.

#8 Demand Just Courts

The most recent appointees to the US Supreme Court have been characterized as believing in a “Living Constitution” – code words for runaway Justices who can’t seem to comprehend the simple language of the Founders.

Those who seek a new interpretation of the Founders should first study English and should get off the bench.  They don’t belong there.

# 9  Believe in Something Greater than Yourself

If we could just get this one right, the rest of our issues would take care of themselves.  Decide to distance from groups that define members by how “others” are different and migrate to those which are organized around “how we’re all the same…”

Near as we can tell, all souls weigh the same regardless of race, creed, gender, persuasion, or national origin.  Off-planet reptiles excluded, unless they have birth certificates.

In Summary

If collectively we can get these simple resolutions enacted widely in the coming year maybe 2013 will be a lot brighter than 2012 looks from here.

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

. . . Your comments welcome at The Electric Tribe

Spotlight Items:

Build your Own Free-to-Air (FTA) Satellite TV System: An interesting read – do you think you could do it?

All New Square Foot Gardening: Growing you own veggies in a limited amount of space is a no-brainer with the Square Foot Gardening System. The bonus is that it requires very little water and yay! there are virtually no weeds.

The Dukan Diet: 2 Steps to Lose the Weight, 2 Steps to Keep It Off Forever:  This is our diet book of choice.  Low carbs but also lost of dairy and after the first week or so, veggies and more.  You can lose 10 pounds in two weeks on this diet and feel great.

LifeSpan TR 1200i Folding Treadmill:  Gaye takes a daily hike (free) while George hits the treadmill. What ever your pleasure, exercise is the key to staying healthy. That an good, real food.

Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere:  This is the Peter Douglas book mentioned above.  Another interesting read.

Want to help support Strategic-Living?
We earn a small commission on your purchases and for that, we thank you!

Nine Resolutions That Matter in 2012 is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

1. Decorations

The holiday period comes with an assortment of “buy once – use forever” options. In January you should be able to find a permanent Christmas tree, if that’s your deal. Fresh, real trees smell good, no question about it, but you can get a permanent tree and a couple of cans of air freshener and reduce the risk of a house fire due to a defective ornament to nearly zero. This makes investment sense to us.

Don’t buy another incandescent light. LED lights are less time consuming (they don’t break as often) and they eat less energy. They have a chance at being “lifetime lights.” While we’re sympathetic to employment levels in China, this one’s a no-brainer.

2. Package Up Packaging

Another area where people spend like “it’s water” is gift wrapping.  We call it waste for the weak-willed.

We’ve seen some really clever ways around this is – either plain brown paper or simply some paper grocery bags turned unprinted side out. A bit upscale from here is using the comic section from the Sunday paper. If foils and holograms are a necessary part of Christmas wrapping, buy it in January and store until next year.

3. Cash In Unwanted Gifts

What do you do if someone buys you something you’re not really thrilled with?

Simple:

a. You can turn it into a cash refund at some stores, especially if your gift-giver was kind enough to scratch off just the price, not the bar code and store name.

b. A growing number of stores won’t do cash disbursements, but they tend to be pretty good about in-store credits. Lowes, for example earns a lot of customer loyalty by being quite reasonable with their returns.

The main danger?  Having something you got for Christmas sitting around till March, by which time no one is interested in Christmas returns. Use gifts right away or trade them on something you can and will use.

4. Gift Cards

If budgeting for Christmas is difficult for you, consider buying in-store gift cards during the year when you might have a few dollars left over. Just make sure, if you go this route, that the cards will be good for 60-days past Christmas.

5. Regifting

Another thing to do is hang onto gifts which someone you know might like. In George’s family, kitchen utensils (or what Gaye calls do-dads)  are prized because if you don’t happen to need a new and improved thing-a-ma-job (like a pasta ladle) you can always use it for a birthday or other special occasion gift to someone who would be thrilled to have it.

Wedding present for someone you slightly know? That kind of thing works.

6. Donations

This would be a fine time to look at your “haul” for the year and ask “Is there something here which I could donate and claim a tax deduction on?” If the condition is New In Box, the write-off could be higher.

7. January Shopping

Since stores will be having all kinds of specials in January and February, this is an ideal time to stock up on birthday and anniversary gifts at rock-bottom clearance prices.

8. Get Rid of Recurring Cost Gifts

There’s a whole class of insidious gifts that bring with them ongoing expenses and very little – if any – health or lifestyle benefit. An example might be one of those $100+ make-it-at-home soda machines. First, you don’t need the sugar and artificial contents of the recurring pop supplies, and then there’s the cost of the carbon dioxide cylinders. Just the thing to re-gift to someone you don’t like. As a bonus, if their kids aren’t ADD already, enough sugar and flavorings and maybe they will be.

Mean? Us?  Gifts are still giving, are they not?

7. Pretentious Gifts

Get rid of them. We both know people who buy very expensive jewelry. What we mean here is well into five and even low six-figures jewelry. Times have changed. Pretentious and conspicuous consumption left town in 2008 and hasn’t seen seen or heard from since. And we know it didn’t go to Florida or on a cruise. Worse: Homeowner’s insurance won’t cover (this version of) the family jewels without a special rider and an additional premium.

Take it off your list and if you did get something, see if there’s some way to take it back and turn it into something useful.

8. Look for Production and Lifestyle Items

Since life is taking a major turn lately, load up at the after-holiday sales on things that will improve the quality of your life:

· Buy technology. It’s false economy to buy a dime-store computer since the aggravation of a second-tier computer is likely to cost you huge amounts of time and money. Do things right and get the best technology you can afford. Even small decisions like buying a duplex (two-sided) printer pay off over time if you get something good.

· Buy household goods that will improve your life. We’re both big on crock pots. Cook all day while other things are going on, food tastes great (tender and delicious are favorite words). Vacuum sealers are great for leftovers that you are going to freeze and can be cheaper than the store-bought zip lock freezer bags. And, it is good for storing dry goods for the long term (SHTF?).

9. Reschedule Payments

Christmas bills may be manageable under most monthly circumstances, but if you’re determined NOT to pay interest on credit cards – or you’re working yourself “out from under” a debt burden hangover – the right thing to do is make payments early, or later if you have annual bills that tend to “hit” in January.

Often times, homeowner’s insurance, auto insurance, homeowner association dues, and special assessments of this type, or that, come due at the same time major bills are coming in.

You don’t want that. Plan on car maintenance in November, insurance and taxes in December (or earlier) so that when you’re flipping through the Sunday newspaper travel section come mid-January if you see one of those clearance priced cruises, you will be in a position to afford it!

We’re frequently criticized by people who don’t seem to “get” what Strategic Living is all about.  George mentioned it in his column last week and it boils down to this: Get a home – even a small cheap home – and get your monthly operating costs down well below your income.

That one small change – and the larger framework of thinking that goes with it – moves you quickly from broke to having a few extra bucks on hand.  Bucks for fun stuff, that is.

There’s an extremely important mindset here: managing your income (cash flow) so that you always have a little “cushion” that you can draw on. Once you make that a regular habit, to where having to pay a deductible for medical or dental work isn’t a worry, you may be pleasantly surprised how much less stressful Life can be.

Think of this as “Cashing in on Christmas” – and it’s the best gift of all.  Oh yeah, and many happy returns!

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

. . . Your comments welcome at The Electric Tribe

On the Other Hand

Gaye:  I would never, ever re-gift a piece of cast iron cookware.  Cast iron is inexpensive, durable and darn cool to cook with be it indoors or out.  My favorite pieces are the Lodge 12-Inch Skillet and the Lodge Cast-Iron Camp Dutch Oven.

George:  Bring on the computer gear, the more the better.  And something I can never have too many of?  How about a 2TB USB external backup drive such as this one from Seagate:  Seagate Free Agent GoFlex Desk 2 TB USB Drive.

Spotlight Items:

FoodSaver Vacuum Sealer: We both love out food savers even though they are older models.  They are still going strong and do a great job of sealing our foods for both long and short term storage.

Crock-Pot Slow Cooker:  Likewise the crockpot.  This is the original set-it and forget-it appliance.  Beef stew anyone?

Brother High Speed Laser Printer with Duplex:  Who said a duplex printer had to cost an arm and a leg?   To save even more money, refill your own toner cartridges with a High Yield Black Toner Refill Kit.

Want to help support Strategic-Living?
We earn a small commission on your purchases and for that, we thank you!

Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

Of course not everything can fit in a single bag. After all, you still need food, a sleeping bag, personal comfort items. No worries. With the help of Kelly at Survival Gear Bags, we have put together the basics and then some. Using this bag as a start, you can enhance and customize as time and budget allows.

Need more info? Check out the kit now by clicking here or head on over to our Strategic Living Kit page where we show all of the components and a bit more info as well.

Cashing In On Christmas is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

The Sure-Fire Four Hour Personal Financial Plan

This year has been for most people a terrible, sucky, bad year for personal financial statements.

The reasons are pretty simple: stocks have been hard to pick, gold and silver have given up most of their gains, and this coming week (December 21^st) the National Association of Realtors will update housing prices going all the way back to 2007 because of apparent over-reporting of sales.  Sources tell us it hasn’t been uncommon for people counting deeds in courthouses in different areas of the country to count things like foreclosures as sales since training on number-gathering does take some attention to details.

The first part of this article is a bit “numbers intensive” but hang in there, the results are important.

While real estate has gone down, there hasn’t been much of a recovery on the jobs front, either. The latest unemployment report claims that 8.6% unemployment was recorded in November 2011, but upon inspection we note that the civilian workforce was placed at 153,883,000 and the number actually working was cited as 140.58 million.

How does the employment for this November compare with year-ago figures?  On the surface, we’ve seen a major improvement: November 2010 saw a reported unemployment rate of 9.8%.  On the surface employment picked up 1.2% for the year.

When we look deeper, however, some continuing weakness becomes clear.  The civilian workforce a year ago was pegged at 154,007,000, which might cause the clear-thinking reader to wonder “Unless America shrank in population, where’d the missing workers go?”

On the employment side, the reported number of job-holders was actually up 1.2% based on 2010’s report that 138.888 million held jobs a year ago.  Hardly the stuff to write home about – and considering the US population grew according to the Census Bureau from July 2010’s 309.349 million to December 15^th’s 312.780 million, an increase in 16½ months of 3.431 million added humans.

Still with us?

The problem is – and this is why you need to be working on how to decrease your lifestyle in 2012 – the Census figures mean about 2.495 million more people per year, but if jobs only increased in the past year by 1.692 million workers, “Hello Houston! We have a problem!”  People are going up in numbers faster than jobs.

Put another way, the real gross domestic product absolutely MUST go up proportionate to the population or something has to give – and that something is your standard of living.  So What?

It’s nicey-nice for the dim-witted financial press to report every news release from the Labor Department and a few even point to the statistically-created jobs in the CES Birth/Death Model. The Current Employment Statistics section makes a sincere effort to estimate the number of jobs which may not show up in official state filings by employers, and such, but it’s all within a very narrow context.

Our goal here at Strategic Living is to look at the data as broadly as possible and make some inferences about the future and then to help you turn those inferences into concrete, specific actions which will build your net worth and value to society over time.

With the data seeming to indicate that we’re in a long-term standard of living decline.  Quite simply, it goes with the Depression territory we’re in.

So what can the average person do about it?

The answer is “Lots!” but many of the choices are not pretty.

The first thing that’s needed is a mindset change for most people. There’s a huge difference between being “rich” and being “poor” – even in the midst of an economic depression like the one we’ve spiraled into.

One way to tell is you’re “rich” is to ask yourself “

“If I saw something today while out and about that cost $20 could I buy it for myself just because I want to, or is that $20 decision something I have to carefully think through since it could cost me dearly in some other area of life?”

If you’re in the place where an occasional $20 bonus payment to yourself means your car insurance will be late, or your rent is held back a day or two, then your are (hate to say this): poor.

The surprising thing is that we both know people who make over $100,000 a year and yet (amazingly) end up being poor by this definition because that $20 was already earmarked for spending when they earned it! Yet, we also know people who live on meager military and social security retirements who seem to thrive on a low income.

“How is this possible?” you’re wondering.

Simple: The shortest path to rich is by under-spending your income, whatever that income might be.

You can literally be dumpster-diving part-time, but if you are thrifty about every single penny found, every pop bottle or beer can turned in, you can accumulate a little nest egg. Or, you can be like high-priced sales execs who live well beyond their incomes and are locked into being “poor” by bad spending habits.

Setting Up 2012 – Simple Steps You Can Take Now

George likes to divide life up into seven general expense levels:

• Food
• Shelter
• Communications
• Transportation
• Energy
• Financial
• Environment (which takes in everything from clothing to medicine)

It’s simple enough to build being “rich” into your life, and we can walk you through it in steps.

First you list out all of the areas of personal spending for the year. A checkbook register and your bankcard statements are all that’s needed, or if you use Quicken or other personal finance software, the reports just “fall out.”

The idea is to figure out what you need to give up in 2012 in order to be rich (meaning having some “walk around money”).

If your food budget is too large, you can save some dough by cutting back the amount of processed food you eat.  You can make some home made vegetable soups and cheap stews, saving time by freezing the leftovers after cooking only once or twice per week.  This makes cleaning the kitchen a shorter exercise and you’ll have better food for a lot less money.

In our own households we both shun anything with high fructose corn syrup, in it, for example. And if a package’s ingredient list contains more than two or three preservatives or chemicals?  Back on the shelf it goes.

Shelter is a little tougher.  Still, even if you rent, you can almost always find something cheaper, or you could find a room mate and double up the available money which might be one cost-reduction route. Moving in with a parent, brother, sister, in-laws, cousins…all this is possible for most people but few actually bite the bullet and do it, even though that would dramatically increase the amount of money they could save for those BIG THINGS in life, like a once in a lifetime trip to China or Europe.

Transportation beyond a bus pass is easy to get sucked into, but why not find somewhere to live closer to work? Why own a car at all?  It is estimated that over half of a car expense for lower income people (driving older cars) is in parking, repairs, and insurance. Why would you throw money at that unless you really had to?  OK, we’ll grant you that young people don’t like to be seen with shopping carts, but there are reasons why older people who “live in the ‘hood” drag them around.  Have you ever looked at Amazon’s assortment of shopping carts?  They cost well under $50 and no wasted time loading and unloading.

Gardening is one of the few hobbies that can more than pay for itself. Even a few containers of dirt on a condo deck can produce a bumper crop – as Gaye can testify – and great tomatoes, too.  It helps when you’re apartment or condo renting to weigh the value of a south-facing deck.

Phone plans are another great expense. George still uses an old AT&T “Go Phone” and spends less than $200 a year on communications expense.  Gaye’s bill is steeper (more client time on the phone) but still her plan is only $80 a month and that includes a cell phone for her husband and 80-something Mom.  No smart phones in this group – we have basic phones that make and receive calls.  Period.

Satellite TV bills over $100 are a thing of the past with a good internet connection and Netflix. News junkies can get their fix on the internet, on the car radio, or buy an old shortwave set.  Amazon has Dennis Brewer’s new book “Build your Own Free-to-Air (FTA) Satellite TV System” out.  But be advised, the news you get from watching Xinhua’s English-language news, or al Jazeera, or Iran’s Press TV is often a lot less subtle and shy of corporate spin common to US channels.

Library cards are invaluable. Depending on library, you can rip audio books, music, dub off copies of DVD’s and oh, yeah, they do have books – both eBooks and the old fashioned paper kind.

Energy use goes down with a simpler lifestyle. LED lights last almost forever (or 100,000 hours, whichever comes first) although the savings from compact florescent lights has been disappointing. Learn to work in dimmer lighting, cooler temperatures in winter and wear lighter (or no) clothing in summer.

Fashion? Forget it! It’s just another way to weasel money from your wallet or purse. Brand name clothing is (and continues to be) a scam promoted in advertising. If something appears to be a breakthrough in an ad, by the way, try to figure how to get the same benefit without buying something. That’s the mindset that becomes rich, not buying a particular piece of clothing, car, accessory, or phone thinking it will be a check/dude magnet. False advertising sure, but it sucks in billions of dollars each year, sorry. People are gullible so we try not to be among them.

Health is one of the few things to be wary of false economy in: Don’t skip going to a doctor if you’re feeling ill. But do go intelligently, especially if you have a little time: Doctor visits (if you don’t have insurance) can be costly but set up the appointment carefully, so that the staff knows you don’t have much money and a $40 or $50 office visit is an extravagance.  Tests should be kept to a minimum, generic prescriptions and the internet is a great repository of information if you have an inclination to really save money.

A few telephone calls may also locate a medical lab which will do tests on site (can vary by state) and only buy what your doctor really needs for diagnosis.

Adding Things Up

We would love to tell you that there is a huge economic recovery underway and that this coming year will be the time to throw yourself into debt because it will all be easily afforded by a soaring standard of living and a huge rise in economic prospects. Sorry, that’s just not likely to be the case.

Hard-nosed thrift is becoming the mindset of a whole generation or two coming up since the employment prospects are not brightening and the easy-money trades (drugs, prostitution, and street crime) seem to wander upward as populations grow faster than workforces.

The good news is that by spending a few hours and working on simple strategic changes in how you live your life, you may be able to come up with the occasional $5 bill that you might throw at something that’s meaningful.

Like a flower for a loved one. Or, a lotto ticket.

A two percent reduction in lifestyle is easy to do on a voluntary basis. But if you’re already poor with no leftover change on payday, 2012 could hurt like hell if you don’t get ahead of the problem and there’s no better time for some deep introspection than the holidays.

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

. . . Your comments welcome at The Electric Tribe

Spotlight Items:

Quicken: Need to know where your money is going? Quicken makes it easy (not as easy as the old Managing Your Money software from years ago, but easy none the less).

Turbo Tax 2011: Speaking of getting your financial house in order, it is time to think about filing your 2011 tax return. Why not get this chore done early in 2012?

Folding Grocery Shopping Cart: No, it is not sexy or cool but consider how much you will save if you walk to the supermarket.

Build your Own Free-to-Air (FTA) Satellite TV System:  An interesting read – do you think you could do it?

Square Foot Gardening : Growing you own veggies in a limited amount of space is a no-brainer with the Square Foot Gardening System. The bonus is that it requires very little water and yay! there are virtually no weeds.

Want to help support Strategic-Living?

We earn a small commission on your purchases and for that, we thank you!

Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

Of course not everything can fit in a single bag. After all, you still need food, a sleeping bag, personal comfort items. No worries. With the help of Kelly at Survival Gear Bags, we have put together the basics and then some. Using this bag as a start, you can enhance and customize as time and budget allows.

Need more info? Check out the kit now by clicking here or head on over to our Strategic Living Kit page where we show all of the components and a bit more info as well.

Prediction: Your Standard of Living is Going Down in 2012 is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

Knife: A cutting tool or instrument consisting of a sharp blade and a handle.

. . . From the American Dictionary of the English Language      

Modern communication has brought world-wide events more intimately into our lives than ever before in history.  By its very nature news focuses on the sensational, and the presentation and implication of events are so enhanced that a mudslide in Colombia burying a villages gives us the impression that we will be next.

And it is true.  Extreme natural occurrences (earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornados, etc.) in distant locations seem to be on the verge of happening outside our very window.  All of them remain a threat – here, now and in the moment.

The threat of a natural disaster seems to be increasing and whether real or not, our mindset is affected because the effect of such a disaster threatens our sense of safety and security.  As technological advancements in our modern world makes our lives comfortable our sense of foreboding over a natural disaster escalates.

A flick of a switch or a press of a button and we can watch someone a half a world away make tea.  By pressing another button we can even talk to them as they heat the water.  If we do not want to watch tea steeping, we press a button and watch lava from a volcano in Hawaii pouring into the ocean.  And if we become bored with that, a turn of a switch, or press of yet another button and we can be whisked in a machine to a restaurant downtown, without significant physical effort.  While travelling, we can press more buttons to listen to music, adjust the ambient temperature, adjust our seat, and more incredibly, heat the seat.

At home, a flick of a switch and we have light at night (with degrees of intensity if we wish). We can adjust the temperature in our home effortlessly, and sit in a comfortable chair and watch the forgoing tea making, and lava flowing, and all repetitively if so desired.  All this happening through the medium (and perhaps miracle) of technology.

In some paradoxical sense, as our social and personal well-being increases, so also the anxiety and uncertainty about our life increases.  We contemplate the possible loss of our comforts.  The cataclysmic events that take place throughout the world, from which people survive and stoically endure and rebuild, may seem insurmountable and even unbearable to us in our modern world.  On our TV screens we watch how emergency services and government responses break down quickly, even in those countries we normally associate with modern technology and resources.

In our own country we have experienced massive calamities that would destabilize other societies. Comparatively though, we in America seem to be unique in our response to catastrophes.  For the most part our skill at adaptation plus our access to and movement of resources and equipment on a large scale help us cope.  This, coupled with our unique ability to organize and work together decisively to survive and recover often masks the severity of these events, and as a result we may marginalize their effect no matter how devastating.

Survival has been a common and successful theme in literature throughout history.  Stories abound about devastation visited upon the earth and society and of man’s struggle against calamities natural and manmade, seemingly beyond his control.

These stories follow a common pattern.

Man is left facing a world devastated, distorted, and degraded; the environment and society is destroyed, destabilized, or mutated, and only a small group of survivors remain, reduced to an elemental state of existence and thrust back, if you will, to a primitive condition where personal will and basic tools make the difference between survival, preservation, or extinction.

Cinema has also been effective with this theme; showing us the possible, probable, and improbable, effects of diabolical technology run amok, meteoric threats from outer space, and natural disasters of epic proportions coupled with the fulfillment of ambiguous prophecies of ancient lore.

Also popular today are movies based on actual experiences of men and women caught up in survival situations.

All this brings us to a recent interest survival; that is, the effort to maintain life when technological functions; electricity, mechanized transportation, and social services fail.  In effect, when we are suddenly booted back 200 years.

This interest is bolstered by the perception that natural disasters seem to be increasing in frequency and intensity these days.  And often, these disasters appear to overwhelm the efforts of modern resources to quickly reestablish previous conditions and essential services.

Another aspect of survival is when an individual or family are caught in a situation where they are forced to rely upon whatever materials or knowledge they possess at that moment in order to continue to live.  We have all heard, seen or read about men and women who have had to confront survival situations as a result of extreme weather conditions, sudden natural disasters, or accidents or injuries while driving, flying, diving, hiking, sailing etc.  The recent movie 127 Hours brings into sharp relief how easily we can be caught in a survival situation.  There are literally thousands of similar stories from around the world.

From factual stories to movies, personal survival has a particular appeal perhaps because it is most involves man at his or her most basic, totally dependent upon the application of his intellect, without recourse to outside guidance to manage his or her situation.

There are hundreds of survival and survival-type movies.  Here are a few we find entertaining if not informative (putting the first Rambo movie aside):

• The Snow Walker
• Cast Away (the scene where the man looks at the multi-purpose pocket knife during his visit with his ex-fiancée is especially good)
• I am Legend
• The Road
• Defiance
• Heaven Knows Mr. Allison
• Touching the Void
• Fly with the Hawk
• My Side of the Mountain

Now this article is not about movies or survival, it is about a tool.  The tool is not new, in fact it may be the oldest tool that man has utilized throughout history, and has not changed significantly over the millenniums.

The Knife As a Tool

This tool is the knife. From Folsom points, to obsidian blades sharper than a razor, to bronze, iron, and steel, the knife even more that its relatives, the sword, the spear, or the axe, has been the essential implement or tool most intimately associated with man.

In fact, optimistic anthropologists estimate the existence of knives to extend 2 million years into the past.

The basic form of the knife has not changed meaningfully over time.  It’s primary function to pierce or cut(slice) remains the same; that in itself is extraordinary given man’s tendency to want to change, adapt, modify or rearrange any contrivance, device or utensil he can get his hands on.

Myriads of survival books have been written, and the implement most commonly recommended for survival is a good knife.  Same thing in movies.  For example, the climber in the movie 127 Hours, uses his knife to free himself from the stone that has fallen and trapped him.

Since this article is about survival knives it seems appropriate to start by looking at some factors that make a knife a useful possession.  To quickly name a few attributes:

• A knife is small compared to a saw, axe, sword, spear, etc. and therefore more easily carried on one’s person or in a portable container.
• The shape and function of the knife is simple and does not require any complex process to put it into action.
• Maintenance of the knife is easy, does not require elaborate care or complex or cumbersome equipment.
• A knife possesses some versatility, it can perform a limited variety of tasks without changing its basic form.

For our needs, we are interested in a knife whose shape, size, and design is more geared toward survival or emergency situations. There are hundreds of brands of knives and knife manufacturers, all producing knives which they label “Survival Knives”.  In fact there are so many brands and styles that the average person who simply wants a knife that is sharp, easy to operate and maintain without getting into the esoteric science of types of steel, handle material, and manufacturing process, can become discouraged looking at the myriad of offerings.

So how does one choose the right survival knife?

We want to make the best choice possible, without paying an outrageous amount for what is basically a piece of metal with minimum moving parts, if any.  We want a knife that can perform one or two basic functions and their variations.  And of course, in a survival-type knife we want a sturdy implement that will hold up under some degree of stress.

Types of Survival Knives

In order to make a somewhat educated evaluation of the type of knife we want, it is worthwhile to acquire some knowledge about the variety and manufacturing of knives.

Essentially, there are two styles of knifes: folding blades, and fixed blades. Folding blades, or pocket knives, are knives where one or more blades are folded inside the handle.  Fixed blades are knives such as hunting knives, daggers, etc. These knives are large, consist of one piece, with the cutting blade at one end and the handle at the other end.

Multi-purpose knives are generally folding knives and contain various blades, and modifications, such as the well-known Swiss Army knife. The more modifications a knife has the more it is compromised in performing a knife function to its fullest.  Nevertheless these knives are useful and very popular.

For our survival knife, an important requirement is toughness; that is the blade should not break easily, it should hold a sharp edge, and it should be large and massive enough to perform tasks normally beyond its basic capability, i.e. chopping, prying, twisting.

It has been said that a Survival Knife is the single most important item in a survival inventory!

Before we get into selecting a survival-type knife we should know a little about their construction.

The fixed blade knife consists of the following:

• Blade: the working part of the knife. The blade may be plain or serrated, or partially serrated.
• Tang: The tang is the part of the knife that forms the handle. There are 3 types of tangs. A stick tang is a narrow ‘nail’-looking protrusion at the end of the knife where the handle is attached. This is a common and cheap way to manufacture the handle. It is not strong and is subject breaking or bending when significant stress is placed on the blade.
  • A partial tang is where the tang is the approximate width of the blade but only extends part way into the handle. A drawback of this type of blade is the handle has a tendency to break above the end of the tang.
  • A full tang is where the tang is approximately the same width and thickness as the blade and runs the full length of the handle. The advantage to this is readily apparent. T he handle and the blade are strong and essentially one piece when in operation.
• Edge: The cutting surface of the blade.
• Grind: Grind is that part of the blade that is shaped or beveled down to the edge, the cross-section of the blade.
• Spine: The spine is the back of the blade, the thickest part of the blade. It provides the strength to the blade.
• Ricasso: The flat section of the blade at the junction of the blade and the knife guard.
• Choil: Where the blade is unsharpened and indented where the blade meets the handle (at the ricasso).
• Guard: A barrier between the blade and the handle. The are two common types of guards: a partial guard that extends down to protect the hand from sliding onto the blade, commonly found on hunting knives. Full guard extends out from the handle on both sides, commonly found on combat knives to protect the hand from an opponent’s blade; also found on survival-type knives.
• Fuller: A groove along each side of the blade where stock is removed by grinding, commonly referred to as a blood groove but its real purpose is the lighten the weight of the blade.
• Blade Profile: The shape of the blade, how it is ground and the form of the blade.
• Straight: The blade is straight along the spine from handle to point without a curve.
• Clipped point: The point of the blade is curved at the spine to give a dagger-like point.
• False Edge or Reverse Edge: Where the forward top edge of the blade (spine) is thinned and left unsharpened.

Now we would like our survival knife to be sharp and to stay sharp as long as possible during work.  The process that distinguishes the sharpness of a blade is called tempering.  Tempering is a science, an art and a skill. The detailed chemical and forging factors that are involved in making the ideal blade are beyond the scope of this article, nevertheless, we want to have some idea of the type of blade and its capabilities when we examine our survival knife.

Elements of Steel

Alloys affect the durability, sharpness, strength and toughness of knife steel. Here are some important steel alloys.

• Carbon: Knife edge steel should contain >5% carbon.
• Chromium: Increases wear resistance, corrosion resistance. Stainless steel.
• Molydbdenum: Prevents brittleness, maintains steels strength at high temperatures.
• Nickel: Adds toughness
• Tungsten: Increases wear resistance.
• Vanadium: Contributes to hardness, and wear resistance, allows blade to take a very sharp edge.
• Blade Steel:  Blade steel is the type of steel used in the manufacture of a knife, sword, axe, hatchet, etc.

Blades are made from a variety and mixture of materials, most common carbon steel, stainless steel, tool steel and alloy steel.

Some additional terms:

Carbides: Hard particles formed in steel when carbon bonds with iron. Carbide types influence wear resistance, and toughness in steel.

Edge stability: Ability to hold a thin highly polished edge. Finer carbide structure increases the ability of the steel to hold sharpness with acute highly polished edges.

Grain size: Steel is made up of grains, decreasing grain size means increased toughness and strength.

Strength: Different steels have different strengths, measured by a calculation called Rockwell hardness (Rc.)

Toughness: Ability to resist chipping or breakage.

Wear Resistance: Ability to resist abrasive wear. Important for slicing and cutting, especially items like rope, cardboard. Generally greater wear resistance means the steel is more difficult to sharpen, so less wear resistance may be preferred.

Steel: All steel rusts.

The type of steel your survival knife is made of is sometimes etched or stamped into the blade. Often however, there will not be a code and the most you may know is whether or not you knife is made of stainless steel.

Stainless steel is popular for knife blades because it resists rust and staining.  In addition. here are a few compositions of steels used in quality knives. The numeric codes are too numerous to include, however here are some principle ones used today.

-400 series: the most popular choices for knife makers because it is easy to sharpen and rust resistant.

-420HC is used extensively by knife makers. HC stands for High Carbon.

-440A is used primarily in inexpensive stainless steel.

-440C is considered a high-end stainless steel, one of the most common alloys used for knife making.

-A2 is air hardening tool steel, frequent choice for combat knives.

-1095 most popular for knives, i.e.. Kabar.

-5160 popular with forgers, generally used in bigger blades that need more toughness.

Finally, there are some considerations to take in to account as we select our survival knife, mainly, what kind of survival are we contemplating for use with our knife?

Typically we will want an emergency tool to cut our way out of our automobile, a knife to cut firewood, skin game, build shelters, and more of what we like to call “rough” work.  So, for rough work and general survival here are some suggestions.

1.  Look for a full tang knife.

2.  Avoid hollow handles.

3.  Survival knives generally come in two types of steel, stainless or carbon. Stainless steel resists corrosion, and some say it does not hold an edge well, however, 440C, 440HC, are high-end stainless steels and popular for knife making.  Carbon steel, excellent qualities but rusts and requires maintenance. Steels such as Muela knives contain Vanadium, are excellent quality steel.  Nevertheless, steels vary by manufacturer.

4.  Blade (length): Most survival knives are between 6 to 12 inches, with 7 to 9 inches the most versatile. Any bigger and we are talking Rambo, and the knife becomes unwieldy to handle.

5.  Blade (Thickness): A good general rule is about 3/16 – 4/16 of an inch thickness. You do not want a survival knife that is “ whippy” or has a lot of flex to the blade. You need a knife that can withstand wood chopping or prying.

6.  Sheath: A belt loop, a lower attachment or hole in the bottom of the sheath for strapping the knife to your leg and permit drainage of moisture from the sheath. The strap that closes around the knife. A cross-strap, where the handle meet the sheath is considered the best.

Some Knives to Consider

And finally here are some great knives to consider for your survival needs.

SOG Specialty Knives, TF3 Trident

Zero Tolerance G10 with Speed Safe

Ka Bar USMC Utility Knife

SOG SEAL Team Knife

Cold Steel SRK

In Summary

There is no such thing as the perfect survival knife since individual needs and budgets may vary.  Our best advice is to pick a knife, use it for awhile then add a second knife to add functionality and additional usefulness.  Whatever you decide, be sure to use your knife in various situations now.  Become skilled and proficient while time is on your side.

Good Luck!

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye with thanks to Panama Bates for his valuable research in to this article

. . . Your comments welcome at The Electric Tribe

Spotlight Items:

Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

Of course not everything can fit in a single bag. After all, you still need food, a sleeping bag, personal comfort items. No worries. With the help of Kelly at Survival Gear Bags, we have put together the basics and then some. Using this bag as a start, you can enhance and customize as time and budget allows.

Need more info? Check out the kit now by clicking here or head on over to our Strategic Living Kit page where we show all of the components and a bit more info as well.

Survival and The Survival Knife: Everything You Need to Know and More is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

Here at Strategic Living, we want to take you beyond the basics by helping you plan for the unexpected.  This not only includes prepping for the occasional disaster, but also coming up with the strategies (strategic, get it?) for coping with day to day challenges.

And so today we talk about the challenge of dealing with and preventing petty crime, or burglary.  Whatever you want to call it, burglars are bad guys.  If someone breaks in to your home – be it ranch in Eastern Texas, a cottage in Washington State, an apartment in the city, or a garden home in a planned community – a break-in is a break-in and is therefore a violation of your most sacred space:  your home.

With the shorter days of winter as well as the holiday’s that are coming up, burglars and thieves are going to be on the lookout for homes that are easy targets.  The two G’s want to share 12 things people do to roll out the welcome mat and invite the bad guys to pay them a visit.  We also offer some suggestions of things you can do now to make your home less attractive to these uninvited visitors.

Let’s get started.

1.  Leaving the doors and windows unlocked while you are home inside.

Okay, we know you are not stupid but you would be surprised at how many folks dutifully lock up when they are away but leave their doors and windows wide open and unattended when they are home.  Gaye will tell you how often people have tried to simply walk right into her house.  So now she leaves both the front and back doors locked so all that these unwelcome visitors get is a rattling door knob and the barking wrath of Tucker the dog.

2.  Hiding a key under the mat, over the door frame, in a barbecue or some other place that every crook  in the county knows about.

This is something else that smart people do,  They hide a key in the most obvious place they can think of – probably so they will not forget themselves.  The problem with this is that everyone else knows about these hidey holes as well.  Fake rock with a well built in for a key?  Jeesh – everyone knows about those.  Instead, invest in a secure key safe such as this one that is mounted outside Gaye’s house.

3.  Using Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites to advertise your whereabouts.

In the early days of Facebook, it was fun to be able to re-connect with old friends from years past.  That was neat.  The no-so-good part was that after six months or so, Facebook became a big time warp.  Going to FB meant that one, two or even three hours would vanish without my realizing it.  Anyway, we digress.

Many Facebook and Twitter aficionados post their every movement on these and other social networks.  Going to the mall?  It is on Facebook.  Going to a movie?  It is on Twitter.  Believe it.  The thieves are watching.  It is not too difficult to become a friend or a friend of a friend and before you know it, your security is compromised because the world knows you are not at home.  Stop it!

4.  Showing off all the good stuff in your house by leaving packaging and empty boxes from your new electronic toys outside at the curb.

Say a burglar is scoping the neighborhood looking for target.  He sees that big empty box at the curb.  You know – the one your new 50” flat screen came in.  You can bet that this guy is going to case your place, waiting until you are away to come on in and help himself.  Now that 50” flat screen may be too big for him to cart away but if you have that flat screen TV, his assumption is that you are going to have a lot more goodies.

Moral of the story?  Don’t advertise that you have expensive new stuff.

5.  Keeping the place in the dark.

For a few cents a day, you can invest in some economical lighting for your outside area.  The newer light bulbs last forever and can brighten up a porch or yard, deterring not only the prowlers but the four legged critters as well.  You can put the lights on dawn to dusk timers making the lighting a set it and forget it operation.  Personally, and this is coming from Gaye, a well-lit home is more important than a new outfit or some other trinket.  And that – in a nutshell – says a lot.

6.  Putting up signs indicating your home has a silent alarm, whether true or not.

Let’s get real.  The silent alarm goes off and how long does it take for the cops to arrive?  Ten minutes, twenty?  Both of us are former city dwellers and back in the day, we each had one of those high-end monitored alarm systems.  That was okay and offered a bit of comfort but in looking back, just how useful was that silent alarm?  In both cases, the silent alarm was accompanied by a very loud alarm that would go off and wake the neighbors when it went off.

So now we just have the loud alarm to alert us that someone is breaking in to our home.  That and a shotgun.

7.  Going on vacation without stopping the mail or the daily delivery of the newspaper.  Plus, telling you barber, the waitress at your favorite coffee shop and the clerk at the drugstore you are going away for two week.

Sure you are excited.  It’s a fabulous tropical vacation, after all.  But do you really need to tell the world?  The more people you tell, the more risk you have that they will tell someone else, who will tell someone else and so on.  Why not wait until you get back when you can share the actual memories?

In the meantime, while you are gone, stop the mail, stop the papers, and have a trusted family member or neighbor know you are gone.  If you live in a planned community, let the security people know you will be gone.  And everyone else?  Well just zip it.

One other thing:  hold off on posting those vacation pictures online until you are back at home.  Why advertise that your house is empty, tempting the burglar to drop on by?

8.  Leaving the garage door open or unlocked.

This is so easy to do, especially if you have a detached garage.  You are running in and out many times a day and it is a pain in the neck to keep unlocking the door then locking it up again.  The problem is two fold:  first, with the door wide open, passersby (and this includes thieves looking for their next target) can see your stuff.  All your tools, your sporting goods, your stored canned goods and your garden equipment can look awfully attractive to someone who covets those things.

It make take a few extra minutes to close the door and lock things up, but that is exactly what you should do.  And while you are at it, how about some curtains for those garage windows?

9.  Crappy locks are good as no locks at all.

The bad guys will simply bypass your home if it requires too much effort or requires more skill and tools to get in than they possess. Invest in quality dead bolt locks with at least a one inch throw.  Also double check the throw plate since most are pretty flimsy.  Upgrade to a four-screw, heavy-duty, high security strike plate which should be available in any hardware store.

If you have a sliding glass door, get an inexpensive wooden dowel to fit insider the railing or track.  This will deter the door from moving, even if the latch has been compromised. while you are gone.

And, once again, let me remind you that for your own safety, lock those doors!

10.  Leaving cash, jewelry and other precious items out in the open for everyone to see.

Consider a home safe.  Home safes are coming down in price and are a wise choice for keeping cash, jewelry, precious metals or guns from inquisitive children, snooping babysitters, and of course, the smash and grab burglar.

11.  The yards a mess, the bushes are overgrown, and the hedge keeps things nice an private.

Your yard may be shouting out an invitation:  come hide here where no one will see you.  The burglars and thieves don’t want to be seen so what better choice than to find a yard full of clutter where they will blend right in with the chaos.  Or, even better, how about a yard full of over grown bushes that make sneaky hiding places?  Or trees that have thick, sturdy branches that reach out to second story windows and the roof?

Now is the time to get out those clippers and trash bags so that you can clean out the excess brush – and the junk – making it more difficult for the thieves to hide in plain sight, right outside your front door.

12.  Your neighbors are grouchy, too old, too young, too persnickety or ???

Whatever feelings you have about your neighbors, find at least one that you can trust and be a good neighbor.  Good neighbors will look out for each other.  If you can, get to know your neighbors on each side of your home and at least one neighbor directly across the street.  Invite them into your home, communicate often, and establish trust.  Good neighbors will watch out for your home or apartment when you are away and they can report suspicious activity to the police or directly to you while you are away.

The important thing here is to get to know your neighbors and learn whether you can trust them now, before you head out for an extended vacation.

So there you have it.  Twelve ways you can target your home for thieves and twelve things you can do instead.

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

Spotlight Items: Gaye here. This week I have selected some great items that will help you secure the home front.

This GE Access Point Key Safe is similar to mine and holds five keys. The best thing about it is that I am always losing my house key in the woods or on the trails and this allows me to get back inside. (And, so far so good, I always go back on find my key which is on a brightly colored flex bracelet so it is easy to spot.)

Another security option is a Keypad Deadbolt. With this, you will never have to worry about locking yourself out plus, you can secure the deadbolt from inside the house.

Nothing beats a Fireproof Home Safe for storing away precious metals or coins, jewelry, extra cash (which I hope you have) and other lockables.  Depending on your needs, you can spend as little as $40 up to $200, $300 or more.  This particular model runs about $170 and is well worth it.

Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

Of course not everything can fit in a single bag. After all, you still need food, a sleeping bag, personal comfort items. No worries. With the help of Kelly at Survival Gear Bags, we have put together the basics and then some. Using this bag as a start, you can enhance and customize as time and budget allows.

Need more info? Check out the kit now by clicking here or head on over to our Strategic Living Kit page where we show all of the components and a bit more info as well.

Is Your Home a Target for the Bad Guys? 12 Things You Can Do Now is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.

Touching on the banking sector first, we note that with the most recent (through 10/21/2011) data, the FDIC has now closed down or reorganized away 403 banks and bank holding companies since the Indy Mac issue began the Second Depression’s banking disaster in July of 2008, preceding the collapse of the stock and credit market synchronize “swan dive” by about 90-days.

Since that watershed event, our latest count shows 83 banks have been reorganized so far this year, down from 139 year-to-date in 2010. Still, a total of 6,068 individual branch locations have been involved.

Even with all the change in the banking industry, which is certainly consolidating in a never before seen way, the availability of funds to refinance upside down homeowners has remained elusive. Despite Obama administration hopes that more than one million homeowners would participate, the numbers are still very thin.

Strategy One: If you still own a home, and particularly if you’re “upside down” – owing more on your mortgage than the property is worth – it’s best to be proactive and start the search for refinancing well ahead of need. With today’s low rates and some federal programs in place, there’s no time like the present to be shopping for a better deal. The federal government’s USA.GOV site has a list of resources which may lead to some relief.

Strategy Two: Keep an eye on the monthly Case Shiller/S&P 20-City Housing Index. This data, updated monthly, has long been one of George’s most quoted housing reports on the UrbanSurvival.com site because it’s as even-handed a report as can be found on what the real price movements are in key markets.

What you can see, by looking at the most recent data (which covers through August by the way, these things take time to work up) what you’ll see is that housing seems to have leveled off a bit, but that said, prices are still down a bit more than 4% this year, compared with last:

The chart above depicts the annual returns of the 10-City and the 20-City Composite Home Price Indices.

In August 2011, the 10- and 20-City Composites recorded annual returns of -3.5% and -3.8%, respectively. Both Composites and 16 MSAs – Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa, and Washington DC – saw their annual rates improve in August compared to July.

This is not a very hopeful report, since summertime is historically when the highest rates of real estate sales occur. School’s out, so getting the kids into a new school in time for fall classes seems to drive many parents, but with moderately even curricula across states, and even the country to some level, moving kids should not be thought of as an insurmountable problem.

If your move involves one of the 20 cities in the Case Shiller/S&P data, it’s a good idea to see how your market compares with others around the country; the objective being to sell high in the market you’re leaving (if it’s even, or up) and buy low in your “landing” city where prices may be even more depressed.

Strategy Three:Keep an eye on the longer term trends in prices since we may be approaching an ideal time to buy a low cost rental home. In many cities, bank repos and government foreclosure auctions can lead to real bargains. Another angle to play is buying tax foreclosure properties. In some states, the original property owner can reclaim the property within two years of the tax sale, but the new owner has to be compensated their costs plus a percentage of the tax sales price (which may be 18% per year) in order to reclaim the property. After that, there’s no recourse for the former owner.

This is not to recommend every young family pick up a couple of rental homes, although they can, over time, become real dependable cash flow generators and even do better than traditional savings plans for children’s’ college funds and other long term investments.

The downside is that tenants can be destructive and abusive plus squatting is a constant problem. In addition rents are seriously depressed in the current economy. Horror stories of renters smearing feces on windowsills and walking out with appliances in the middle of the night are often times true. But, as with any other business deal, you can moderate risk by doing a lot of homework and this means spending time to bone up on landlord tenant laws and doing thorough background checks on perspective tenants. Don’t forget, former landlords may lie just to get rid of a bad tenant. Many large cities have landlord associations and offer background checking services for a fee.

Strategy Four:If you’re looking to cut costs, and you’re either single, or a couple, look into renting a room in someone’s home. This may seem like it would be a “hard sell” but it’s not. The reason is simple: Many of the Baby Boomer’s who thought they would be retiring later are under increasing economic pressure to pay off their home loans – many of which are refi’s – early. To approach a homeowner is not terribly difficult.

In the Seattle area (the former stomping ground for both of us), we know from current examples in our circles of friends, that a good-sized room with shared kitchen privileges can be had in a decent setting for as little as $300 per month. Think of it as “going back to college” for a little more dorm time. Leads can be picked up off Craigslist, local supermarket bulletin boards and so forth. It’s a good idea to have a “reference list” of past places you’ve stayed with current working phone numbers so that a homeowner can “check you out.” Often, there’s some light housekeeping involved, but for a roof overhead in winter, who’s to complain?

Strategy Five:  Consider renting someone’s boat. This might seem a bit far-fetched at first blush, but there are many boat owners who are just barely able to hang on to their boats. The reason is the marina rents nationally have not come down as quickly as demand would warrant. The reason: Cities and municipalities own marinas in many areas.

One way to come up with leads is to put up a “live aboard wanted” sign in the local marina offices and see if the folks at the local West Marine store can help you. Sometimes a boat may be found by talking with members of sailing clubs, and look at the boats for sale columns in publications like 48 North in the Pacific Northwest, Latitude 38 from northern California south.

The east coast is a more fractured market. But, in all markets you may approach yacht brokers and offer them a cut of the rent if you can afford $350 a month – many will find customers with boats unlikely to sell until spring and that can buy you some breathing room.

Strategy Six:RV’s are become super bargains, but they will keep getting cheaper. Hit Ebay and click on the “Ebay Motors” tab, and then look for “Other Vehicle” and then down to the RV’s and campers listings. The best “bang for the buck” is in 10+ year old gas powered rigs which admittedly don’t get good gasoline mileage. But check out the cost: RV’s are getting much less expensive.

We recently saw a small 22-foot Class C rig with 80,000 miles on it, but a serviceable interior for two go for just $1,300. Yes, it had some leaks and other issues, but a motivated buyer with $50 could have made it quite nice for another $50 worth of elastomeric roofing goo. A bit more upscale, a 98 diesel Fleetwood 37-foot pusher rig for about $22,000 and this was a diesel in good shape at 105,000 miles.

Strategy Seven: Off-season resorts may be “sleepers.” George & Elaine were in Branson, Missouri, a popular entertainment destination where three months out of the year things are really hopping. But come fall and into early spring, there are lots of bargains to be found while reading the local papers. Many hotels have both low cost long-term guest rates and many duplex and triplex owners would rather rent for something rather than have a unit sit vacant all winter.

Thanks to the internet, you can find the winter-over places that make sense pretty easily. $350 a month seemed to be the going rate for off-season middle-lower accommodations in the Branson area, but we expect many resort areas will have off-season 6-month leases as the economy continues to tighten. Think of this as counter-season leasing: Leave when the tourists come and return when they’re gone!

George & Elaine are heading up to Branson, Missouri in a couple of weeks, and they’ve kicked around living in Branson part time because there are some really nice waterfront spots along the eastern side of the city. Six months ago, prices were in the $400-$500 range for two bedrooms, furnished with some utilities.

A check of weather in such places is worthwhile. Leases are cheap in Florida in the summertime and cheap in Maine in winter. Locals have told us Branson and some of those idyllic spots in the Ozarks get fierce ice storms, so you’ll need to pick and choose. Summers in Hawaii aren’t bad, especially on the windward side of the Big Island – Hilo isn’t nearly as expensive as Honolulu.

Strategy Eight:House sitting is not entirely out of vogue. A few calls to real estate operations, and some creative sales pitches may land you a very low cost home for several months. The key parts of the pitch include reliability, the value of having “owner’s eyes” on the property and surroundings, and don’t forget your bio with current reference contact information. High end homes are particularly vulnerable to theft of high end appliances and your pitch might be something like this: I will pay you $300 per month and watch to make sure you don’t get a $5,000 property loss.

There are several channels to be pursued here: A constant scan of Craigslist for situation, phone calls to local real estate outfits, especially workable after an outbreak of appliance and copper thefts from upscale homes. And just calling people with “For Sales by Owner” (FSBO) signs out front.

Strategy Nine: Visit Unitedcountry.com which is one of the nation’s largest sellers of non-urban real estate specializing in farms and ranch lands. When you get to their search tool, put in a minimum of 1 bedroom and a maximum of $50,000 and you’ll be surprised what you can find. Most of these properties are rural, but if you can find an inexpensive home with good internet connectivity, being a party time farmer/prepper and “click ranching” as a customer service rep using a telephone and a computer is not a bad way to live. It’s often much cheaper than life in a dense and expensive urban setting.

In some parts of the country you can get amazing home values. A little time on the computer and even a job with $10 an hour begins to make sense. Why? That’s $20,800 per year and if you have that kind of income, odds are good you can swing some kind of ultra-low (or no) down payment. That would mean with typical taxes about $345 per month for the house and land, a tax break if you farm a bit, a place to live, and a much more laid back lifestyle.

We recently saw a 4.78 acre property with a livable home on, adjacent to a national forest in Oklahoma (land and homes are ridiculously cheap there) for just $45,000. That included a stocked pond, mountain views, a remodeled mobile home with two living areas plus abundant wildlife.

Find the school bus driving job to beef up a retirement, remembering you’ll need to pass a drug test to pass a commercial driver’s license (C DL) and then put in DSL. It’s a whole lifestyle choice for all ages: Retirement, farming – without click ranch.

Strategy Ten: Leave America and head for somewhere completely different. For example, we’ve heard from some ex-patriots (“ex-pats” is what they’re known as) that they have been able to buy first-class 3 and four bedroom villas in overbuilt Spanish subdivisions for as little as USD$ 23,000. Similarly, we have readers in places such as Bolivia and Ecuador in South America that tell us that retired life there is a breeze IF you have taken the time to invest in learning a foreign language. Curiously, research shows that learning new languages is easiest when you’re either very young OR when you are in the 60+ category. No, we have no idea why that it. A way to get “opened up” to exiting the USA is to drop by the Escape from America website and look around there and then join some Yahoo Groups on specific countries. Because most countries have income requirements that must be met in order to get long-term visitation permission, that limits this option somewhat, although for retired military and people on dependable retirements – or even click ranchers – this is a very desirable alternative to consider.

There are plenty of other ways to get around being out in the cold. Author Mike Oehlers The Fifty Dollar and Up Underground House Bookwill give you plenty of ideas which may be implemented for almost no cost. A shovel, some plastic grocery bags and maybe a pond liner and if you can find a place out of the way enough, you can dig in (literally!) and add value to some land.

Of course, with government regulations a lot of this might be best done under the radar of officialdom. Renting out a room in your home may subject you to building code and tax laws. Living on a boat may violate “living aboard rules” enacted back in the roaring 90’s. RV parking isn’t free, although Wal-Mart has really carved out a loyal following in RV circles because the allow overnighting in their parking lots at many locations.

Remember, I.R.S. doesn’t take kindly to people who skin-flint their taxes even though they have moved overseas. They may hold to 10-year tax liability laws, though getting your hosting offshore and email, too, is not entirely out of the question is you’re an enterprising click-rancher.

Bonus Strategy:Take advantage of hard times and see if now might be the time to buy a distressed business. Often, when times get tough, spousal issues pop up, people move around, and occasionally you’ll see tremendous business ownership opportunities.

As an example: One of George’s clients sold his business about three years ago. George had counseled him on timing and what he wanted to do with his cash out sale. The client, wisely, bought a fine farm (larger than 10 acres) and put most of his money into gold and silver. He’s done very well for himself.

But now comes the interesting part: He’s just learned that the person who bought the business has lost it to the bank. A franchise agreement has been broken, and now George’s client is in the “cat bird seat” – and may be able to get back into his former business, without the profit and loss load of a hefty franchise fee, and still be able to keep his rural home. His cost may be only a few thousand dollars out of pocket.

That’s not going to happen often but it only takes one of two deals like that falling into your lap over the course of a lifetime to get you to the point where you will own your own patch of dirt free and clear.

The main thing to remember is that even in a period of serious economic downturn, there’s always opportunity for the prepared mind that has a set outcome in mind. If you focus on owning your own home, a life of sufficiency, and the health and a happy partner to share it with, then it’s as good as done.

Just takes a little work to usher it in, is all. That’s what strategic living is all about.

Hang on and enjoy the ride,

The Two G’s – George & Gaye

Recommended Reading:

For Any Climate, in Any Situation. Newly updated to reflect the latest in survival knowledge and technology, the internationally bestselling SAS Survival Handbook is the definitive resource for all campers, hikers, and outdoor adventurers. From basic camp craft and navigation to fear management and strategies for coping with any type of disaster, this complete course includes:

• Being prepared: Understanding basic survival needs and preparing essentials, such as a pocket survival kit.
• Making camp: Finding the best location, constructing the appropriate shelter, organizing camp, and creating tools.
• Food: What to eat, what to avoid, where to find it, and how to prepare it.
• First aid: A comprehensive course in emergency/wilderness medicine, including how to maximize survival in any climate or when injured.
• Disaster survival: How to react in the face of increasingly frequent natural disasters and hostile situations—and how to survive at home if and supplies are cut off.

Strategic Pick: The Strategic-Living Gear Bag

Talk about two heads getting together to come up with the ultimate gear bag! We spent a bit of time coming up with a checklist of things we would want with us if we were either stranded (say in a storm), in a wreck (heaven forbid a “ditch the plane” situation), or even in a bug out situation.

Of course not everything can fit in a single bag. After all, you still need food, a sleeping bag, personal comfort items. No worries.  With the help of Kelly at Survival Gear Bags, we have put together the basics and then some. Using this bag as a start, you can enhance and customize as time and budget allows.

Need more info? Check out the kit now by clicking here or head on over to our Strategic Living Kit page where we show all of the components and a bit more info as well.

10 Strategies to Cope with Absurd Housing Costs is another awesome article brought to you by TEST BLOG.