My storage room had a graveyard section in the back corner, and it sat there for eleven years before I admitted what it was. Clearing it out took most of a Saturday, and I made two trips to the dump before the shelves were empty.
The strange part was that nothing back there had spoiled. The rice was fine, and the buckets were still sealed the way they arrived. So what I’d really been paying for all those years was the feeling of being ready, and that feeling never got tested once.
I’d take back twenty-one of those purchases today. A few of them still live in my pantry in smaller amounts, bought and stored a different way. But the rest went into the truck bed that Saturday, and I haven’t replaced a single one.
Then again, hauling everything to the dump wasn’t the smartest move either. Plenty of old stuff sitting in a garage becomes useful again in a crisis, and I covered the best examples in 7 Pieces of Junk That Could Save Your Life When SHTF. So before a clear-out pile goes into the truck, that list is worth a read.
21. Emergency Food Buckets
The sealed buckets sold as a month of food count their days in servings, and a serving is a lot smaller than a meal. So if you divide the calories on the side panel by the days promised, many of them land near 1,200 a day. That’s close to what a dieting office worker eats, and it won’t hold up anyone splitting wood in February.
On top of that, a good share of the pouches inside are drink mix and dessert, and the label still counts them as food. The sodium also runs high, so your water needs climb right when water gets hardest to find.
That’s why it pays to run the numbers before you order one. You can divide the total calories by the days claimed, then count how many pouches are real meals. After that, pricing the same calories in rice, beans, oats and canned meat usually shows the bucket losing badly.
Some decent buckets do exist, but they rarely come in the loudest packaging. Instead, you can buy each item yourself, but it pays to have a good plan first so you don’t waste money and time. For a more organized approach, I recommend The Lost Superfoods, a book that many of my prepping friends rely on. And if you don’t have it yet, it’s worth at least taking a look at the blog. You’ll find plenty of good advice there that you won’t come across anywhere else, whether in libraries or online.
20. Freeze-Dried Meals I Never Taste-Tested
I bought a case of freeze-dried entrees because the reviews looked good, and I opened the first pouch four years later. Turns out my family couldn’t get past the first few bites. Worse, the salt coated your whole mouth, and my wife said the texture reminded her of wet paper.
Freeze-drying is good technology, but brands vary a lot in whether the result tastes like dinner. So make sure you cook one pouch and test it before you buy a whole case.
19. Duplicate Survival Tools
In the early enthusiasm, I bought a survival axe, a folding saw, a machete and a multi-tool with its own saw blade. Meanwhile, a good felling axe and a bow saw were already hanging in my shop.
Turns out a lot of gear marketed to preppers is a weaker copy of tools made for farmers and tradesmen. And the prepper version usually costs more because of the branding. So checking the tools I already owned before ordering would have saved me a few hundred dollars.
Meanwhile, I tried to make sure I had exactly what I needed, but at some point it became overwhelming. It felt like I needed everything, and in the end it was like packing for a vacation. You bring 70% more clothes than you’ll ever wear. So you can skip that mistake by going through this list of 27 tools you need to have in your stockpile.
18. A Gas Mask Without Spare Filters or Fit Testing
Mine hung on a hook for six years with the original filter still sealed in its sleeve. That filter is the part doing the work, and it’s also the part that expires. So a mask with no spare filters on the shelf stops being useful the day that first one goes out of date.
Fit is the second problem, because the mask only protects you when the rubber seals tight against your face. A beard breaks that seal completely, and so does a strap adjusted wrong.
You can check it with a negative pressure test, which means covering the filter with your palm and inhaling gently. If the seal holds, the mask pulls in slightly and stays there.
17. A Thousand Feet of Paracord
Paracord is cheap and useful, so it’s easy to buy far more than you’ll ever cut. I’ve gone through maybe sixty feet in a decade, and most of that went into tarp lines and a clothesline.
What I actually reached for were ratchet straps and a roll of baling wire. On top of that, bank line saw plenty of use, and it’s a thin tarred twine that holds knots well and costs pennies a foot. So two hundred feet of paracord covers a whole household, and anything past that just gets moved from shelf to shelf.
16. MREs Kept in Hot Storage
Military rations look like the serious choice, and that look is a big part of why people buy them. But per calorie, they cost more than almost anything else you could stock.
The shelf life printed on the box also assumes cool storage, and a shed in summer runs much hotter than that. Kept at 70 degrees, an MRE holds up for years, which is the number the box is built on. But at 100 degrees, an ordinary afternoon in a Texas shed, quality starts falling off within months. So the price of one case could put away far more food that stores better and tastes like something your family would pick on purpose.
15. Tactical Gear Bought for the Look
I owned a plate carrier, which is a vest built to hold armor plates, and I never wore it for anything harder than a photograph. The chest rig that went with it, a harness of magazine pouches worn on the front, saw even less use.
Some of this gear makes sense for people who train with it every month. But for everyone else it’s an expensive outfit, and it can send the wrong message to neighbors about what you’re planning. That’s why I’d rather have spent that money on water barrels or a hand pump for the well.
14. Potassium Iodide Tablets in Bulk
Potassium iodide, often sold as KI, fills your thyroid with safe iodine so it can’t absorb the radioactive kind after a nuclear release. But it does nothing against any other type of radiation exposure. On top of that, it only helps when taken within a short window around the exposure. And the tablets themselves last about five to seven years on the shelf.
A single bottle in the medicine cabinet costs little and isn’t a bad idea. Still, plenty of people I know bought whole cases in 2022, and that much KI reaches its expiration date long before they needed it.
13. One-Pound Propane Canisters
The little green propane cylinders are convenient, but they’re an expensive way to store fuel. A twenty-pound grill tank holds about as much as twenty of them for a fraction of the price. And it won’t rust through at the seam the way small canisters do when they sit on concrete.
An adapter hose costs about twenty dollars and lets a camp stove run straight off the big tank. I still keep a few small canisters in my truck, but everything at the house runs on twenty-pounders.
12. Whole Wheat Flour Instead of Wheat Berries
Whole wheat flour carries the same kind of oil in the germ, which is the part of the kernel that sprouts. So it goes bitter somewhere between six and twelve months, and a fifty-pound bag rarely gets used in time.
Wheat berries are the whole, unground kernels, and sealed in a bucket they keep twenty-five years or more.
On top of that, a hand mill costs less than a decent rifle scope. And grinding a cup at a time gives you fresh flour you can bake with this week.
11. Toilet Paper by the Closetful
I filled a whole closet with toilet paper in the spring of 2020, like half the country did. It all stayed usable, but that closet could have held three months of food instead. And toilet paper is mostly air by volume, so you give up a lot of shelf space for very little.
Two months’ worth makes sense for a household. After that, a stack of washable cloths and a lidded bucket handle the long stretch in a fraction of the space.
10. Fifty Pounds of One Single Food
Buying deep on one item feels efficient at the register, but it gets hard to eat by the third week. Disaster relief workers call this appetite fatigue, which is when people get so tired of the same food that they eat less or skip meals. And it hits children and older folks hardest.
My first year of storage was almost all rice and beans because they were the cheapest calories I could find. But what I should have added cost almost nothing, like bouillon, vinegar, hot sauce, canned tomatoes, dried onion, cumin and curry powder. With those on the shelf, the same two staples turn into a different dinner most nights of the month.
09. Canned Soup
Canned soup is mostly water, and water belongs in its own part of your plan. On top of that, a standard can runs 150 to 250 calories. So a family of four needs six or eight cans at supper to get anywhere near full.
Canned meat and dry beans, on the other hand, give you several times the calories per inch of shelf. That’s why I keep about a dozen cans of soup for sick days and give the rest of that shelf to heavier food.
08. Ammunition for Calibers You Don’t Shoot
I bought cases of ammunition during a panic because I figured it would always be good for trading. Turns out some of it was for calibers nobody in my house even shoots.
Ammunition is heavy and expensive to store in bulk. And handing it to strangers in hard times is a lot riskier than it sounds from a comfortable chair, because you may be arming the person who comes back for your supplies. So buying deep makes sense for the guns you actually own and practice with, and the panic buys can go.
07. Cases of Retail Bottled Water
Thin retail cases and flimsy gallon jugs are made to be used up within a week or two. But stored for years, the plastic lets water seep out slowly. Worse, thin plastic lets odors pass through, so water stored near the gas can ends up tasting like gas.
The same money buys food-grade barrels or rigid seven-gallon containers that hold several times the water in better shape. I keep mine up on wood pallets, which keeps them off the bare concrete and away from whatever’s in the slab. Still, even the biggest barrel runs dry eventually, so I added a DIY AWG to my setup. On humid days it keeps adding water while the barrels only go down.
06. First Aid Kits With No Trauma Supplies
At one point I owned four store-bought first aid kits spread between the house and our vehicles. Put together, they held several hundred adhesive bandages and a few gauze pads. But there wasn’t a single thing in them for a wound that bleeds hard.
What I needed first was a tourniquet, which is a strap you tighten above a limb wound to stop arterial bleeding. Next to it belongs hemostatic gauze, which is treated with an agent that speeds up clotting. Chest seals round it out, and they’re adhesive patches that cover a puncture wound in the chest so air can’t get in. Still, every one of those items needs a class behind it, because a tourniquet put on wrong can slip when it matters most.
On a homestead, the likely emergencies are chainsaw cuts and falls from ladders or equipment. And a box of cartoon bandages can’t do much for either one. That’s why every first aid kit should come with a manual, and the best one I’ve ever put my hands on is a doctor’s survival guide written for regular folks. After all, even the best supplies only help if someone in the house knows what to do with them.
05. Brown Rice Instead of White
Brown rice keeps its bran layer, and that bran is what makes it the healthier choice. But the bran also carries oil, and that oil turns rancid in about six months at room temperature.
White rice has the bran polished off, so there’s no oil left to spoil. That’s why it keeps for decades in a sealed bucket with an oxygen absorber, a small iron packet that pulls the oxygen out of the air inside. And the small nutrition gap matters very little next to a bucket of brown rice that’s gone bad.
04. A Generator That Never Gets Started
I’ve watched this happen many times over the years in my friends circles. The generator arrives and gets unboxed, and then it sits in the corner of the garage through four quiet winters.
But when an ice storm finally knocks the power out, the problems show up all at once. The gas in the tank has turned to varnish, a sticky residue that clogs the carburetor. Worse, the oil was never changed, and nobody knows which extension cord reaches the freezer. So the generator ends up as the heaviest useless thing in the garage on the worst night of the year. That’s why a generator needs a monthly run and a yearly service.
So, to make sure I’d never be stuck with a generator that won’t start, I decided to switch to a backyard generator that never needs gas. That way, there’s no fuel sitting in the tank to go stale.
03. Hybrid Seed Packets
Many seed packets on the hardware store rack are hybrids, and hybrid seed doesn’t grow true to the parent plant. So if you save seed from a hybrid tomato, next spring’s plants come up as a mix of the grandparent varieties. And many of them won’t give you anything worth eating.
Open-pollinated and heirloom seed produces the same plant year after year, which is the whole point of saving seed. Still, germination drops as seed ages. That’s why I keep mine in a sealed jar in the freezer and buy a fresh batch every few years.
These days, that batch also includes a set of apothecary garden seeds chosen by an herbalist I trust. So right next to the tomatoes and beans, I’m growing the start of a home medicine cabinet.
02. Dollar-Store Solar Lights
Cheap solar path lights run on small nickel-cadmium batteries that usually die after a season or two. On top of that, the plastic lenses cloud up in the sun until barely any light reaches the panel. So they work as yard decoration, but they’re miserable to rely on when the power goes out.
One rechargeable lantern with a lithium battery and a decent solar panel will outlast a whole box of them. And it puts out enough light to read by. As for the dead cells from those path lights, learning how to bring “dead” batteries back to life changed what I do with them. So instead of the trash can, that drawer of old cells now feeds spare power to every flashlight in the house.
01. Silver Bought at a High Premium
I paid heavy premiums on fractional rounds and commemorative coins during a stretch when I thought the dollar had months left. The premium is the markup over spot price, meaning the market value of the silver itself. And when you sell, that markup stays with the dealer.
Common bullion coins and generic rounds carry the smallest markup, and they’re the easiest pieces to trade. So if bartering in bad times is the reason to own metal, a fancy design on the face adds cost without adding any trading value.
After years of investing, I’ve come to see silver as valuable, and it has held its worth through plenty of economic crises in history. Still, there are good reasons not to put too much money into it. In fact, economist D. Bates argues there are better options, and he makes a strong case against both silver and gold in his latest book about the US economy and beyond. From there, it’s up to you to decide whether his argument holds up.
What I Would Have Done Differently
Most of the items on this list have a place in a stockpile, and I’d still keep a few of them today. But I bought them in bulk and stacked them in the back, and that turned good gear into wasted money. Worse, a lot of it would have failed me in a crisis, because the flour went bitter and the bleach went weak long before I needed either one.
So if I could redo those eleven years, I’d buy the same categories in a smarter way. These are the habits I run on now:
- Match quantity to shelf life. I figure out how much of something we go through before it expires, and I stop buying there. For bleach that means one jug every six months, and for whole wheat flour it means only what I’ll bake in three months.
- Put a date on everything. Every bucket and jug gets the purchase date in marker on the lid. I also keep a master sheet and check it twice a year when the clocks change.
- Spend on storage before quantity. Mylar bags, small packs of oxygen absorbers and buckets with gamma lids (screw-on lids that seal tight) protect what you already own. That money goes further than another fifty pounds of anything.
- Store below 70 degrees wherever you can. An interior closet or a basement keeps food and medicine good for years longer. Meanwhile, a summer garage cuts that shelf life down to months.
- Run the equipment under load. On the first Saturday of every month, I start the generator and plug the chest freezer into it for twenty minutes. And the stored gas gets stabilizer, then goes into the truck every six months so fresh fuel replaces it.
- Put training on the same budget as supplies. A Stop the Bleed class costs little or nothing, and it makes the tourniquet in your kit worth carrying. On top of that, a practice afternoon with the gas mask or the grain mill shows you what’s missing while there’s still time to fix it.
That approach costs less than the way I started, and everything on the shelf still works when the power goes out. Of course, experience taught me which mistakes to avoid, but so did research, and a lot of it. Out of all the books, videos and blogs I went through, this one resource stood out, and I wish I’d had it when I started stockpiling.
It comes from an experienced prepper, so the whole course treats the house itself as the main prep. And reading his one-year stockpile plan felt like someone had walked through my graveyard corner with a clipboard. The MREs and emergency food kits I regret are left out entirely, and the plan builds around healthy food you’d actually eat.
What sold me was the section on how to inspect every prep you own in about an hour, since that’s exactly the habit I was missing for eleven years. On top of that, the checklists that come with it made it easy to spot what was still missing from my shelves. So if I could hand my younger self one thing before that first bulk order, it would be this smart bug-in course, along with a note to read the stockpile chapter twice.
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