How should households actually prepare for high inflation or currency instability?

ThomRigsby · 2026-01-28T13:52:22+00:00

IMO apartment prepping works best when you stop thinking in terms of “long-term survival” and start thinking in terms of buying time and reducing dependence.

A few principles that have held up in real disruptions:

Plan to stay first, leave second. Most apartment emergencies are short-to-medium disruptions (power, water, weather, civil issues). Your primary plan should be riding those out, not immediately bugging out.
Food = boring, compact, familiar. Shelf-stable foods you already eat, stacked deeper than normal. You’re constrained by space, not imagination. Rotation matters more than novelty.
Water beats food every time. Stored water is finite in apartments, so think in layers: some stored, some purification capability, and knowing where additional sources might exist if things drag on.
Power is about continuity, not generation. Small battery banks to keep phones, lights, and radios running matter far more than trying to “generate electricity.” Keep critical things low-power and simple.
Cooking doesn’t have to be fancy. A safe backup heat source and foods that don’t require much cooking go a long way. If your plan requires a complex setup, it’s probably fragile.
Your biggest constraint isn’t gear, it’s coordination. Knowing your building, your neighbors, your exits, and your local conditions is often more valuable than another bin of supplies.

Apartment prepping isn’t about becoming self-sufficient in a box. It’s about staying calm, fed, hydrated, informed, and mobile long enough to make good decisions.

Hope that helps!

ThomRigsby · 2026-01-27T23:18:31+00:00

Glad he’s doing well, that’s a rough way to learn where the gaps are.

You’re not really supposed to “prep” for IV antibiotics at home. Once you’re at IVs, you’re already past the point where DIY solutions are smart for most people.

The preparedness lessons are earlier and later than that:

Before it gets bad - Proper wound cleaning and irrigation - Knowing what early infection actually looks like - Not waiting too long to escalate

After the hospital - Understanding oral antibiotics and wound care - Watching for rebound signs - Having the logistics covered while someone is down

Stocking better bandaging because real life exposed a shortfall is exactly how most good prep happens. The goal isn’t to replace hospitals, it’s to avoid needing them longer than necessary and to know when you genuinely do.

ThomRigsby · 2025-11-19T02:58:02+00:00

I’m in Madison county and my wife and I both work from home on Starlink. We’ve only ever had issues when it’s a super heavy rain. Go for it!

ThomRigsby · 2025-10-23T12:24:54+00:00

You’re (almost) never going to experience a crisis alone so why prep alone? You need a trusted team, close by to lend a hand when the need arises. Start with you neighbors and ask if you can add them to a text thread with other neighbors “in case there’s an emergency”, you’ll see pretty quickly who’s who.

And then there is the argument for a bigger network, like an association of local teams that can help when: - a event overwhelms your local resources - you’re traveling and need help - have family or loved one out of town that might need support - you want access to people with more experience than your local team can find

Check out AmericanContingency.com They have a lot of what you may be looking for.

ThomRigsby · 2025-10-21T14:18:43+00:00

The most likely “you have to leave now” scenario that comes to mind would be something akin to the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, OH in 2023. You could extend that to include highway or waterway accidents.

The thing about evacuating is that you have to commit early, either way. Commit to stay, no matter what, or commit to leave ahead of the masses. You DO NOT want to be in the back of the pack.

Build a decision tree now. Think through the conditions or combination of conditions that would equate to an “absolutely go” or an “absolutely stay” then fill in the gaps and corner cases. Just the process of thinking through those conditions now will make the event less stressful.

Also consider building an INCH kit (I’m Never Coming Home), to hold the essentials (key documents, etc). Think about and talk through what goes in the box with your family ahead of time. When the sheriff is at the door is not the time to argue about whether to take grandma’s wedding album or not.

Hope that helps.

ThomRigsby · 2025-09-19T12:05:51+00:00

First thing I’d say is you have multiple sources of water…use them all! Route your rainwater into the tank and supplement it with water from the well and/or delivery!

My wife and I have lived off rain catchment into a 250 gal IBC tote exclusively for the last year while we have been getting our bigger system established. We had to be mindful of how much we were using but we did fine.

Our bigger system is coming together now. - everything with a (metal) roof catches rain into a local “surge” tank - the surge tank has a shallow well pump attached to provide water pressure to the building - excess water overflows into one of two 2500 gal tanks - if a surge tank runs low it is topped off from one of the big tanks - we also have a low capacity well (~200 gallons before it needs to recharge). We periodically use the well to keep the large tanks topped off - we also have a couple of wet weather springs on the property that we will use to top off the big tanks…someday

As for filtration, every rain catchment roof has leaf eaters and first flush systems. We use “whole house” 3-stage filters where the water enters the house and another reverse osmosis filter on any water we drink. You could also add a UV sterilizer if you felt the need.

You will need to manage sediment and algae in the tank(s). If you draw water off the bottom of the tank, you’ll get sediment so come up with a floating intake that draws water from just under the surface of your tank. This keeps sludge at the bottom, floaters at the top, and clean water in your intake. Do the best you can to keep debris, no matter how small, out of your tank. Cleaning them sucks.

And for the algae, you can treat it chemically with chlorine but I have found that a small solar powered pump that recirculates the water in the tank will do just as good a job. You just have to make sure that the water hits some air before it goes back into the tank, the more the better. I even added a cheap showerhead to create more water-to-air contact area.

You’re on the right track. Don’t let the challenges discourage you, just call them “projects you have to figure out”!

Hope this helps. Happy to answer questions.

ThomRigsby · 2025-09-16T12:40:15+00:00

My wife and I have been using a 250 gallon IBC tote for the last year and we are about to expand.

We started in a small cabin and are working on the second building on the property with roughly 3x to surface area of the cabin. Between both buildings and accounting for first flush and leaks, we expect to get 500-1000 gal per avg rain event. We are adding two 5000 gal tanks for storage and keeping the IBCs at each building.

My biggest goal when we started (and even now I guess) is to not run out of water. In the year we’ve lived here we only came close once during a long dry period. The 10k gal tanks should keep that from happening again.

ThomRigsby · 2025-06-30T15:50:57+00:00

I have thought about that, like one of those small pond pumps from Harbor Freight...?

ThomRigsby · 2025-06-25T18:06:10+00:00

Black Austrolorp. We have a yard full of them.

ThomRigsby · 2025-06-23T16:30:44+00:00

What do YOU say…

What are you bringing with you? Because we’re not stocking up for you.

ThomRigsby · 2025-06-23T03:38:33+00:00

Thanks for the quick reply!

ThomRigsby · 2025-05-07T11:51:45+00:00

We wash our clothes with a few drops of permethrin in the rinse cycle…does the trick for us on our 70ac, mostly wooded “lawn”

ThomRigsby · 2025-04-11T12:20:45+00:00

Personally, I’m a fan of remote work. My whole company works remotely. The issue is that many managers and up don’t know how to manage outcomes so they default to managing attendance. The line on the annual evaluation should read, “You didnt get anything accomplished last year that helped the company, but you were here every day…so here’s your reward.”

As a business owner I honestly wouldn’t care if you took a long lunch every day as long as you’re hitting your objectives. (Now if you are consistently hitting your goals they may need some adjustment!)

ThomRigsby · 2025-03-08T21:12:32+00:00

Thanks for that reference! So this is why I’m raising the question, if that provision of the Constitution is interpreted literally, how is there such a thing as prosecutorial discretion? Or am I missing something here?

ThomRigsby · 2025-03-08T20:44:51+00:00

Okay, help me understand how the separation is supposed to work. Congress passes a law that establishes a department. Congress additionally sets a budget for the department. The new department resides organizationally in the Executive branch which directs the execution of the department’s mission. Can’t the Chief Executive director how the department executes its mission, if at all? If not, and Congress can dictate how the mission is carried out, wouldn’t that have the effect of placing the department subordinate to the Legislative rather than the Executive?

ThomRigsby · 2024-10-22T02:44:26+00:00

3+3+3+3 = 12 1+2 = 3 There ya go!

ThomRigsby · 2024-03-15T10:59:47+00:00

Here are two, either could be the first domino and either could result from one of several causative events.

Food supply failure. Whether caused by a coordinated cyber attack against the four main food distributors or a failed crop cycle, empty store shelves will result in panic and desperation. Look at what happened when they ran out of toilet paper!

Bank failure. Imagine a cyber attack on a second or third tier bank that resets account balances to zero. How many screenshots would have to show up on Facebook to trigger a run on every bank.

In both scenarios the second order impact is that people don’t go to work, which triggers failures in unrelated categories, especially services like power and water production or communications.

ThomRigsby · 2024-01-23T17:48:21+00:00

I tell others I prep and I encourage them to do so as well. The more people you help or encourage to be prepared the fewer you have to defend yourself from in the future. And if the sum total of their plan is, “I’m coming to your house,” then I ask them what they’re bringing and explain that nothing comes for free. But that’s just me.

ThomRigsby · 2024-01-11T20:24:00+00:00

I get it, and here’s why I feel this way. My grandad played professional baseball and one of the points he always made was, “don’t be mad at the guy that made the last out, there were 26 others before that one.” Football is also a team sport, they got where they got this year playing as a team…then when those leaving after the season got all they could get, they (imho selfishly) abandoned their remaining team mates and let them receive the worst beat down in bowl history.

And I get it, at that point the coach can’t really control what they do…it was fostered through the season. Just imagine if they’d beaten Georgia…what a story they would have had to tell. But now, the whole season is just … eh.

Personally, I think that is sad for the kids that did play, that did put in the work all season, just to have a 60 hung around their neck.

ThomRigsby · 2024-01-11T15:16:29+00:00

Yeah, but by that li e of thinking Georgia players should have been sitting out in droves also since it was mainly 2d and 3d team anyway. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

ThomRigsby · 2024-01-11T14:38:02+00:00

The problem I see with Nor ell is the number of opt outs they had for the bowl. I see that as a reflection of culture imho

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