how did you convince your spouse to be a prepper? (and not think you're nuts)

me ^ | 9-1-11 | wobbly bob

[WOBBLY BOB]

how did you convince your spouse to be a prepper? (and not think you're nuts)

Post your interesting , amusing , and/or somber antecdotes here.

IE: I convinced her the money saved on growing food could be used for some killer pedicures.

[MichiganCheese]

Wow! you only have hockey tournaments once a month? We seem to have 2 or 3 some months! We love it though.

BTW, my wife is totally on board about being prepared in all areas of our life.

[MichiganCheese]

Wow! you only have hockey tournaments once a month? We seem to have 2 or 3 some months! We love it though.

BTW, my wife is totally on board about being prepared in all areas of our life.

[arthurus]

I didn’t have to convince her.She is a school teacher who had already observed that some of the parents of her kids were, with their extended families, stocking up family farms in Alabama and Tennessee and Ohio. She would ask them why and they would say their grandpas talked a lot about the Depression and it looks like we have that coming again with violence thrown in. When I started collecting stuff she started thinking of the things I didn’t think of and started collecting stuff, too. We don’t have a family refuge but we do have a lair of sorts that ie defensible and stockable.

[arthurus]

Take HER to the gun range and the NRA course. My wife was once ambivalent about guns but I talked her into the NRA course. I knew it had had the intended effect when, as we were loading up the truck to go look at raw property she told me to don’t forget the gun, “in case of snakes.”

[ApplegateRanch]

Convince? What is this “convince” you speak of?

Our “Federal Family” assisted us, by gently providing incentives to becoming prepared.

First, Our Federal Family magnanamously allowed us to “donate” our jobs to poor, downtrodden minority persons under the War On Poverty portion of Johnson’s Great (for minorities)Society, in order for our employers to fufill their ‘voluntary’ quatoa requirements.

After scrabbling hard, and getting back on our feet, we were then encouraged by Our Federal Family to survive the Carter Disaster any way we could that did not inconvenience the privileged underprivileged.

We survived that by moving to a cheaper, rural, area; and then cooperating & pooling with neighbors in like circumstances, to get by until better (Reagan) times returned.

“NEVER AGAIN” became more than a slogan.

We were ready for Obama.

[arthurus]

Uncle will never “run out of money.” It will become worthless but there will be a lot of it.

[Texas resident]

I took my wife to a gun show in Houston.

LOTS of women there. And guys dressed not in camo and jeans, but professional types. She started talking with some of the vendors and the show goers.

She’s a prepper now.

[AGreatPer]

I just put on some Smokey Robinson, Temptations and Four Lads on the radio.

Oh wait, different times.

[Lurker]

Here’s how I did it: “Honey, I swear to you that no matter what happens neither you or our child wil ever suffer because I didn’t make some prudent preparations in case something really bad happens. I couldn’t live with myself if I did.”

Try that one. Not only will she put up with your prepping, you’ll probably get laid that night.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Used to be 50 games a season. In south Texas we have to go to Dallas to play. So we play 4 games a weekend.

[StonyMan451]

Yeah, that’s my plan. It’s just going to take a while to get her there.

[StonyMan451]

Yeah, that’s my plan. It’s just going to take a while to get her there.

[betsyross60]

I bought Hubby the book Surviving the Economic Collapse (based on Argentina). He’s not at 110% but moving along very nicely since reading the book.

[tlb]

>>> how did you convince your spouse to be a prepper? (and not think you’re nuts)

It’s prudent to be driving down the interstate wearing your seatbelt, carrying a spare tire and jack, some flares and a flashlight, and appropriate maps. It actually is nuts to be driving down that same road pulling a trailer holding a hundred spare tires unless you are in the delivery business.

Nobody can complain once it’s put in the context of reasonable precautions against actual foreseeable hazards. Then again, while overkill may get you called nuts, there is no actual harm in overpreparation if you have the free time and money.

[reformedliberal]

Does he ever do any shopping? My husband was outraged at the price increases when he stopped to do those fill-ins on the way home from work.

The other thing that got him on board (pun intended) was when he realized that much of what we are storing could work well on his sailboat or for camping, mostly because I purchased long-shelf items from cruising sites. He read some of the prepper & SHTF sites and a few of my post-apocalyptic sci-fi books, as well.

Now, he will voluntarily pick up items like propane, extra batteries, various outdoor things. He also is now keeping a Get Home Bag in the car, since he works 45 miles away 3 days a week and one Saturday/month. Calling it a Go Bag elicited the response:"Go where?".

And, w/CC just a couple of months away, he has a reason to buy _another_ hand gun. Whatever works. ;)

[bgill]

Good on you. Brilliant idea with the “get home” named bag. Whatever works.

No, he really doesn’t shop much. Sometimes for his snacks so he justifies that but he does complain about the prices. Even so, he’s not making the connection. I try to come at it from a natural disaster scenerio (btdt) or financial crisis (there now) but it doesn’t fly. And now he’s found out there’s grab n go goodies in the bag so sneaks them, sigh...

[reformedliberal]

Oh, well. You could just call that *rotation*.

I know when I was being challenged about the amount I was stashing away, not to mention comments about my organizational skills (admittedly needs improvement), I just ignored them and carried on. When things would look better, economically/politically/weather-wise, I would get snarky comments. I think he just thought this was a Y2K sort of thing or some other extreme conspiracy theory. Then, a totally different sort of thing, a local political issue I had been agitating about, became public knowledge. Suddenly, after over a decade, I had people coming up to me or to my husband on the street or in a store saying: “She was right. How did she know that, then?” I think that helped a lot and prompted him to begin his own analysis.

I know there have been a few politically/economically dicey periods in the past 3 years when he went white with shock over something or other and began his own lists of essentials, mostly tools, energy sources, maintenance supplies. Our income slowed down after major investment losses in 08 and then, he had an accident and was out of work for 7 weeks. We are self-employed and this was a major economic hit. The preps came in handy. I think we rotated through the food stores 3x since 2008. We have even more now and are getting well-stocked on energy sources and tools.

So, hang in there and keep on keeping on. You will be vindicated. If we are super fortunate and nothing really happens, outside of a storm or temporary income loss, you can point out how your various purchases were already made for the next 6 months/year. If we are right, your family is prepared for a major disruption and that is the important thing.

Logical males with a strong normalcy bias really need a lot of evidence. I know that I had more free-floating anxiety than my husband did, originally. Prepping, for me, reduces my anxiety. He tends to be confident he can handle any situation as it arises. That has changed, though, as this slow motion train wreck of an economy and an administration has endured.

[bgill]

Prepping, for me, reduces my anxiety.

Bingo! I was half raised by my grandparents who made it through the Depression so it's like an arm is cut off if I don't have a full pantry and supplies.

[reformedliberal]

Yep. In my case, it was my parents who were Depression babies. My one grandmother to whom I was close lived in a village in the Ukraine until she was 18. She could do anything and everything: cook, can, butcher, knit, crochet, tailor,draft patterns, bake, including pastries, grow anything from seed or a cutting, etc, etc. We were so spoiled because she would just automatically do all those things and no one really learned all of her skills, just some.

I always think of her as I rediscover, relearn or learn something new. The skills, IMO, are as important as the goods.

[Ladysforest]

Lets see. I got him on board with buying the small woodstove by reminding him that in NY we can lose power mid-winter for weeks at a time (worse case), and I found one that was a bargain! While it’s been sitting in the garage for three years, he has committed to having it installed this year.

Guns and ammo? I’d have to kill him dead to stop him from getting those anyway.

Let him hunt up on my camp acreage - after he got a deer in the freezer, he discovered the joy of plenty.

Convinced him to use coupons - first for vitamins and shower gels - which so amazed him at how much he saved, especially the whole buy one get one free thing, that he is fine with buying in multiples now. Like 5 or 6 of the same item at a time. He uses coupons better than I do, and we save around $900.+ a year. Hehehe - but he did have a run in with a woman behind him in line at the Walmart, she got pissed because he had so many coupons & they had an exchange. He saved $65. that trip.

The garden took no convincing.

He picks on me when I bag stuff into mylar, but I don’t care. He jokes about the word prepper, but I don’t care. And he busts me about my incandescent light bulb stash, but I’ll keep adding to that anyway. :)