RPF0694-How_to_Prepare_for_a_FluCoronavirus

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00:00:30.400 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills,

00:00:33.700 | insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:37.200 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:40.300 | My name is Joshua. I am your host.

00:00:42.000 | And today, I'm going to push off what I had planned to talk to you about today,

00:00:45.600 | which was the next in the 7 Rings of Freedom series.

00:00:49.000 | And I'm gonna talk today instead about disaster preparedness, specifically for a flu pandemic.

00:00:54.300 | Obviously, the big news of last week and this weekend, in addition to the untimely death of Kobe Bryant,

00:01:01.700 | obviously, the big news is related to the, I guess I should say, other big news,

00:01:08.400 | I guess the impeachment of President Trump, impeachment trial.

00:01:11.000 | Big news is this, is the expansion of the coronavirus from China and then spreading throughout the world right now.

00:01:20.500 | And obviously, if you're listening to this a couple weeks from now, it could be that it's an absolutely massive story,

00:01:26.400 | and it could be that it's a non-event, and we don't know.

00:01:30.100 | But I like to use events like this to think about and to put me in a right frame of mind,

00:01:36.300 | whether or not something bad actually happens.

00:01:39.000 | Whenever I see somebody else experience something, I often think, "What if that happened to me?"

00:01:45.200 | So if I see that Kobe Bryant died, I think, "Well, what if that happened to me?

00:01:48.500 | What if I were the one in that helicopter with my daughter?"

00:01:51.200 | And I'm not aware yet of who all the other people were.

00:01:54.600 | I haven't followed the story very closely.

00:01:56.000 | But what if I were the person in that helicopter?

00:01:58.800 | What would the situation have been?

00:02:01.900 | Now, of course, you don't know the details or the circumstances of the flight,

00:02:05.700 | but you think, you wonder, right, was he flying in unsafe conditions?

00:02:10.000 | Did he push through, he being the pilot or Kobe or whomever was in charge?

00:02:16.000 | Did they push past when they shouldn't have pushed past?

00:02:18.700 | And then I think, "Well, I don't fly in helicopters all that much, but do I do things like that?"

00:02:23.300 | For example, driving tired.

00:02:25.700 | When I think about something like that, I think, "Well, the most likely analog for me would be

00:02:29.000 | that I would be tempted to drive when I'm tired.

00:02:31.600 | And is it really worth it for me to get to a destination

00:02:34.200 | when realistically I should just either stop and sleep for a few hours

00:02:37.600 | or go and get a hotel room and not drive when I'm tired?"

00:02:41.800 | Or if there are bad driving conditions and it's foggy or it's icy or it's dangerous in some way,

00:02:46.500 | why should I risk my life in a bad situation like that?

00:02:51.500 | If you study things like aircraft accidents, inclement weather is a major factor.

00:02:55.300 | Generally, if a vehicle, an aircraft is in good repair,

00:02:58.500 | yes, there can be pilot error, but pilot error is going to be more likely to be caused by circumstances.

00:03:03.300 | And usually, in most disasters, you'll find either a critical decision

00:03:09.100 | or a series of critical decisions which can be identified later.

00:03:14.700 | And you can see that was the bad decision.

00:03:16.700 | There was when somebody made the imprudent call.

00:03:18.900 | There was the warning light that got ignored

00:03:21.100 | or there was the warning from the scientist that got ignored.

00:03:25.600 | So I think about things like that.

00:03:26.900 | And of course, being a financial planner, I immediately think of the financial planning.

00:03:29.400 | I wonder, "Was Kobe Bryant's estate plan buttoned up?"

00:03:33.900 | Here's a very wealthy man, recently retired from his career,

00:03:37.200 | looking forward to his next act.

00:03:39.500 | I hope that his estate plan was in order and that everything was squared away and ready to go.

00:03:46.100 | You got to be ready to go anytime.

00:03:47.500 | And part of that is to make sure that your estate plan is ready to go.

00:03:51.300 | Then you think of your family.

00:03:52.600 | Did you establish the legacy in your family that you wanted to establish

00:03:56.700 | so that they have the ability and the skill to carry on and the finances to carry on?

00:04:01.500 | Kobe, I doubt he needed life insurance, but do you have life insurance to protect your family?

00:04:07.100 | So I always think about those things.

00:04:08.700 | And I encourage you to do that, too.

00:04:11.400 | It's a shame.

00:04:12.300 | Tragedy is tragic, but it's a shame to waste a tragedy,

00:04:17.300 | not in the sense of political expediency, as that famous quote goes for.

00:04:20.600 | What I mean is simply don't waste the tragedy by not paying attention to it and learning from it,

00:04:26.200 | so that if your family is the one who goes through it,

00:04:28.500 | at least make sure to the best of your ability that things are going to be improved.

00:04:32.700 | And a lot of times you don't need an expert to come along and tell you what to do in a circumstance.

00:04:36.700 | You just think, "What if that happened to me?

00:04:38.600 | What would I do?"

00:04:39.300 | And you'll naturally come up with the right solution.

00:04:41.700 | So in that same way of thinking, I want to talk about the coronavirus.

00:04:45.600 | And in this show, I want to cover three things.

00:04:46.900 | Number one, I'm going to talk about flu pandemics in general,

00:04:49.900 | just because it's a very interesting and important topic,

00:04:52.900 | and we need to deal with it under the avoiding catastrophe problem.

00:04:55.400 | I consider a flu pandemic, a global flu pandemic,

00:04:57.500 | to be one of the most serious and most probable of the large-scale total catastrophe risks.

00:05:05.600 | Not predicting this one to be that?

00:05:07.000 | I don't know.

00:05:07.800 | None of us do.

00:05:09.100 | But that in time, and probably at some point within your lifetime and my lifetime,

00:05:15.000 | there will be another very large-scale global flu pandemic.

00:05:18.800 | We can look back a century and see the Spanish flu pandemic that famously killed perhaps 50 million people.

00:05:24.700 | And there are some risk factors in our modern society which would make it even higher of a worse problem in today's world versus back then.

00:05:33.300 | Some risk factors that could possibly offset that and make the risk lower, but we don't know.

00:05:37.700 | Throughout history, disease has been a great killer of mankind,

00:05:40.700 | and there's not really any reason to think that it won't be the same going forward.

00:05:45.100 | And I'll talk about flu pandemics in a moment.

00:05:47.600 | The second part of the show is I'm going to give you some very specific and practical suggestions

00:05:53.800 | for how to prepare in case something like this coronavirus or some future sickness becomes very,

00:06:00.300 | very severe and you have to impose a self-quarantine on yourself and on your family and how to prepare for that.

00:06:07.000 | Because if you are prepared for such an eventuality, you'll be prepared for almost any other circumstance,

00:06:11.500 | and that's really well worth considering.

00:06:14.800 | And then the third thing is at the end of the show, I'll introduce—I'm going to record in light of the flu pandemic.

00:06:20.000 | I've been meaning to do this for a while, but it just gives me a little bit more urgency.

00:06:24.200 | I'm going to go ahead and launch a live webinar series over the next two weeks where I'm going to teach Joshua's family preparedness class.

00:06:32.900 | And I've been asked for this a lot because I've done a lot about practical preparedness on this show,

00:06:36.900 | and I've gotten a lot of good feedback. People have said they appreciate the way that I do it,

00:06:41.000 | the tone that I do it, the practicality, the frugality, the budget-mindedness, not hysterical,

00:06:48.300 | but just practical solutions. And I've got a lot of that stuff, and I've been meaning to put it into a paid course.

00:06:53.100 | And so I'm going to do that, and I'll give you information on that at the end of the show.

00:06:56.300 | So stay tuned for that at the very end.

00:06:59.000 | Now, I want to begin by talking about flu pandemics.

00:07:01.000 | And first, an introduction on this specific virus that has the news occupied at the moment.

00:07:08.300 | I don't know, and I don't see how you could know either, the extent to which you should really be concerned about the current coronavirus coming out of China.

00:07:21.000 | On the one hand, statistically, if you just go by the number of people infected, the number of people who have died,

00:07:29.000 | statistically, it's meaningless. It's my understanding that several tens of thousands of people,

00:07:33.300 | something like 30,000 people per year in the United States die of the flu.

00:07:36.300 | Well, to have a couple dozen people around the world dying of something that is like the flu, akin to the flu,

00:07:44.000 | is a statistical blip that can basically be safely ignored.

00:07:48.900 | However, on the other side, if you want to look for the writing on the wall, the recipe for catastrophe,

00:07:55.200 | there are enough symptoms of the recipe for catastrophe that you should pay a lot of attention to.

00:08:00.200 | The most remarkable thing to see that I look at is not the level of infection or the level of death,

00:08:06.700 | but the response of the Chinese government.

00:08:10.200 | As I record this on Monday, January 27, the latest data is that something like 2,800 confirmed cases of this coronavirus have been confirmed around the world.

00:08:21.500 | And that there have been about 80 deaths around the world.

00:08:24.500 | But in China, the Chinese government has imposed truly historical levels of quarantine on many of the people in Wuhan, China, which is really remarkable.

00:08:38.500 | The city of Wuhan is, in my understanding, a city of about 11 million people.

00:08:42.500 | To put that into context, New York has a little less than 9 million people, London, 8.5 million, Hong Kong, 7.5 million, Singapore, almost 6 million people.

00:08:52.000 | So bigger, 20% bigger of a city than New York City in the United States.

00:08:58.000 | And yet, in that city of Wuhan, China, all public transportation, all ride-hailing services, all taxis have all been suspended.

00:09:06.500 | All trains in and out of the city stopped.

00:09:09.000 | All flights in and out of the city stopped.

00:09:11.500 | And people have basically been told to stay home.

00:09:14.000 | I've been looking around the internet trying to find some reporting from inside China, and you can find independent vloggers and video creators going around and filming the city, and it's a ghost town.

00:09:25.500 | It looks like something from a post-apocalyptic movie.

00:09:28.500 | It's really remarkable.

00:09:30.000 | And the Chinese government doesn't have a reputation for honesty and transparency.

00:09:36.500 | Rather, the reputation of the Chinese government is the exact opposite, especially as it relates to things like sicknesses.

00:09:43.000 | This was a major problem back in 2002 with the SARS epidemic, where the data was so slow to come out of the Chinese government, it caught the world really behind.

00:09:51.500 | And so, and then in terms of the exact things of what's being reported about this particular virus, it has the markers of the kind of thing that can spread very rapidly around the world and result in great death and destruction.

00:10:05.000 | So at the moment, it's something that, in my assessment, needs to be watched carefully, pay attention to it, but not the kind of thing to panic about or to freak out about, but to think about.

00:10:15.000 | And so what I like to do is use it as an example in my own life and say, "All right, what if this particular scenario were to turn into a catastrophic nightmare scenario?

00:10:25.000 | How would I be prepared for that?

00:10:27.500 | How would my family be prepared for that?

00:10:29.500 | And how would you, my listener, be prepared for that?"

00:10:33.500 | And so I want to talk about that preparation.

00:10:38.000 | I do consider a global flu pandemic to be one of those truly horrible, broad-scale, destructive scenarios that can happen, that has happened repeatedly throughout history, and that can have civilization-level effects.

00:10:57.000 | My list is three.

00:10:59.000 | There are three things on my kind of top three disasters list.

00:11:02.000 | Before I give you my three, I rate disasters based upon their impact on an individual versus a broader community and based upon their likelihood.

00:11:12.000 | And I really like what Jack Spirico has really codified, where if you think about the severity of a disaster versus the likelihood of a disaster, the more severe disasters are usually the least likely.

00:11:28.000 | Sorry, I'm kind of butchering this.

00:11:30.000 | The point is that a personal disaster is the most likely thing.

00:11:33.000 | It's very likely that you might have a snow ski accident and break your leg or break your head and be limited in your work duties because of your accident.

00:11:42.000 | It's very likely that you'll lose your job at some point in time.

00:11:46.000 | It's very likely that your car will break down on the side of the road.

00:11:48.000 | These are all, so to some people, these are major disasters.

00:11:52.000 | People who are generally poor, a car broken down can be a major crisis.

00:11:57.000 | But these are likely scenarios that most of us face.

00:12:00.000 | It's likely that your power is going to go out in a storm of some kind.

00:12:03.000 | And so these are very likely, but the impact on a person is usually pretty small and certainly it's just an impact on one person.

00:12:12.000 | And so the most likely scenarios are personal disaster scenarios.

00:12:15.000 | And most personal disaster scenarios can be mitigated with three things.

00:12:20.000 | Number one is good financial planning.

00:12:22.000 | Primarily that just means saving money.

00:12:24.000 | If you have money and you have money saved, then most disasters stop becoming disasters for you.

00:12:30.000 | Number two would be insurance.

00:12:32.000 | You can insure carefully and properly for many significant situations.

00:12:37.000 | And then number three is practical preparedness.

00:12:40.000 | Having a flashlight with a charged battery when the lights go out.

00:12:43.000 | Things like that make a big difference.

00:12:45.000 | Having a generator so that your freezer full of food doesn't spoil when the power is out for a few days.

00:12:50.000 | Very, very practical, very simple, and very likely to be used.

00:12:54.000 | Now the big wide scale disasters that could affect a huge community or a state or a nation,

00:13:01.000 | those are the fun ones to think about because they're so horrific, but they're very unlikely.

00:13:08.000 | And the likelihood goes down as you go to a broader area.

00:13:12.000 | It's pretty likely that your city will be at some point in time affected by a natural disaster.

00:13:17.000 | Perhaps you live in hurricane country or perhaps you live in tornado country or perhaps you live in earthquake country.

00:13:23.000 | Pretty likely that at some point in time your city will face a severe ice storm or a drought or a flood of some kind.

00:13:29.000 | Pretty likely.

00:13:30.000 | Pretty unlikely that your nation would face something like that, especially if you're from a very large country.

00:13:36.000 | The United States, Russia, Canada, Argentina, you know, some of these very physically large countries,

00:13:43.000 | very unlikely that your entire nation would be affected by something like that.

00:13:47.000 | But there are a handful of disasters and potential disasters that really do have those huge potential impacts.

00:13:56.000 | There are disasters that are so massive in their impact that I don't consider them to be worth thinking about.

00:14:02.000 | Things like an asteroid.

00:14:03.000 | If an asteroid hits the United States, you know, what do you do to prepare for that?

00:14:08.000 | I don't think you do.

00:14:09.000 | I think you just deal with it if you're still alive and if not, then you make sure that your soul is with God and not in the other place.

00:14:17.000 | But when I think about those big disasters that are short of an asteroid and I consider the likelihood of those things happening,

00:14:29.000 | I always come up with three specific scenarios.

00:14:32.000 | Number one, a global flu pandemic.

00:14:36.000 | Number two, global nuclear war.

00:14:39.000 | Number three, broad scale electromagnetic pulse attack.

00:14:44.000 | I think that those three things are probably the most realistic of those really big scenarios.

00:14:50.000 | Now, could there be a major earthquake and tsunami or a major, you know, the Yellowstone super volcano?

00:14:59.000 | Yeah, sure.

00:15:00.000 | But I think those three are like those three that I said are always those three that I think, you know what?

00:15:05.000 | These things are very technologically feasible.

00:15:08.000 | The world has either been through them or been close to being through them at some point in the past.

00:15:14.000 | And there's good reason to believe that they would have vast ripple effects.

00:15:19.000 | And so I've thought a lot about all three of those scenarios, global flu pandemic, nuclear war, broad scale nuclear war, and broad scale electromagnetic pulse attack.

00:15:32.000 | And I think that all three of them are also very, you can prepare very effectively for all three of them.

00:15:36.000 | Now, we're going to focus today on just a couple of basic things with a global flu pandemic, but don't mitigate the other two.

00:15:43.000 | I don't, I did a little bit of consulting with somebody on one of them one time, but it's not something that I talk a lot about because most people aren't that interested in talking about nuclear war preparedness.

00:15:52.000 | But I will tell you, I've studied the topic and it's very feasible to prepare for something like a global nuclear war.

00:16:00.000 | It may sound funny to talk about having a bunker, a fallout shelter, but it's very feasible to have a fallout shelter.

00:16:07.000 | It's very doable.

00:16:09.000 | And I've been fascinated by the subject.

00:16:11.000 | I used to love reading the, you know, the 1950s civil defense manuals and all the stuff that was put out by the US government, how to prepare for nuclear war.

00:16:18.000 | Super interesting stuff to me.

00:16:21.000 | So you can prepare for that.

00:16:22.000 | Same thing, you can prepare for electromagnetic pulse and you can prepare for a global flu pandemic.

00:16:27.000 | And I think it's worth considering how you would do that.

00:16:30.000 | Now, the important thing to realize though is with all three of those disasters, and we're going to focus from here going forward on a flu pandemic, one of the major risks is not just the primary disaster, but a lot of times the secondary effects.

00:16:44.000 | Think of it like this.

00:16:46.000 | When you consider a storm, a bad storm, maybe think Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans or a super storm Sandy in the northeast, there are multiple layers of effect.

00:16:57.000 | The first is the effect of the actual storm, the wind damage, the water damage from flooding.

00:17:05.000 | Those are an immediate effect.

00:17:07.000 | But then there's also an immediate secondary effect, which is usually economic.

00:17:11.000 | The people who don't go to work because they can't get to work or they don't go to work because the work, you know, everything is closed.

00:17:19.000 | If you go to, if you depend on a job and all of a sudden you work at a store, a retail store, but that retail store is closed for two days due to a storm or possibly closed for four or five days due to a storm and the following cleanup, that can really be a major impact on the budget of somebody who's living week to week paycheck to paycheck.

00:17:39.000 | Now, what employers try to do in those circumstances is certainly to go ahead and pay their employees because they know that their employees are standing on the paycheck.

00:17:46.000 | But sometimes they can, sometimes they can't.

00:17:48.000 | And so if they can't, it's a major disruption.

00:17:52.000 | It's a disruption on the stores themselves.

00:17:54.000 | Stores depend on business.

00:17:56.000 | And if the entire city is, let's say that somebody is running a holiday resort and right in the middle of holiday season, a storm comes through that and all the tourists get in their cars or fly out and just disappear.

00:18:07.000 | No one's out buying stuff.

00:18:08.000 | That's a real loss to a business.

00:18:10.000 | It could be a major financial impact on the business owner that takes some significant time to recover from.

00:18:16.000 | So there's usually an immediate economic feeling or an economic effect associated with something destructive like a storm.

00:18:24.000 | And then there's obviously more of a longer term economic effect.

00:18:28.000 | If you think about New Orleans after and Mississippi in that area after Hurricane Katrina, long term effects, major population reduction, major decrease in economic development.

00:18:40.000 | Still today, probably you can chase the effects of that storm on that area.

00:18:46.000 | There's long term economic effects.

00:18:48.000 | And so if you think about something like a flu pandemic, a flu pandemic can come with similar effects.

00:18:54.000 | Right now in the city of Wuhan, you got a city of 11 million people that's basically shut down.

00:18:58.000 | Nobody going out.

00:18:59.000 | Nobody's going to the movies.

00:19:00.000 | Nobody's going shopping.

00:19:01.000 | One of the things that is your pieces of evidence to say this is a really serious thing or potentially a really serious thing is the tremendous step that the Chinese government took to limit Lunar New Year celebrations.

00:19:16.000 | It's my understanding.

00:19:17.000 | It's the biggest holiday in China, and yet most of the large celebrations were shut down and diminished.

00:19:24.000 | Well, that was a major holiday.

00:19:27.000 | And so the impact on the transportation system of people not traveling, the impact of the loss of business for people spending on parties and celebrations on food, on alcohol, on all of those things is a major economic event in the short term.

00:19:42.000 | Right now, what if you were a taxi driver in Wuhan, China, and you have no business?

00:19:47.000 | What if you were an Uber driver and you had no business?

00:19:50.000 | What if it's one thing perhaps if you are a municipal employee and you might still get your paycheck, but if you're an entrepreneur and you were depending on people filling up your restaurant, well, no one's in your restaurant right now.

00:20:01.000 | Everyone's sitting in their apartments waiting out the quarantine.

00:20:04.000 | That's a major economic impact.

00:20:06.000 | And so you need to be prepared for that.

00:20:08.000 | And the best way to be prepared is be out of debt, have money saved, always have liquid cash, be prepared for those kinds of things.

00:20:14.000 | Now, in addition to that, though, you've got to think about the longer term effects.

00:20:18.000 | If you study the historical analogs of massive death due to sickness and disease, many times civilizations never recovered from that death due to sickness or disease.

00:20:31.000 | Just think about today, if you were to go back to 1918, you had the 50 million people wiped out by the Spanish flu, plus, of course, the death and destruction of World War I.

00:20:42.000 | Try to extrapolate those numbers out.

00:20:45.000 | I didn't do it in preparation for the show.

00:20:47.000 | I should have, but extrapolate those numbers out to today and imagine what would happen with global economic activity if a significant, if you had hundreds of millions of people that were killed by a flu pandemic.

00:20:59.000 | That kind of thing.

00:21:02.000 | Let me do the numbers.

00:21:04.000 | Stand by.

00:21:05.000 | All right.

00:21:06.000 | Quick and dirty math, but I think this gets us directionally in the right direction.

00:21:09.000 | If I use a website here, which popped up in my DuckDuckGo search, worldometers.info, the global population in the year 1900 was estimated to be about 1.6 billion people.

00:21:19.000 | 1.6 billion people.

00:21:21.000 | And I've read a number of estimates of the Spanish flu of having killed 50 million people.

00:21:26.000 | So that's something like 3% of the population.

00:21:29.000 | According to the same data source, 2020, global population estimated to be something like 7.79 billion, so about 7.8 billion people.

00:21:37.000 | If we take 3% of that, it's about 233 million people.

00:21:40.000 | So if 3% of the world's population today were killed by some sort of flu pandemic, that would be a loss of 233 million lives.

00:21:50.000 | That would be devastating.

00:21:52.000 | Absolutely devastating.

00:21:55.000 | In the very least of terms, to the world economy.

00:21:58.000 | Completely devastating.

00:22:00.000 | And that's on a global basis, if the deaths were distributed equally around the globe.

00:22:05.000 | Now, throughout history, what you have often seen is you've often seen that individual civilizations were wiped out by sickness.

00:22:13.000 | You think about the smallpox epidemics that wiped out so many of the American Indian tribes in Central and North America from the European settlers.

00:22:25.000 | I think that when Cortez invaded Mexico, I think the Mexican population was estimated to be something like 25 or 30 million people.

00:22:34.000 | And 50 years later, it was down to 3 million people, most of them killed by infectious disease.

00:22:40.000 | I don't think that the European settlers had any idea what was happening.

00:22:43.000 | I don't think it was an intentional act of war, but the intent doesn't really matter.

00:22:49.000 | The results were the same.

00:22:51.000 | That you had a population wiped out of 30 million to 3 million.

00:22:55.000 | 25 million to 3 million, depending on what number you actually choose.

00:22:59.000 | Think about how that devastated Mexico at that time.

00:23:03.000 | Those are the kinds of civilization wipeout scenarios that have been seen throughout history.

00:23:11.000 | Now, I think there's good reason to be optimistic that in the modern world, with an improved understanding of germ theory, etc., maybe that kind of scenario is less likely to happen.

00:23:25.000 | But then you also flip, go on the flip side.

00:23:28.000 | You say that we haven't even talked about intentionality, the release of some sort of toxin or some sort of disease that was intentionally designed to be destructive.

00:23:39.000 | Who knows?

00:23:40.000 | But these are scenarios that have happened again and again throughout history.

00:23:44.000 | So, a flu pandemic could come with the risk of getting sick and dying.

00:23:49.000 | Yes, that is the risk.

00:23:51.000 | But it also comes with economic risk.

00:23:54.000 | The risk of having your business collapse, having your restaurant sit empty because people aren't going out to eat.

00:23:59.000 | Having your event that you've invested tons of money into producing, the big concert or the big festival lightly attended because nobody wants to come.

00:24:09.000 | Having your airline seat sit empty because people don't want to fly.

00:24:13.000 | Those are the things that start to stack up in the short term.

00:24:16.000 | And potentially, if you had a truly widespread and truly destructive virus, then the long-term impacts could be massive.

00:24:25.000 | What would it do?

00:24:26.000 | One of the unique things about the Spanish flu, it's my understanding, that it affected the young and the healthy much more than the elderly and the sick, which is the normal case.

00:24:36.000 | Usually, it's the elderly and the sick who die from the flu.

00:24:39.000 | But it's my understanding the Spanish flu impacted the young and the healthy more.

00:24:43.000 | What would happen to something like an already sick social security system if there were some disease that came through and wiped out a huge number of young, healthy workers?

00:24:55.000 | All of a sudden, it collapses even faster.

00:24:57.000 | Those are the kinds of things that are very feasible.

00:24:59.000 | Now, are they likely?

00:25:01.000 | I don't know how you would even guess something like that.

00:25:03.000 | I just say feasible.

00:25:05.000 | Everything that I've just said is certainly within the understanding of medical science.

00:25:09.000 | It's happened again and again throughout history, and it's certainly feasible.

00:25:13.000 | So, what do you do?

00:25:15.000 | First thing you do is you stop and you think.

00:25:17.000 | You think, "What would I do if that kind of situation were happening?

00:25:22.000 | What would I do if I had 50% fewer customers in my store because people didn't want to go out to public places?

00:25:28.000 | What would I do if my business got shut down because of a quarantine that were imposed on my town?"

00:25:36.000 | Go and look at the videos from China right now.

00:25:40.000 | Most of us don't live in China.

00:25:42.000 | It's a very different system of social control than the more free societies that most of us live in.

00:25:48.000 | But when you get to the end of the world, when you get to the end of the day, governments don't really have any option other than to try to impose quarantine, to try to impose martial law, to enforce quarantine because that's really the only way that you can deal with a large-scale sickness.

00:26:05.000 | Disease outbreak is to impose quarantine.

00:26:08.000 | And so, there's not another solution that they really have.

00:26:12.000 | Yes, you can try to fight it.

00:26:14.000 | You can try to provide medical care.

00:26:16.000 | But the end of the day, quarantine is about the only solution.

00:26:19.000 | Just like when you get to a situation where there's been a big disaster, about the only solution that they have to offer is to try to impose a curfew and to get people out, and that's about it.

00:26:29.000 | And so, during severe times of distress, that's the standard operating procedure.

00:26:36.000 | Impose martial law, impose onerous restrictions regardless of whether they're truly effective or not, regardless of whether they should be done or not.

00:26:43.000 | All that stuff, the government officials are happy to say all this stuff can be argued out in the courts later.

00:26:48.000 | We're just going to do what we think we got to do to help people to survive.

00:26:51.000 | So, stop and think.

00:26:53.000 | What would you do?

00:26:54.000 | Now, what you'll see is quickly that everything we talk about in day-to-day financial planning comes into play.

00:27:01.000 | Why do I encourage you to have money saved?

00:27:06.000 | Well, because if you have money saved, then you have resources that you can draw on in order for you to be able to have the things you need to get through.

00:27:17.000 | If you have money saved and your business takes a 50% decline due to something happening, then you're going to be okay.

00:27:24.000 | Why do I encourage you not to have debt or not to have significant amounts of debt?

00:27:28.000 | Well, because that puts more resiliency in your life.

00:27:31.000 | If you have a paid-off house and you can sit at home and all you got to do is come up with enough money to pay the taxes so that the government doesn't take it from you, then you are in a safer position.

00:27:40.000 | And so, having money saved and having low debt and having low financial commitments is really good.

00:27:46.000 | It increases your personal resiliency.

00:27:49.000 | In addition, it allows you to make intelligent actions that could protect you.

00:27:54.000 | For example, one of the things that's really hard for poor people is when you get sick, but you have to have this day's income in order to provide for yourself.

00:28:03.000 | And so, you have to go to work because if you don't, you know, you don't have enough money for this week's bills.

00:28:10.000 | Really tough. Really tough situation to be in when you're in that situation.

00:28:13.000 | So, what do you do?

00:28:15.000 | Well, try to get ahead of your bills and have money saved so that you can make the decision to not go to work.

00:28:19.000 | Or if you're worried about being exposed or you have a job that's going to expose you to some risk, what do you say?

00:28:23.000 | I'm sorry, I'm not going to do this job anymore.

00:28:25.000 | And you protect yourself and your family if it were to come to a situation where you felt that that were the prudent thing to do.

00:28:31.000 | Now, let's pivot to the practical side of preparedness because thus far, you may say, "I agree with you on everything.

00:28:38.000 | I've got some money saved. I've got some credit cards available if I had to buy some stuff."

00:28:42.000 | But now what?

00:28:44.000 | Well, if that's all you have, your planning is incomplete.

00:28:49.000 | Here's the scenario.

00:28:50.000 | Let's pretend that today, right now, I told you and I convinced you and persuaded you that you needed to impose a self-quarantine on you and your family.

00:29:02.000 | You needed to go home.

00:29:03.000 | You needed to have all of your family at home.

00:29:05.000 | And you needed to not interact with any people other than your immediate family in your house for the next month.

00:29:14.000 | No buying, no selling, no going to the store, no going to public places.

00:29:18.000 | Just go home and live at your house for the next month.

00:29:24.000 | Could you do that?

00:29:27.000 | Could you go home and with what you have in your home, live in your house for the next month without needing to go shopping?

00:29:36.000 | I don't know the percentage of the Radical Personal Finance audience that could do that,

00:29:39.000 | but I think the percentage of people in the world at large that could do that is pretty low.

00:29:45.000 | Most of us are so dependent on the economic systems around us that it would be very difficult for us to get through a month with no interaction.

00:29:58.000 | Now, in truth, you could go home.

00:30:00.000 | You could sit down.

00:30:01.000 | You could turn on the TV and you could sit there for 30 days.

00:30:04.000 | You could fast for 30 days.

00:30:06.000 | You wouldn't die.

00:30:07.000 | As long as you've got water flowing in from your sink tap, you probably wouldn't die.

00:30:11.000 | You'd probably be okay, but you'd probably be pretty miserable.

00:30:14.000 | So let's expand it longer.

00:30:16.000 | What if you needed two months, three months?

00:30:20.000 | Could you go home and stay at home for three months without going out and interacting outside?

00:30:27.000 | Now, it starts to get a little bit harder here to do that because the time increases.

00:30:33.000 | Your supplies may start to run dry, but I think that that should be a goal,

00:30:40.000 | and your goal for family preparedness should be that if I said go home and be home for three months without leaving your property,

00:30:47.000 | that you should have the basic things that you need to provide for you and your family so that you could live for three months.

00:30:55.000 | Now, probably the number one thing that you need to do is something to do.

00:30:59.000 | Most people would go pretty stir-crazy being stuck on their property for three months,

00:31:03.000 | and so you should think about that as a reason why you should have a home full of books.

00:31:07.000 | Maybe you have a movie collection.

00:31:09.000 | Maybe you have an internet connection.

00:31:11.000 | Notice that I'm being kind to you, and I'm keeping everything functioning.

00:31:14.000 | I'm keeping your water on.

00:31:16.000 | I'm keeping your electricity on.

00:31:17.000 | I haven't taken those things away.

00:31:19.000 | Frankly, the aspiration should be that if I shut off your water, if I shut off your power,

00:31:26.000 | if I shut off your internet, and I shut off all contact with the outside world for some reason,

00:31:33.000 | all the systems I've turned off your cell phone signal, et cetera,

00:31:37.000 | you should be prepared to survive and, frankly, to thrive for three months.

00:31:42.000 | It's not actually that hard.

00:31:44.000 | It does take planning and preparation, but it's not actually that hard, and it's not that expensive,

00:31:48.000 | but it's well worth pursuing that level of preparedness.

00:31:52.000 | But in this current situation, flu pandemic, as far as I'm concerned, keep your water on,

00:31:57.000 | keep your lights on, keep your electricity on, and that makes a lot of things a lot easier.

00:32:01.000 | You could pay your bills with electronic bill pay or mail a check.

00:32:04.000 | You can pay bills without leaving the property.

00:32:08.000 | The biggest weakness for most people is going to be food.

00:32:11.000 | I'm keeping your water on.

00:32:12.000 | Most people have water coming in from the tap.

00:32:14.000 | The biggest weakness for most people is going to be food, and that's what I'll talk about.

00:32:18.000 | But I think this is a very realistic scenario.

00:32:21.000 | If you became convinced that the chances of your contracting the flu out in public were very severe

00:32:27.000 | and you became convinced that you could just simply stay home

00:32:31.000 | and have a 0% chance of contracting the flu out there,

00:32:34.000 | then the most obvious solution for you would be to stay home.

00:32:38.000 | Right now, in Wuhan, China, everybody is sitting in their house.

00:32:42.000 | There's these fascinating videos you can see of everyone standing on their balcony in their little apartment

00:32:45.000 | on the 40-story apartment building quarantined in their houses.

00:32:51.000 | And so that's the most likely solution to a very bad broad-scale flu pandemic is stay home.

00:32:59.000 | But you got to be prepared to stay home.

00:33:02.000 | So I want you to really think about that.

00:33:06.000 | I'm going to repeat this scenario just so that you can think about it.

00:33:11.000 | This scenario is easier than if I take away all your resources.

00:33:16.000 | Again, if I cut off your power, if I cut off your water, if I cut off your cable, if I cut off all those things,

00:33:23.000 | now we really start to test your emergency preparations.

00:33:27.000 | But the flu pandemic is easier if you have basically two things.

00:33:33.000 | Probably I'll expand it to three.

00:33:35.000 | But number one, you need to have money, money saved.

00:33:38.000 | If you have an emergency fund equal to three months' worth of living expenses,

00:33:44.000 | then with that emergency fund of three months' worth of living expenses,

00:33:48.000 | you should have enough money that if you had to stay home for three months to sit out a flu pandemic,

00:33:53.000 | you would have the ability to pay your electricity bill, pay your mortgage, be current on all your bills

00:33:59.000 | so that at least everything stays on.

00:34:02.000 | And as long as you have that, you have most of the things you need for light.

00:34:05.000 | So that's money.

00:34:06.000 | That's why an emergency fund is so important.

00:34:09.000 | Then food, and I'm going to give you some suggestions on food.

00:34:13.000 | Just a moment.

00:34:14.000 | And then I guess number three would be security, right, to secure your home property.

00:34:18.000 | It means a defense, a security system, a gate, a dog, a gun, basic security.

00:34:22.000 | I don't want to dig into that, though.

00:34:23.000 | I want to talk mainly about food.

00:34:26.000 | With what you see right now in the news, that's a very realistic disaster that could happen.

00:34:32.000 | Hope it doesn't happen.

00:34:34.000 | Not convinced it's going to happen, but it could happen.

00:34:38.000 | And it's just simply too early to know.

00:34:40.000 | And the response to that would be stay on your property, in your house with the doors shut, and stay safe.

00:34:47.000 | Stay away from people who are sick.

00:34:50.000 | Now let's talk about food preparation.

00:34:53.000 | The thing that I have often marveled at with food storage, the first time I started buying food and stocking up on food, I felt like I was nuts.

00:35:01.000 | I felt like I was engaging in some kind of fear-based hoarding, and I felt like I was nuts.

00:35:09.000 | And then I started to appreciate the value of having a deep pantry, and I realized, hey, this is really nice.

00:35:15.000 | And the thing about food is, for most of us, it's not something that we think a whole lot about in terms of our overall family budget.

00:35:25.000 | Yes, we know we could be more frugal.

00:35:28.000 | If you're getting out of debt or saving money a lot, you're probably trying to make a few changes here at the margin.

00:35:34.000 | But generally, we just buy the kind of food that we want to eat.

00:35:37.000 | I've never gone into a grocery store on a poverty budget and said, "I'm just trying to have enough calories to keep my family alive."

00:35:44.000 | I always go to the grocery store and I buy what I want.

00:35:46.000 | I think about a recipe.

00:35:47.000 | I want to make bacon-wrapped asparagus, or I want to make paella, and I shop based upon that.

00:35:53.000 | And yeah, I try to make some frugal decisions here and there and buy when stuff's on sale, but I don't really--I'm not thinking in terms of survival.

00:36:01.000 | I'm thinking in terms of what do I like, what kind of food do I want to eat, what kind of food do I think is healthiest for me, etc.

00:36:07.000 | If we go to survival level food, food is absurdly cheap, and yet most of us don't have any.

00:36:18.000 | And so the number one thing that you'd have to leave your house to do would be to go and get food.

00:36:24.000 | You could probably make it a few weeks with what you have in your pantry, and you would probably be alive at the end of three months because maybe a 30-day fast would help you to lose that 50 pounds.

00:36:32.000 | But at the end of the day, you're going to want some food.

00:36:37.000 | You can today, no matter your budget, you can go and you can buy emergency food that is so cheap that at least you'd know I have three months' worth of food sitting in the hall closet there.

00:36:48.000 | You don't have to go and buy the fanciest food.

00:36:50.000 | You don't have to go and buy the best food.

00:36:52.000 | You just need something that's going to keep you and your family alive and hopefully food that's good enough for them to eat.

00:36:58.000 | Now, there's a lot of stuff that we could do on this subject.

00:37:01.000 | I'm just going to give you some suggestions, some simple suggestions.

00:37:05.000 | A good comprehensive preparedness plan is going to involve all kinds of food.

00:37:10.000 | If you're looking for a free resource, I'm going to give you my class next week.

00:37:14.000 | I encourage you to sign up for it.

00:37:16.000 | But if you're looking for a free resource, go and download the LDS Preparedness Manual put out by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons.

00:37:24.000 | And that preparedness manual is freely available online.

00:37:26.000 | It gives you 400 pages of – they give it away – 400 pages of resources on how to do it.

00:37:32.000 | And the LDS Church is part of their doctrines.

00:37:35.000 | They really recommend that everybody has at least a year's worth of supply of food.

00:37:41.000 | And they've got canneries all over the United States, I think, and many parts of the world as well, but I'm not sure.

00:37:47.000 | But they got all kinds of resources on how to actually develop those foods.

00:37:52.000 | And I recommend you do that.

00:37:54.000 | A year's worth of food, I think, is an ideal goal for most people to look to.

00:37:58.000 | And they have a food purchasing calendar that you can work towards.

00:38:02.000 | Let me give you an idea of what the LDS Church says are the bare minimum food storage requirements for an individual.

00:38:10.000 | The LDS Church food storage requirements for one adult male for one year of approximately 2,300 calories per day.

00:38:17.000 | It's only about 695 pounds total.

00:38:20.000 | So this will keep you fed but leave you hungry.

00:38:22.000 | They recommend that you have 400 pounds of grains, 90 pounds of beans and legumes, 75 pounds of milk and dairy products,

00:38:32.000 | 20 pounds of meats or meat substitutes, 20 pounds of fats and oils, 60 pounds of sugar, 90 pounds of fruits and vegetables,

00:38:41.000 | and then some other additional foods, things that will help you to be able to make things out of that.

00:38:47.000 | And so that's a year's supply. 400 pounds of grains, 60 pounds of beans, 10 quarts of cooking oil, 60 pounds of honey,

00:38:53.000 | 8 pounds of salt, 16 pounds of powdered milk, 14 gallons of drinking water.

00:38:56.000 | Covers you for two weeks.

00:38:58.000 | And that's per person.

00:39:00.000 | So the numbers can get fairly large fairly quickly.

00:39:03.000 | But the food doesn't actually cost all that much.

00:39:06.000 | If you go and you buy a 50 pound bucket of wheat, it's not that expensive.

00:39:10.000 | If you go and buy large bags of beans, not that expensive.

00:39:14.000 | I haven't done the prices on it because I'm not in the United States anymore.

00:39:17.000 | So I don't have it readily at my fingertips to tell you exactly the U.S. prices.

00:39:22.000 | But it's not that expensive.

00:39:24.000 | And so that's for a year's supply.

00:39:26.000 | You can start with a lot less.

00:39:28.000 | So here's what I would do.

00:39:29.000 | And I wonder where your brain goes first.

00:39:31.000 | Many people go quickly to rice and beans.

00:39:34.000 | And I think rice and beans are okay.

00:39:36.000 | I've worked hard over the years to figure out how to make rice and beans good and better.

00:39:40.000 | And I've gotten better.

00:39:41.000 | But I still don't enjoy eating rice and beans.

00:39:43.000 | But there's no arguing with the fact that they are cheap and easily available.

00:39:47.000 | So if you don't have any rice and beans in your house, go to Costco.

00:39:51.000 | Or go to Sam's Club.

00:39:52.000 | Or go to a restaurant depot or a restaurant supply store.

00:39:54.000 | Or go to Walmart.

00:39:56.000 | And buy some rice and beans.

00:39:59.000 | Make sure that while you're buying those rice and beans that you go ahead and get some spices to go into them.

00:40:04.000 | If you don't know how to cook rice and beans, then start learning.

00:40:07.000 | Because some spices are going to go a long way.

00:40:09.000 | Buy some rice and beans. Buy a thing of garlic powder, some onion powder, some salt, some pepper.

00:40:14.000 | Maybe some different seasonings. Some Cajun seasonings. Creole seasonings. Chinese seasonings.

00:40:18.000 | Depending on what you like.

00:40:20.000 | If you're into Spanish food, then pick up some Spanish seasonings.

00:40:23.000 | Buy what you like to cook.

00:40:25.000 | But pick up some rice and beans.

00:40:27.000 | The great thing about when you're doing kind of stocking up on a situation like we're talking about.

00:40:32.000 | I've got to be prepared for a pandemic.

00:40:35.000 | At the moment, you don't even need to worry about storing the food.

00:40:38.000 | If you're going to do long-term food storage, you do need to learn how to store the food.

00:40:42.000 | And package it in a way that pests and bugs don't get into it.

00:40:45.000 | And it doesn't fall apart.

00:40:46.000 | But for most of us, to stock up on 100 pounds of rice and 100 pounds of beans is so cheap.

00:40:53.000 | That you can just throw the food away if it goes bad.

00:40:56.000 | You just keep the food for 2, 3, 4 years.

00:40:58.000 | You can throw the food away. And you're out $100.

00:41:00.000 | It's not that big a deal. You're out $200.

00:41:02.000 | It's not going to be a big deal.

00:41:03.000 | So I want you to actually take action and go and get some food first.

00:41:07.000 | So if you like rice and beans or if you cook rice and beans, go to Costco and get some rice and beans.

00:41:11.000 | Now, I'll tell you though, I don't love rice and beans as an immediate thing.

00:41:16.000 | Because although it's a very good nutritional profile, protein, calories.

00:41:23.000 | I've got butter to go on rice and beans.

00:41:26.000 | It makes it a lot on rice. It goes on a lot better.

00:41:28.000 | And I can eat it. My family will eat it.

00:41:30.000 | I don't love it.

00:41:31.000 | So I'll tell you my go-to. It's peanut butter and jelly.

00:41:34.000 | So what I'd recommend that you do is if you don't have any food in your house, go to Costco.

00:41:39.000 | Go to Sam's Club. Go to Walmart. Go to Restaurant Depot.

00:41:41.000 | And buy a bunch of white flour.

00:41:44.000 | White flour is insanely cheap.

00:41:47.000 | And yet, you can make really good food with it.

00:41:49.000 | So buy three things.

00:41:51.000 | Buy white flour.

00:41:52.000 | Buy olive oil.

00:41:54.000 | And buy some salt.

00:41:56.000 | And if you take white flour, olive oil, salt, and sometimes add a little bit of water,

00:42:01.000 | you have the ability to make a dough.

00:42:03.000 | And that dough can be easily turned into bread or some variation of bread.

00:42:07.000 | I like to fry it in oil.

00:42:09.000 | If you're doing it, make up some tortillas or some patties.

00:42:13.000 | You can make them.

00:42:14.000 | I don't have a tortilla press.

00:42:15.000 | But if you have a tortilla press, you can go ahead and make flour tortillas with your tortilla press.

00:42:19.000 | Or you can use two plates put together.

00:42:21.000 | That's usually what I do if I'm making tortillas.

00:42:23.000 | I like to often make them a little thicker, make them more like arepas.

00:42:25.000 | And just make some patties.

00:42:28.000 | You can make pancakes.

00:42:29.000 | You can make all kinds of bread-related things with flour and oil and salt.

00:42:34.000 | Obviously, nice.

00:42:35.000 | Other baking things are useful as well.

00:42:38.000 | But flour, oil, and salt is really all you need.

00:42:40.000 | Try it sometime.

00:42:41.000 | Mix up a dough of flour, oil, and salt.

00:42:44.000 | And then get a frying pan hot.

00:42:46.000 | Put a little oil in the bottom of it.

00:42:48.000 | And fry some basically pancakes that you make with your hands.

00:42:53.000 | Add some sugar to them if you want to make them sweet.

00:42:56.000 | Sometimes if you make them a little bit sweet, it goes down a little bit better.

00:42:59.000 | And then stock up on peanut butter and jelly.

00:43:01.000 | And for the vast majority of Americans, the vast majority of American children,

00:43:05.000 | if you make them a little patty, a little pancake basically of flour, oil, and salt,

00:43:11.000 | and a little bit of sugar, and then you add some peanut butter and jelly to the top,

00:43:15.000 | they will shovel those things down.

00:43:17.000 | Kids will eat them.

00:43:18.000 | You'll eat them.

00:43:19.000 | And you'll be happy.

00:43:20.000 | You'll probably be happier than with rice and beans.

00:43:22.000 | And the amount of flour, oil, and salt you can buy for $100 is insanely--it's huge.

00:43:30.000 | I'm sorry I don't have the measurements in front of me.

00:43:33.000 | I'll try to do them before the class if I can.

00:43:35.000 | Maybe I'll solicit some help.

00:43:37.000 | But if you go down to the store and you buy $200 worth of flour--or $100 worth of flour,

00:43:44.000 | not even that much, but go buy $50 worth of flour, buy a 5-pound bag of sugar,

00:43:49.000 | buy a couple big bottles of olive oil, and a dozen jars of peanut butter,

00:43:54.000 | a dozen jars of jelly, you're in good shape for weeks of food that your family will eat.

00:44:00.000 | Is it healthy?

00:44:02.000 | No, it's not healthy.

00:44:03.000 | It's not full of all kinds of vitamins and nutrients, et cetera.

00:44:06.000 | But it is food that you can eat.

00:44:08.000 | And you'll be a little bit happier.

00:44:10.000 | If you're going home--and if I today say you've got to go home for 30 days,

00:44:13.000 | or you've got to go home for three months, or you've got to go home for two weeks,

00:44:16.000 | you'll be happier to know that there's some flour in the kitchen that you can make stuff with.

00:44:23.000 | Now, a little bit more expensive than you can go and pick up things like pancake mix.

00:44:28.000 | So in the big supply stores, really all around the world, but especially in the United States,

00:44:33.000 | you can go and you can buy the big bags.

00:44:35.000 | For example, Krusty's is a brand that you can usually get at Costco and whatnot.

00:44:40.000 | It's a pancake mix.

00:44:41.000 | And basically all it has is flour and some baking powder and maybe some baking soda,

00:44:45.000 | and that's about it.

00:44:46.000 | So you can do it yourself.

00:44:47.000 | But the nice thing about those is they're sealed a little bit better than just the paper wrapping

00:44:51.000 | that usually comes in a bag of flour.

00:44:53.000 | And so I've always kept four or five of those big bags around,

00:44:56.000 | and I use them as kind of a pour-over when I have a bunch of people for breakfast.

00:45:01.000 | So if all of a sudden I have a bunch of people over my house for breakfast,

00:45:03.000 | which, yes, I do unexpectedly have 15 breakfast guests or something,

00:45:07.000 | I know that I've always--at the very least, I can always have pancakes.

00:45:10.000 | And since I always have peanut butter on hand as well, because peanut butter stores well

00:45:13.000 | for at least a couple of years--could go rancid in time, sure--but it stores very well.

00:45:17.000 | It's cheap. It's good.

00:45:19.000 | So you've got peanut butter that stores well, honey, which stores forever,

00:45:23.000 | and/or maple syrup, which basically stores forever.

00:45:26.000 | Not quite as well as honey, but basically stores for a long time.

00:45:29.000 | If I've got pancake mix that comes in a big sealed bag that's going to last for several years,

00:45:33.000 | and I've got peanut butter and I've got honey and syrup, I always have the ability to feed a crowd.

00:45:37.000 | And peanut butter has protein in it.

00:45:39.000 | Peanut butter is also very good for if somebody has diarrhea.

00:45:43.000 | It's kind of a natural--the opposite of laxative--I can't remember what the word is for that--

00:45:48.000 | to help people recover from diarrhea.

00:45:52.000 | And good protein, got some calories, gives them some energy in their body.

00:45:56.000 | So that's a useful thing as well.

00:45:58.000 | So keeping it super simple.

00:46:00.000 | But if you don't have at least some food, go to the grocery store and buy flour, oil, sugar, salt,

00:46:07.000 | and rice and beans.

00:46:09.000 | Now the next step that's obvious while you're there is you might like a little bit of variety.

00:46:13.000 | And so then you move into just stuff that's there, canned meats and canned veggies.

00:46:18.000 | And you can easily buy canned meats and canned veggies.

00:46:21.000 | Now with your meats, usually that's tuna and/or canned chicken.

00:46:25.000 | And that's not super cost-effective.

00:46:27.000 | In time, you can can your own.

00:46:29.000 | In the past, when I was stocking up, I would go and buy 40-pound boxes of chicken

00:46:35.000 | at the restaurant supply store and can it myself.

00:46:37.000 | You can do that as well.

00:46:38.000 | But then you've got to buy a canner, a pressure canner.

00:46:40.000 | You've got to learn how to can.

00:46:41.000 | You've got to buy jars.

00:46:42.000 | Big hassle.

00:46:43.000 | So I recommend don't do that right now.

00:46:45.000 | But get yourself some canned meats and canned veggies.

00:46:47.000 | So canned chicken, canned tuna is good.

00:46:49.000 | And then go ahead and buy a couple of trays of the canned corn, canned peas, canned green beans,

00:46:54.000 | canned tomatoes, et cetera.

00:46:56.000 | If you give anybody who's cooked for a few weeks some of that, they can start to put together

00:47:01.000 | some dishes that are reasonable, that are going to have a little bit more variety

00:47:08.000 | than just rice and beans.

00:47:09.000 | Rice and beans are a whole lot better if one day you can have chicken with them

00:47:12.000 | and have some Spanish seasonings.

00:47:14.000 | Another day you can have veggies.

00:47:15.000 | It just adds a little bit of variety and helps you to have some more vitamins, et cetera,

00:47:19.000 | which is useful.

00:47:21.000 | The best solution, though, for having meat and storing meat is not canning, though,

00:47:26.000 | unless you already have a canner and you already do that.

00:47:28.000 | The best solution is just simply freezing it.

00:47:30.000 | So while you're at the store, stock up on a bunch of meat and make sure that your freezer is full.

00:47:36.000 | You can get a lot of food into the little freezer that you have with your refrigerator

00:47:40.000 | if you actually use it.

00:47:41.000 | Probably at some point you'll want a chest freezer, so look around and grab one online that's used

00:47:46.000 | or go and get one.

00:47:47.000 | They're not that expensive.

00:47:48.000 | But if you have a chest freezer full of meat, you can store a year's worth of meat easily

00:47:53.000 | in a chest freezer, a medium-sized chest freezer.

00:47:56.000 | You may or may not have to rewrap something depending on the original wrapping of the food that you buy.

00:48:01.000 | You may need to wrap something.

00:48:02.000 | You may need to put it in its own plastic bag to minimize freezer burn.

00:48:06.000 | You may want a vacuum seal, something that you buy.

00:48:10.000 | That's up to you.

00:48:11.000 | But you can store a lot of meat, basically forever, in a freezer.

00:48:16.000 | So if you have never stored food, just consider doing what I've said.

00:48:24.000 | Go buy some flour, some oil, some sugar, some salt.

00:48:30.000 | Consider while you're doing that maybe picking up some pre-prepared baking mixes or pancake mix.

00:48:36.000 | Or if you have your own pancake recipe, you can make pancakes just with flour, oil, and salt.

00:48:42.000 | A little nicer if you have a few extra things to go in it, a little bit of vanilla, some baking powder,

00:48:46.000 | baking soda, et cetera.

00:48:47.000 | So you might stock up on some of those too while you're there.

00:48:49.000 | But keep a simple flour, oil, and salt.

00:48:51.000 | If you've got flour, oil, and salt, and you buy a dozen cans of peanut butter,

00:48:55.000 | a dozen cans of jelly, you have the ability to have breakfast every day.

00:49:00.000 | Pick up some rice and beans if you cook rice and beans,

00:49:03.000 | and now you have the ability to have lunch every day.

00:49:06.000 | And then fill a freezer full of meat.

00:49:09.000 | Whatever size freezer you have, fill it up full of meat.

00:49:12.000 | Now you have something to go with the rice and beans that's really well worth eating.

00:49:16.000 | That's all you need to do to prepare for a pandemic.

00:49:19.000 | If everything else stays online and you have emergency money, savings, to pay your bills,

00:49:24.000 | but you've got to quarantine at home, you should still have water, you should still have power,

00:49:29.000 | which means you can cook your meat in the crock pot, you can cook your meat on the stove,

00:49:32.000 | we don't need to get to all the emergency ways of cooking without power, et cetera.

00:49:37.000 | You just need food.

00:49:39.000 | So if you don't have a bunch of food in your house, can I encourage you, go get some?

00:49:46.000 | If you want to spend $1,000, I think you should.

00:49:51.000 | $1,000 of food in the house that you could always eat up will make you feel better

00:49:57.000 | when you're reading the news about something like a flu pandemic.

00:50:00.000 | It'll make you feel better.

00:50:02.000 | Now if you don't have $1,000, go spend a few hundred dollars, but just get those basics

00:50:07.000 | and make sure that you're stocking up on lots of calories.

00:50:13.000 | If money's not that big of an issue, then go ahead and just walk around the grocery store.

00:50:18.000 | It's nice to do this at some of the bigger stores.

00:50:20.000 | If you can get a membership at one, shop at a restaurant supply store or a Costco or Sam's Club,

00:50:26.000 | et cetera, or I guess you got WinCo and some of the places like that.

00:50:31.000 | Walk around and see some of the foods that are shelf stable.

00:50:34.000 | For example, a big box of dehydrated potatoes or dehydrated mashed potatoes.

00:50:37.000 | That's really nice.

00:50:39.000 | Sometimes it's nicer to eat mashed potatoes and dehydrated mashed potatoes than it is to eat rice and beans.

00:50:46.000 | If you see butter that's there, go ahead and stock up on a bunch of butter and put that in the freezer.

00:50:50.000 | You can keep 10 pounds of butter in the freezer.

00:50:52.000 | It'll last you for, I would guess, basically forever.

00:50:56.000 | If it becomes a little bit not so fresh to eat fresh, then you just cook with it

00:51:00.000 | or you use it as extra calories in your recipes, use it as an oil.

00:51:06.000 | Look around and say.

00:51:07.000 | But if you have a freezer, you can store most things in your freezer.

00:51:11.000 | You can store foods that are very nutrient dense, calorie dense, et cetera, and they store basically forever.

00:51:17.000 | If you add to that the canned foods, go ahead if you want to buy some soup, et cetera.

00:51:21.000 | But I just started with cheap.

00:51:23.000 | But have a deep pantry and have at least the ability to say,

00:51:26.000 | "If we had to be quarantined for a month, we could stay at home and have enough food for a month."

00:51:32.000 | The great thing about this is there's no downside.

00:51:35.000 | Number one, you'll probably save money because if you're going to go and spend $500 on meat,

00:51:39.000 | you're probably going to buy large boxes of it and get it cheaper than just little cuts here and there.

00:51:44.000 | And so you'll save money.

00:51:46.000 | You'll get a discount when you're willing to buy that much meat all at one time.

00:51:49.000 | You'll probably save money on all the rest of the purchases.

00:51:51.000 | If you buy a 25-pound bag of flour, you save money over buying 5-pound bags of flour.

00:51:56.000 | Now, the cost is just basically you can ignore it.

00:52:00.000 | But if you buy 5 20-pound bags of rice, you're going to save money on rice.

00:52:07.000 | Frankly, don't worry about preserving it at this point in time.

00:52:10.000 | Just plan to throw it away in a few years if you don't eat it.

00:52:12.000 | You'll probably eat some of it here and there.

00:52:14.000 | But if you don't eat it, throw it away.

00:52:16.000 | It's not going to make that big of a difference.

00:52:18.000 | But you'll feel better.

00:52:20.000 | Now, you can move on to other levels.

00:52:22.000 | What about longer-term storage foods?

00:52:24.000 | Well, there's a real place for them.

00:52:26.000 | My recommendation to people is start with things that are simple.

00:52:29.000 | But interestingly, I just looked up--Costco has always had emergency food storage.

00:52:35.000 | And you could buy--usually at Costco, you could buy a pallet of long-term emergency food supply, which they--

00:52:43.000 | Mountain House, for example, they sell a pallet of Mountain House food, which is dehydrated and freeze-dried food,

00:52:49.000 | about 4,000 servings of food.

00:52:52.000 | So they call it one year of food storage for $5,000.

00:52:55.000 | And that kind of food is nice because it's all prepackaged.

00:52:59.000 | It all comes in number 10 cans.

00:53:00.000 | As long as you got a place to save it, it'll last for a long time.

00:53:03.000 | It should last for--depends on the specific product you're buying, sometimes 15 years, sometimes 30 years,

00:53:07.000 | depending on the exact item in the cans.

00:53:10.000 | But that stuff will last for a long time.

00:53:11.000 | But it's a little bit weird to cook with if you're not accustomed to cooking with it.

00:53:14.000 | Probably easier to learn how to make that good than to make rice and beans good.

00:53:18.000 | But it is a little bit different for most people to cook with.

00:53:23.000 | So even if you went and did that, though, and just bought a pallet of food, 4,000 servings of food for $5,000,

00:53:29.000 | it doesn't cost all that much and probably worth your doing if you just want everything done for you.

00:53:34.000 | It's going to be a lot more expensive than what I said, but it's probably worth doing.

00:53:37.000 | The problem is right now, out of stock.

00:53:39.000 | Now, I don't know if it's gone out of stock in the last couple of days.

00:53:42.000 | I am trying to figure out to what level people are paying attention to the flu thing.

00:53:47.000 | I'm interested to know. It seems, for example, that masks, the supplies of the N95 masks seem to be diminishing.

00:54:01.000 | People going to Home Depot and stocking up on all the masks, et cetera, to prepare for flu.

00:54:05.000 | And that's a good thing to do for flu.

00:54:07.000 | We could talk about masks. We could talk about bleach to sanitize.

00:54:10.000 | We could talk about plastic and protective suits, et cetera.

00:54:13.000 | Yeah, there's a place for that.

00:54:14.000 | I just wanted to focus on food, just the simple ability for you to go home, stay at home, and have food available.

00:54:20.000 | Because many people know that they could do that and they could ignore it.

00:54:24.000 | So if you want to buy a pallet of food, go for it.

00:54:26.000 | It'll last for 20, 30 years, and you'll be glad you did.

00:54:29.000 | But it is going to be more expensive.

00:54:31.000 | There are things like MREs, military rations, or sorry, meal ready to eat, the military type of food.

00:54:38.000 | I've bought MREs.

00:54:40.000 | MREs have a place.

00:54:42.000 | What I like to do is I like to keep MREs in the car because, although the food is not particularly healthy, it's full of calories.

00:54:48.000 | And so if you're out and about and you have an option, it will be cheaper.

00:54:52.000 | Those are a few bucks a meal, basically.

00:54:54.000 | It'll be cheaper than going to a fast food restaurant.

00:54:57.000 | It'll probably be about the same level of calories and the same health level, but a lot of times just more convenient.

00:55:01.000 | So MREs and things that are packed for that long-term storage really are great, but as a thing in the car, not as a primary point of food storage.

00:55:09.000 | Then, of course, you could say, "Well, does my property produce anything for me?"

00:55:12.000 | It'd be really nice if you could add some eggs to what I said, flour and rice and beans.

00:55:18.000 | But in order to add eggs, you could stock up on eggs that would last for a month or two.

00:55:22.000 | But it'd be a lot better if you had some chickens in your backyard to produce some eggs.

00:55:26.000 | You can see the value of chickens.

00:55:28.000 | They can take all the scraps from your kitchen and turn them into lovely eggs that go really nicely beside your pancake.

00:55:33.000 | So a pancake or a waffle with peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and honey on top is really nice, but it goes a lot better with a nice fried egg.

00:55:41.000 | It goes a lot better with some nice bacon that you had stored in the freezer.

00:55:45.000 | So think about that and make sure that you have food not only to survive but to really thrive, to really enjoy.

00:55:52.000 | But then you get into home food production.

00:55:54.000 | It'd be really nice if you had a garden.

00:55:56.000 | You have some land that has the ability to produce some fresh vegetables. That goes a long way towards giving you some vitamins, something that's more useful.

00:56:04.000 | The ability to produce food on your own land is a superpower.

00:56:07.000 | You can do it in a kitchen window.

00:56:08.000 | You can do sprouts and have some nutrition from the sprouts to round out your diet or do salad greens on your patio.

00:56:15.000 | There's all kinds of ways to cook food, to grow food when you actually start to get into it.

00:56:21.000 | But I'm just trying to get you from zero to one or frankly from zero to 29, which is rice, beans, flour, oil, salt, canned meats, some of them, and frozen meat in your freezer.

00:56:33.000 | If you'll do that and you go now to the store and load up your kitchen, load up your pantry, load up your freezer, you'll probably sleep better tonight when you're reading about the coronavirus and thinking about the prospect of being quarantined in your house for a month.

00:56:50.000 | That's how I see it.

00:56:54.000 | That's all I wanted to focus on for today.

00:56:56.000 | I don't know. I don't think that there's any reason to freak out.

00:57:00.000 | No reason to panic about something like a flu virus at the moment.

00:57:04.000 | Just pay attention to it, just like with anything.

00:57:06.000 | Pay attention and think about what you would do.

00:57:08.000 | The key is you need to be early.

00:57:10.000 | You don't want to be the kind of person who's rushing out at the last minute to try to stock up when everyone else is rushing out trying to stock up.

00:57:16.000 | Because when panic sets into a population and people start engaging in panic buying, everything falls apart.

00:57:22.000 | So go now.

00:57:26.000 | Avoid the rush.

00:57:28.000 | Do it now.

00:57:30.000 | I've never had anybody say to me that they regretted buying food, having food storage.

00:57:34.000 | Simple to do, very practical, nothing crazy, and yet potentially could be very, very useful for you.

00:57:41.000 | I want to pivot now and just tell you I'm going to go ahead and starting next Monday, so Monday, February the 3rd, I'm going to launch a live webinar series, a live set of classes on preparedness, on practical preparedness.

00:57:57.000 | I've wanted to do this for a while.

00:57:59.000 | I'm going to do another class, which I'll announce tomorrow, probably basically simultaneously.

00:58:04.000 | But I've wanted to do this for a while because I have a unique take on personal preparedness.

00:58:09.000 | There are a number of good resources out there, a number of good books, and I'll tell you those books and tell you those resources.

00:58:14.000 | I've studied the topics pretty deeply, but one of the things that's often annoyed me is just that some people, there are some really good practical steps, and then there are some people that, some that aren't so practical.

00:58:26.000 | And I'm really big on practical.

00:58:29.000 | And so over the last few months, last year, I left the United States, and I moved with my family with a set of suitcases to a foreign country.

00:58:36.000 | And so I left everything behind and then started over.

00:58:40.000 | Well, one of the first things I started doing in the new country was shoring up my household.

00:58:46.000 | Once I stopped bouncing from Airbnb to Airbnb, then, of course, I started to say, "Okay, what do we need?"

00:58:51.000 | So I got a little bit of gasoline for my car, laid in some food storage.

00:58:55.000 | I didn't go out and get buckets with mylar bags and whatnot.

00:58:59.000 | It's not available.

00:59:00.000 | I just bought some rice and beans and some flour and some oil and some salt, right?

00:59:04.000 | Everything I've just told you, stocked up on peanut butter and jelly because it's simple, it's cheap.

00:59:09.000 | And if I leave here and move and I have to leave it behind, no big deal.

00:59:12.000 | But at least I know that I have a couple months' worth of food in my house that I can feed my children because as a father or a mother, there's nothing worse than looking at your hungry children, right?

00:59:21.000 | It's hard to think of anything worse than that.

00:59:25.000 | And so today, I just kind of just sat down and wrote this out in about 10 minutes to lay out for you.

00:59:30.000 | But starting on February the 3rd, I'm going to go through a live webinar series that I'm going to ultimately use to get your feedback on creating a course that I'll release here on the site because it's one of the most ignored areas of personal financial planning.

00:59:43.000 | I've defended the concepts of preparedness as being a fundamental part of financial planning.

00:59:48.000 | Everything in what I just said is useful in financial planning.

00:59:51.000 | I've talked about in asset protection.

00:59:53.000 | I talked about converting money into physical items.

00:59:57.000 | So if you have--let's say you went and spent $5,000 of food on a mountain house--a pallet of mountain house food from Costco.

01:00:05.000 | And that was one thing that you did with $5,000 when you were in financial difficulty.

01:00:09.000 | Well, it's pretty hard for me to imagine, although theoretically possible, it's pretty hard for me to imagine Chase Credit Cards sending their collector to your house to pack up your $5,000 worth of food and ship it off to the bank to satisfy their judgment against you.

01:00:24.000 | Meanwhile, if you have the $5,000 worth of food, you have $4,000 of long-term storage food that you can live on even if you have no job.

01:00:34.000 | And so this interplay between the financial systems and physical preparedness systems are fundamentally a part of the same component.

01:00:43.000 | So whether it's asset protection planning, whether it's emergency planning, if you've got a year's worth of food and you lose your job, well, one of the first things I want you to do is to stop spending money and go ahead and start eating some of the emergency food.

01:00:55.000 | Of course, if you need--get some fresh vegetables and things like that that's hard to store.

01:01:00.000 | There's no reason to go all the way to one side.

01:01:02.000 | But one of the most useful things to you in a job loss is going to be having savings.

01:01:06.000 | And so I would start eating down food to some degree if I lost my job rather than spending money in case I needed to move across state or move across the country to get another job.

01:01:16.000 | And so this is a neglected part of emergency--of financial planning, but yet it's an entirely sensible and important part of it.

01:01:24.000 | So, very simple.

01:01:25.000 | I'm going to launch on--I'm going to do a--start recording a series of live webinars.

01:01:29.000 | I haven't decided the exact schedule yet.

01:01:30.000 | I'll survey you if you join the course.

01:01:32.000 | And I'll survey you and we'll set it on a schedule that will work best for you.

01:01:38.000 | I haven't decided exactly the number of classes.

01:01:40.000 | I've probably--I've got at least five to--I've got many hours of subjects that I could do on it.

01:01:45.000 | And so I haven't fully decided the scope.

01:01:47.000 | I just decided to do this yesterday and just set up the site yesterday.

01:01:51.000 | So I'll let you--today.

01:01:52.000 | So I will work with you if you're in the course.

01:01:55.000 | It's going to be great.

01:01:56.000 | It's going to be worth your money.

01:01:57.000 | It's going to be worth your being there.

01:01:58.000 | And if you go through the initial live webinar with me, then you'll have the chance to help me shape the content.

01:02:04.000 | So if you have questions, I'll answer them and we'll help sort everything out in a very detailed scenario.

01:02:09.000 | I'll give you a detailed outline with specific recommendations, a specific approach, and specific plan of attack, of order of things, how to do things.

01:02:22.000 | So here's how you do it.

01:02:23.000 | Go to RadicalPreparedness.com.

01:02:26.000 | Again, RadicalPreparedness.com.

01:02:28.000 | That will forward you.

01:02:29.000 | I don't even have a full sales page set up, but that will forward you to a page where you can just simply buy the course.

01:02:35.000 | I'm selling it for $29, the cheapest course I've ever sold in my life.

01:02:40.000 | I probably should sell it for $499, but I'm going to write an experiment and see if--I'm going to do it at this low--at only $29.

01:02:48.000 | That's only now and only for the live webinar.

01:02:51.000 | I don't know what I'm going to sell the eventual course for after I redo it, non-live, with all your input and everything.

01:03:01.000 | But hopefully it's a no-brainer.

01:03:05.000 | I promise you that if you ever thought or have had the idea of thinking about emergency preparedness, didn't know where to start, didn't know how to organize it logically,

01:03:15.000 | or interested in where to start and what to do, but wanted some specific marching instructions of do this, here's why,

01:03:21.000 | and I'll explain all of that stuff to make it make really good sense for you, give it a shot.

01:03:27.000 | Go to RadicalPreparedness.com, sign up for the course, and we'll do this as a live webinar series on practical family preparedness.

01:03:34.000 | It'll be the most practical, the most useful class, the most useful resource you've ever taken.

01:03:41.000 | I just started creating the outline yesterday, haven't finished it, but it'll probably wind up being a mini-book that will walk you through logically,

01:03:48.000 | step by step by step, so that you can be confident that every dollar that you spend is good.

01:03:55.000 | There's a lot of free stuff out there on this subject.

01:03:58.000 | I already told you, you can go and read the LDS manual, right, 400 pages, free online, and I recommend you do.

01:04:04.000 | I have it, I've read it, I've studied it, I've done it, right?

01:04:07.000 | But the problem is that when you have the Internet, YouTube is full of preparedness stuff.

01:04:15.000 | There's so many good books. I've recommended tons of them.

01:04:17.000 | I own practically all of them. I've studied all of them.

01:04:20.000 | But the problem is, with so much free information and good information, it's just so much, it's hard to know where to start and what to do.

01:04:29.000 | And my ambition is to solve that problem for you.

01:04:32.000 | The thing that I'm world-class at is taking ideas, thinking them through, and then figuring out the sensible way to work your way through them in a sensible way.

01:04:41.000 | And I can do that with many subjects, and this subject is no exception.

01:04:46.000 | So yes, you can go out and get stuff for free.

01:04:48.000 | There's tons of stuff out there for free.

01:04:50.000 | The Internet is full of free prepping information, and go for it.

01:04:55.000 | But if you want to save time, and you want just somebody to say, "Do it fast, do it,"

01:05:01.000 | I'll have people who sign up for this webinar who don't show up a bit for the webinar,

01:05:05.000 | who just go through and get the executive summary basically at the end of, "Here's the book. Here's the order that you do it."

01:05:12.000 | And that's totally fine. If you want to save time, this is the way to do it.

01:05:15.000 | So go to RadicalPreparedness.com, sign up for my live webinar series, RadicalPersonalFinance.com,

01:05:22.000 | and we will start that on Monday, February 3, so you have to go now.

01:05:25.000 | You've got less than one week.

01:05:27.000 | RadicalPreparedness.com offer ends, I guess I need to close it on Sunday, right?

01:05:33.000 | So it's going to end on February 2, so you've got to go before midnight on Sunday,

01:05:37.000 | and we'll launch on Monday, February 3.

01:05:40.000 | Thanks for listening. RadicalPreparedness.com.

01:05:43.000 | With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season

01:05:48.000 | because Kroger brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices.

01:05:53.000 | And with a money-back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite.

01:05:58.000 | ♪ These are a few of my favorite things ♪

01:06:01.000 | Whether you shop delivery, pickup, or in-store, Kroger brand has all your favorite things.

01:06:08.000 | Ralph's. Fresh for Everyone.

01:06:10.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

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