RPF0385-Sensible_Food_Storage_pt_2
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00:00:31.000 | In the previous episode of Radical Personal Finance, I gave you the rationale and philosophy and reasons behind why I think you should establish for yourself a food insurance policy.
00:00:44.000 | Which is simply defined as setting aside a substantial amount of food so that without external resources, you could feed your family for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to a year or more if you would like to go that hardcore.
00:01:00.000 | In today's episode, I give you the practical approach. Some practical ideas of actually tactically practically how to do this.
00:01:10.000 | Most of us, when we go shopping, we're accustomed to simply buying what we need because it stands out to us on shelves. That's how most people shop for food.
00:01:18.000 | Perhaps you've come past that to a higher level, which is to look and shop based upon what you need for a recipe or a few recipes.
00:01:28.000 | That way, you're taking more of a planned approach.
00:01:31.000 | Perhaps you've reached the point of expertise with your personal grocery getting that you've been able to set aside and plan for a meal plan for a week or a couple of weeks or perhaps even a month.
00:01:44.000 | Maybe you practice once a month cooking, which is I admire. I don't do it, but I admire it. I think it would be very useful if I were in a different situation. I think I would.
00:01:53.000 | At every stage, you have to learn new skills, but most of you are daunted by the idea of somebody like me or some other expert saying, "Well, go ahead and buy a year's worth of food," and you think, "Huh? How do I do that? How do I keep apples fresh for a year?"
00:02:13.000 | What I want to give you here is just simply three simple approaches and try to break it down so you can see how tangible and possible this is.
00:02:21.000 | Here's how I categorize these three things. Maybe other people have different categorizations. These are just my ways of categorizing them based upon my own self-education.
00:02:30.000 | The first approach that you can and should pursue is to simply build a deep pantry, which means instead of buying one thing at a time, buy a few things at a time.
00:02:41.000 | Instead of waiting until you're completely out of something that you're using to cook, wait until you're down a few cans and then go ahead and get more even though you have more in the pantry.
00:02:51.000 | Build a deep pantry. The saying that people in the survivalist and prepper communities use is, let me get it right, "Store what you eat, eat what you store," which is simply whatever you're used to buying, just get more of it.
00:03:07.000 | That's number one, build a deep pantry. Number two is I'm going to describe as systematically buy and package your own food for long-term storage, meaning going to go to the store and get the food that I need and then store it here in my house for a significant amount of time, a few months, a year, a few years.
00:03:29.000 | I'm going to choose foods that are functional in that capacity. Now, that's where we all of a sudden go into skills that most of us don't have.
00:03:38.000 | Number three approach is to purchase commercially available emergency food reserves. This is the type of things that you see advertised, cable channels and the AM stations advertise this a lot, where you buy prepackaged, dehydrated, or freeze-dried food and you set it aside and it'll last for 30 years.
00:03:58.000 | This is for everything from the mountain house backpacking food to MREs, military MREs, which is an acronym which stands for Meals Ready to Eat. It's how soldiers eat when they're out on a long deployment.
00:04:10.000 | You can buy a year's worth of food for a four-person family of a few thousand bucks and it'll all get delivered to your house and it'll last for 30 years.
00:04:17.000 | So that's the commercially available emergency food reserves. Now, I think all three of these make sense and the best approach is probably to do a combination of these things.
00:04:30.000 | But I think the most sensible approach is to proceed systematically through them in order, little by little.
00:04:39.000 | I'm happy when people go out and spend money and buy things that are helpful to them. If you listen to AM political talk shows, you'll find that they have advertisers who advertise things like food insurance and you can buy a backpack of emergency food or a seven-day supply, etc.
00:04:56.000 | Those things are great, I think. I've never bought them, but I think they're cool, but they're expensive.
00:05:02.000 | And the concern that I have is if you start with something like that, it's very easy to become disillusioned when all of a sudden the world doesn't fall apart.
00:05:13.000 | This happened a lot with regard to Y2K. Many people, being concerned about potential calamity coming based upon the rolling over of the clocks on computers in Y2K, went heavily into survivalism and they bought pallets of food and pallets of MREs and things like that.
00:05:31.000 | And then all of a sudden the world didn't end and now they got pallets of food that they don't eat.
00:05:38.000 | And they feel stupid for spending thousands of dollars on something that didn't happen. I don't think that's wise.
00:05:44.000 | I think it's better to plan and prepare in advance and to do it in a sensible way so that, as Jack Spirico puts it, who's been on the show, a host of the Survival Podcast, excellent podcast, his tagline, which I love the tagline, it expresses my thinking on many things is – I'm fumbling on the words.
00:06:05.000 | His tagline, "Helping you live a better life if times get tougher even if they don't." His philosophy is, "Everything you do should improve your life if nothing goes wrong or if everything goes wrong."
00:06:15.000 | That's an appropriate philosophy to bring to financial planning. I want the stuff that I do to be sensible.
00:06:22.000 | I mentioned on the hurricane show a few shows ago how useful the concept of an inverter has been. I've never used my inverters in a hurricane just simply because I've never had a hurricane where I lost power significantly and needed to use them.
00:06:37.000 | We hadn't had a major hurricane hit us in about 10 years until Hurricane Matthew and I never even lost power for that one. Many of you did.
00:06:44.000 | I've never used my inverters for the hurricane, but I've used them on several occasions when I'm out and about living my life, such as going and organizing a group event at a pavilion at a local park, and with my inverter, I can easily power a sound system.
00:06:56.000 | Really, really useful.
00:06:58.000 | So it's not just a matter of stocking stuff up and then hoping that everything goes wrong. Rather, it's use the stuff.
00:07:07.000 | Same thing with food. I've never had thus far in my life, with the exception of what I described in the previous episode about using a deep pantry where in times of fluctuating income, I've never had a circumstance where I've been stuck in my house for a month and hadn't been able to go out.
00:07:27.000 | But one valuable benefit of having significant stores of food in a pantry is that I never have to worry about if I have food to cook when people come over.
00:07:39.000 | My wife and I entertain a huge amount. I serve – I should calculate it at some point, but as an example, I'm recording this on Friday and this morning I served breakfast to 12 people and I'll serve dinner to 8 to 10.
00:07:57.000 | I routinely serve 10 to 20 people at my table for food. And so I never even think twice about putting an invitation out to many people because I don't have to run to the store all of a sudden to figure it out.
00:08:11.000 | I got to look and say, "What am I going to make?" But when you have food in your pantry, that's where to me it's the biggest benefit. You don't have to be concerned about it.
00:08:19.000 | You don't have to rush out and fight the hurricane crowds, but it's much more useful than that.
00:08:23.000 | So when we build these things, we shouldn't start with a palette of MREs that's nasty food that you don't like to eat. Start with something that's practical.
00:08:31.000 | So let's talk about number one. Here's my advice for you of how to build a deep pantry because this is where I believe that you should start.
00:08:39.000 | If you are like many Americans where you have just enough food to get you through till Wednesday, start here.
00:08:45.000 | Use the concept of the price book that I mentioned in the previous episode and that I explained how it works, which is simply when something's on sale, stock up.
00:08:58.000 | If you go to the grocery store and something's on a buy one, get one, stock up. Get four or six instead of one or two.
00:09:08.000 | When you're shopping, if there's something on your shopping list, stock up. If you need green beans, don't just get two cans of green beans. Go ahead and get four, six, or eight.
00:09:19.000 | And if you do this systematically little by little, it'll start to change what I refer to as your thermostat.
00:09:26.000 | I think of thermostat as a useful way of picturing and visualizing where you're comfortable.
00:09:37.000 | I first learned the concept years ago when I was a teenager and I read T. Harv Ecker's book, The Millionaire Mind.
00:09:47.000 | In that book, he described the concept of a financial thermostat, which is each of us has a different point at which we're comfortable financially.
00:09:56.000 | If you generally are comfortable with $1,000 in your checking account, when your checking account balance starts getting down to $300 or $400, you're uncomfortable and you'll start spending less and saving more.
00:10:10.000 | But if you're comfortable with $1,000 balance and your checking account balance starts climbing up and now you've got $3,000 or $4,000 in there, you'll start to spend more in order to bring it down to that $1,000.
00:10:23.000 | I've seen this all over the place. Some people are comfortable with a $0 balance in their checking account down to the last penny. Some people are only comfortable with tens of thousands of dollars.
00:10:32.000 | Same thing happens with wealth. The best example that T. Harv Ecker used was if you took a rich person, best example is someone like Donald Trump.
00:10:41.000 | Donald Trump is a billionaire. How many billions? No one knows, including him. But at least we could probably be pretty confident that he is legitimately a billionaire.
00:10:51.000 | If Donald Trump woke up with a $2 million net worth, would he rejoice over that or would he freak out?
00:11:00.000 | Now, most of us would rejoice over a $2 million net worth, as we should. It puts you in the very top of the world wealthy.
00:11:10.000 | But if you're used to a couple billion and you wind up with a couple million, you're going to all of a sudden get busy trying to figure out how to get back to the couple billion.
00:11:23.000 | Now, the same thing applies at the millions. If you are used to a couple million and you drop down to a couple hundred thousand, you're going to be pretty concerned.
00:11:33.000 | So over time, we have to adjust our thermostat and change what we're comfortable with. Same thing happens with something as simple as your groceries.
00:11:41.000 | Some people are comfortable with a can of soup and a can of Coke in their fridge. That's what they're comfortable with.
00:11:48.000 | Some people are only comfortable if they have an entire room of their house filled with food.
00:11:53.000 | And that changes over time. It changes as you start to think about your situation. So with regard to adjusting your pantry and simply building a deep pantry,
00:12:03.000 | by systematically purchasing larger amounts of the food that you normally buy and eat, you'll start to change your thermostat.
00:12:11.000 | You'll start to change what you're comfortable with. I'm not comfortable with one can of peanut butter in the pantry because I know that if I have 12 people over for breakfast,
00:12:21.000 | like I did this morning and I serve pancakes, a can of peanut butter will be gone in one meal.
00:12:26.000 | So now all of a sudden, my comfort level of peanut butter is to have a half a dozen jars of peanut butter set aside.
00:12:32.000 | So to build a deep pantry, focus on simply buying things when they're good deals.
00:12:37.000 | If something that you buy doesn't routinely go on a good deal, then just simply try to buy a couple extra from time to time.
00:12:45.000 | And if you do this, it'll increase your budget a little bit in the short term, but over time, it won't increase your budget at all.
00:12:53.000 | Because what you're doing is just simply using the same amount, but you're using it from your pantry.
00:13:01.000 | I'm convinced that if you follow the concept and idea of a price book, and if you follow the concept and idea of paying attention and buying when things are on sale,
00:13:10.000 | I'm convinced you'll actually save money most of the time on this.
00:13:15.000 | So with things that are non-perishable, items that are jarred, items that are canned, items that don't go stale or flat or bad this week,
00:13:24.000 | go ahead and stock up on those things systematically when they're on sale.
00:13:28.000 | My understanding from the grocery experts is that most items that are going to go on sale go on sale once about every six weeks.
00:13:34.000 | So look for that trend in time.
00:13:38.000 | Now, not everything can go ahead -- not everything can be set by in a can or in a jar in a way that lasts.
00:13:45.000 | So you can't do this with everything.
00:13:48.000 | But you can do it with things that are frozen.
00:13:51.000 | So if you are used to buying whole frozen chickens from Costco and that's what you cook with,
00:13:57.000 | well, go ahead and establish the habit of whenever you're down to two in your freezer or down to four in your freezer or whatever that is,
00:14:04.000 | go ahead and get more then. Don't wait until you're completely out.
00:14:08.000 | And over time, you'll accomplish the same thing.
00:14:11.000 | Building a deep pantry is simple, it's easy, and it doesn't cost any extra.
00:14:16.000 | But it's the first, simplest, practical thing that you can do.
00:14:20.000 | And you'll wind up with the result of if you need to cook two chickens, you've got them in the freezer.
00:14:24.000 | If you don't feel like going out, you've always got food at your fingertips and you'll save money.
00:14:29.000 | But this type of approach is limiting because, number one, you're going to run out of room in your pantry.
00:14:36.000 | Number two, most foods that are commercially manufactured and packaged have a shelf life of anywhere from some months to a couple of years.
00:14:44.000 | And so very quickly, you'll start to get concerned about your shelf life.
00:14:49.000 | How long is this food going to last? And we don't want to waste food.
00:14:52.000 | You'll also find it, if you're anything like me, very difficult to have an accurate inventory of the amount of food that you have.
00:14:59.000 | If I ask you today, and I say, "If today you don't have the ability to buy any more food, how long could you feed your family?"
00:15:08.000 | Very few of you could answer that with any degree of confidence.
00:15:13.000 | Because when we're using food that's in our pantry, we're systematically taking and replenishing, taking and replenishing.
00:15:19.000 | And usually, we're not doing a detailed calculation.
00:15:22.000 | When I run and grab a couple of cups of flour or grab a couple of cans of vegetables because we need something all of a sudden last minute,
00:15:28.000 | I'm not making the time to put that into a spreadsheet.
00:15:31.000 | So it's hard to know.
00:15:33.000 | And that's where we move on to the next stage, where I think the most practical thing is to systematically buy and package your own food for long-term storage.
00:15:41.000 | Now, when most people think about this, what immediately comes to mind is something like rice and beans.
00:15:46.000 | And that's great because rice, you can buy big bags of rice and it lasts for a long time.
00:15:51.000 | You can buy big or little bags of beans and they last for a long time.
00:15:56.000 | That works. Simple to do.
00:15:59.000 | But many people don't eat rice and beans.
00:16:02.000 | Or if you do eat rice and beans, you don't eat it in the format that you store it.
00:16:06.000 | So it's very easy to make a big mistake here if you all of a sudden think, "Well, I'm going to buy rice and beans and store and eat rice and beans."
00:16:13.000 | And you wind up with a bunch of stuff that you don't buy and eat.
00:16:18.000 | If you were starving, it would be nice to have.
00:16:21.000 | But very quickly, you'll feel foolish again.
00:16:23.000 | We don't want to do that.
00:16:25.000 | So start by looking at the things that you eat and then thinking about which of those things can be set aside for a longer period of time.
00:16:31.000 | You may not eat rice and beans, but you might eat pancakes.
00:16:34.000 | Well, go ahead and purchase a number of bags of pancake mix if you use the stuff.
00:16:40.000 | Purchase some of the commercially canned foods that are soups, chilies, vegetables, and set those aside.
00:16:48.000 | Not in your daily pantry rotational stock, but go ahead and just set them aside.
00:16:53.000 | Tuna fish, rice can work if you eat it.
00:16:55.000 | So you can start with those things that you actually eat.
00:16:58.000 | But in order to avoid a hodgepodge of stuff that you bought because you thought it was a good idea but you might not like, then you need a plan.
00:17:08.000 | I always look for people who are experts.
00:17:11.000 | On the Hurricane Show, I mentioned Stephen Harris's family emergency preparedness class.
00:17:15.000 | It's wonderful.
00:17:17.000 | Go back and listen to a few of the suggestions that he makes.
00:17:20.000 | But it's wonderful, and he shows you how you can store and eat emergency food and have it cheap.
00:17:25.000 | The problem is, although it's great for emergencies, it doesn't invoke a lot of excitement and enthusiasm in me to think about eating that for a long period of time.
00:17:35.000 | So I love his presentation.
00:17:37.000 | It's very good.
00:17:38.000 | It's very practical.
00:17:39.000 | But I don't want to eat tortillas three meals a day or donuts, as he puts it, three meals a day for an ongoing period of time.
00:17:47.000 | The best seminar I've ever found on the subject of how to store and save long-term food comes from a lady named Wendy DeWitt.
00:17:56.000 | I'll link in the show to a YouTube video of her making a presentation.
00:18:01.000 | It's just under an hour.
00:18:03.000 | It's a class of her going through and talking about how to put together a simple, systematic food storage plan.
00:18:11.000 | I'm going to summarize it in just a moment.
00:18:13.000 | It's also she has a simple book that she's written that's freely available on her blog, which I will also link in the show notes for today's show.
00:18:21.000 | But she's done a wonderful job of putting together a very sensible food storage system where you can put by something like a year's worth of food in a very simple and practical way.
00:18:34.000 | I think the best people to go to if you're interested in this subject, the best people to start with is the Mormons.
00:18:39.000 | Mormons have done a tremendous job of building systems and advice for people in this area of food storage.
00:18:48.000 | It's my understanding that they teach as a matter of church doctrine that every family who's involved in their church should have a goal and have a system of storing a year's worth of food.
00:18:57.000 | So it's a wonderful, they've done a great job on developing resources for it.
00:19:02.000 | Here are the nuts and bolts of her system, the outline of it to give you an idea, and I encourage you to go and watch her video for additional information.
00:19:11.000 | To begin with, if you have a goal of setting aside a year's worth of food, start with taking out 14 note cards and write down on those note cards seven breakfasts and seven dinners that you would like to eat once per week for one year.
00:19:30.000 | So you're going to have a different breakfast and a different dinner every day for a week, and you'd be happy to eat that once a week for a year.
00:19:38.000 | Most of us probably have about this number of meals that we actually eat anyway, maybe it's 14.
00:19:43.000 | But if you'd be willing to eat spaghetti and meatballs one day per week every week for a year, write that down.
00:19:50.000 | If you'd be willing to eat pancakes with maple syrup one day per week every day for a year, write that down.
00:19:56.000 | And you write those on different note cards, and those note cards become your recipe cards.
00:20:02.000 | So on the left-hand side of the recipe card, you write down everything that you need to make that food.
00:20:08.000 | If it's pancakes, you write down pancake mix.
00:20:10.000 | If you use that, if you make it from scratch, you write down how much flour, how much buckwheat, et cetera.
00:20:15.000 | You write that down, and you write down all of the things included to make it, how much water you need, how much oil you need for the pan, et cetera.
00:20:24.000 | Make that list, and then you take those ingredients and you multiply them out based upon the number of times that you're going to need them to eat them in a year.
00:20:35.000 | If you need two cups of flour to make pancakes and you're willing to have that one time per week, take two cups, multiply it times 52, and then it comes out to be 104 cups of flour.
00:20:48.000 | If you do the conversion math on something like that, and by the way, in the resource that I'll link in the show notes, she has all the information right there as far as how to do the conversion.
00:20:57.000 | And you convert that to pounds, you'll wind up with about 28 pounds of flour.
00:21:01.000 | Now, you know that you can just simply go out and purchase that amount of flour and buy 28 pounds of it, and you'll have enough flour to prepare pancakes one morning per week for 52 weeks.
00:21:13.000 | And you have a specific number prepared.
00:21:16.000 | She teaches that you take this information, you total it up, you move it over to a spreadsheet, and then you figure out how much you need, how much you have, and then how much you need to buy, and then systematically go about buying it and packaging it.
00:21:28.000 | This is very doable.
00:21:30.000 | She teaches that one person's supply of food for one year will usually fit under a standard twin-size bed.
00:21:38.000 | Most of us have a twin-size bed that we sleep in or the equivalent.
00:21:44.000 | Maybe two of you sleep in a king-size bed.
00:21:46.000 | So, each person under their bed can have one year's supply of food.
00:21:50.000 | So, you systematically go out, you systematically purchase these foods, and then you package them.
00:21:56.000 | She teaches in her seminar how to do some of the packaging yourself very simply with vacuum packaging, very simply with canning, bottling meats especially.
00:22:06.000 | She focuses on that.
00:22:07.000 | She also teaches very simply in her seminar how to preserve some of the other foods that you would like to keep.
00:22:15.000 | Some things you can buy and package very, very simply.
00:22:17.000 | There's all kinds of information on the internet if you start searching this out.
00:22:20.000 | Very, very simple to do.
00:22:24.000 | So, check out the resources linked in the show notes for today's show, and I think you'll find them extremely helpful and useful for you.
00:22:32.000 | She does a great job of going through some simple cooking methodologies, very, very practical stuff.
00:22:37.000 | I think it's very, very helpful.
00:22:39.000 | Any person with a desire can systematically follow her plan and set aside a year's worth of food for each person in their family.
00:22:48.000 | It doesn't need to cost very much money.
00:22:50.000 | When you buy things in bulk and you're buying basic staple foods, it doesn't need to cost very much money.
00:22:56.000 | And when you start to rotate it in to your normal, regular food rotation, it doesn't cost you any extra money over time.
00:23:05.000 | It costs maybe anywhere from a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars in the beginning.
00:23:10.000 | I commend to you that resource as the best way to start to go out and systematically buy and package your own food.
00:23:20.000 | That's the cheapest way.
00:23:21.000 | Now, the third and final approach here is to purchase commercially available emergency food reserves.
00:23:28.000 | And I think, as I said in the beginning, you'll probably wind up with a desire to do all three of these things to some degree.
00:23:36.000 | Commercially available emergency food reserves are things like freeze-dried backpacking food.
00:23:41.000 | The big brand there is Mountain House, where you buy these little foil packet, you toss it in your backpack.
00:23:47.000 | When you go out hiking, when you get to the end of the day, you peel off the foil, you pour in some hot water,
00:23:52.000 | and you've got a meal that's ready to go, that's hot and that's somewhat tasty.
00:23:57.000 | There are lots of versions of these.
00:23:58.000 | You can buy meals ready to eat, surplus meals ready to eat from the military, MREs.
00:24:04.000 | That's fine.
00:24:06.000 | The great thing about a lot of these options is they store simply for an incredible amount of time.
00:24:11.000 | The system that Wendy DeWitt outlines will require you to do some work in preparation for her--you have to be involved in the process.
00:24:23.000 | When you just simply go and purchase commercially available emergency food reserves, you don't need to be involved in the process in terms of actually doing anything.
00:24:30.000 | You just buy the stuff and put it on a shelf.
00:24:32.000 | It's as simple as that.
00:24:33.000 | The problem with these things is that they are going to cost you more.
00:24:37.000 | So they're great, they're convenient, but they're going to cost more.
00:24:41.000 | And it's a little daunting sometimes if you have a family of many to think, "Oh, I'm going to go out and spend $10,000 on food."
00:24:47.000 | There's no reason to do that unless you want to do that.
00:24:51.000 | You can do it much simpler, much less expensive.
00:24:57.000 | These products and resources that are out there, food that's prepackaged in number 10 cans and all of that,
00:25:03.000 | can be very useful because they allow you to have variety.
00:25:07.000 | But there's no reason to start there and think that you have to spend a lot of money.
00:25:13.000 | The other downside of commercially available emergency food reserves is you might not be accustomed to cooking with it.
00:25:21.000 | And so I encourage you, if you purchase this type of commercially available food, cook with it.
00:25:25.000 | Get used to it.
00:25:26.000 | Eat it.
00:25:27.000 | And you can start to incorporate many of those ingredients into your normal day-to-day cooking.
00:25:33.000 | I want this for you to be practical and to be useful and to be something that you can systematically use.
00:25:41.000 | I find that there's nothing in my life that I have that I don't use.
00:25:46.000 | And I don't want this by design.
00:25:48.000 | I don't want there to be something just sitting around that I'm not using or that's not significantly useful to me.
00:25:54.000 | So there's no reason why there needs to be any contradiction between building up food stores for yourself and for your family and your normal day-to-day life.
00:26:03.000 | I buy Parmalat UHT, ultra-high heat treatment pasteurized milk.
00:26:10.000 | It's shelf-stable milk that you buy, comes in a cardboard carton, and it goes in the pantry.
00:26:17.000 | I sometimes will buy normal cow's milk from the grocery store and keep that in the fridge.
00:26:23.000 | But we don't drink a lot of milk in my household.
00:26:26.000 | And so oftentimes if I buy an entire gallon, it may go bad on me.
00:26:30.000 | So I don't keep a lot of it around unless I actually know I'm going to use it.
00:26:34.000 | Well, this morning when I was making breakfast for the people that were coming over for breakfast, I hadn't had any plans of anything to make.
00:26:41.000 | So I made a dish that is a family recipe.
00:26:44.000 | It has a funny name.
00:26:45.000 | We call it Fluffy Wuffy.
00:26:46.000 | It's basically a German pancake.
00:26:48.000 | It's an egg dish.
00:26:50.000 | But I had eggs.
00:26:52.000 | They're easy to keep on hand.
00:26:53.000 | And I used the milk from the pantry because I didn't have any milk in the fridge.
00:26:57.000 | But because I had something in the pantry that was a shelf-stable milk that I didn't have to worry about going bad, I was able to make the dish to serve the people.
00:27:06.000 | So the same thing should be applied with all of the things that you do.
00:27:10.000 | If you buy dehydrated potato flakes or powdered eggs or something like that from some of these emergency food companies, make sure that you use the stuff.
00:27:19.000 | Don't just keep it aside and buy buckets of it that you never touch.
00:27:23.000 | Get used to using it.
00:27:25.000 | Many times people have a problem and they consider that, "Well, all I need to do is buy something and then everything is good."
00:27:32.000 | It's not true.
00:27:33.000 | You need to use it.
00:27:34.000 | You can't buy a magical system of stock analysis and expect it to make you rich.
00:27:40.000 | You've got to use whatever system of stock analysis that you use and over time, you'll be the one who learns to become rich.
00:27:48.000 | This is a life lesson that's applicable in every area of life.
00:27:53.000 | I hope these resources are useful for you.
00:27:55.000 | I've done a tremendous amount of research in this area and I see that people often get overwhelmed because it's so outside of your normal day-to-day comfort zone of what we're used to doing.
00:28:06.000 | But there's no reason for it.
00:28:08.000 | If you follow the path that I recommended, start with simply building up a store of food in your pantry.
00:28:14.000 | That's the stuff that you eat day-to-day and changing your comfort level to where you're comfortable buying four or six chickens instead of one and setting three or four of them aside in the freezer for future use.
00:28:26.000 | That over time will start to build some resilience to your pantry.
00:28:30.000 | Then if you'll follow and put into practice the recommendations made in Wendy DeWitt's seminar, that will be tremendously helpful to you.
00:28:40.000 | Then from there, you can go and educate yourself on the details of your own personal situation.
00:28:47.000 | If the headline of that USA Today article is correct, meaning that if the headline that says that seven out of ten Americans have less than $1,000 available to them in their savings account based upon the bank rate study,
00:29:03.000 | if that's correct, then ideas and tools and tips like I've done in this episode and yesterday's episode talking about something as basic and simple as food in your pantry will make a far bigger difference to you and to your living a wealthy life than will any stock suggestion whatsoever for your retirement account.
00:29:31.000 | Build the life and the lifestyle that you want to live that's a wealthy life first and then build it concurrent with other aspects of wealth.
00:29:43.000 | Don't fall into the trap that most US Americans seem to fall into of measuring everything with money.
00:29:51.000 | Some things are too important for your daily existence, comfort, survival, and joy to leave stuck in the world of money.
00:30:06.000 | Food and your personal food insurance program is one of those things.
00:30:12.000 | Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance.
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