Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Today is Tuesday, October 4, 2016, early in the morning on Tuesday.

And as things stand presently, there is another hurricane, a relatively large one, Category 4, headed in the direction of the United States. Presently, this hurricane, Hurricane Matthew, is inundating Haiti and Cuba with rain and certainly very high winds. Men and women down there are facing a very difficult circumstance.

But the cone of uncertainty certainly has much of the eastern seaboard of the United States in its sights, including where I live here in West Palm Beach, Florida. We'll see, time will tell whether it moves towards us or not, but at this point, it's certainly important to go ahead and take some preparations.

Today I have plans to share with you some simple, cheap, and very practical steps that you can take for hurricane preparations. I was born and raised in Florida, so hurricanes are nothing new. My parents spent a number of years of their life in the Philippines long before I was born, back in the '70s.

And so they went through various typhoons there, so I've grown up in a family that's relatively comfortable with dealing with tropical storms. For those of you who are not in hurricane country, I know hurricanes can often seem a little bit overwhelming and seem like, "How could you handle them?" In my opinion, they're one of the best types of natural risks to face just because of the advance warning.

Earthquakes don't generally give as much advance warning as hurricanes do. Tornadoes don't generally give as much advance warning as hurricanes do. And hurricanes are relatively simple to prepare for. They are usually not that big of a deal in the sense of when compared to other disasters that can be more acute.

The reason hurricanes are a big deal is because of their large size, that when they come through your state, your city, your county, they can devastate a massive region. And so they're generally a major hassle to deal with. But today I'm going to walk through some hurricane preparations for you.

And these are things that I believe are simple and practical. This show is not intended to be an exhaustive resource for you, but just some things that I have found to be useful and practical in the past. As we sit at the moment here on, again, Tuesday, October 4, we don't know what the actual course of this hurricane will be.

And the tendency that we generally seem to have as humans is to wait until the last minute to prepare. Unfortunately, that's a bad move because that's when it's the hardest to prepare. You see people rushing out right when the storm's about to hit and trying to put gas in their car and trying to get milk and eggs and bread from the grocery store and things get wiped out.

You want to avoid that. And a good secret of life is a good point to be well prepared in life is to move in a counter cyclical way. So if you've prepared for hurricanes when it wasn't hurricane season, the stores were filled and there's plenty of options around and you can stop shop around and get the best deals and you can lay the things by that you need to be ready for a hurricane.

If you wait to the last minute, you're in competition with everybody else. Prices change. Supplies run low and they can face significant problems. So the best time to prepare is always before the fact. Hopefully, I'll be able to get this show out to you in about an hour and this will be early enough that you can still take a few simple precautions.

The other aspect of preparation is you want to make sure that the things that you do are going to serve you even if a storm doesn't come. If you rush out and buy 10 loaves of bread and then the storm doesn't come and all your bread goes stale and moldy, then you'll be a little bit frustrated with yourself.

By the way, buying bread in advance of a hurricane is not necessarily a good idea. And if you do buy bread and it's starting to go stale and moldy, put it in the freezer. That's the way you keep bread to last longer. But you want to make sure the things that you do are reasonable, rational and not a knee-jerk reaction to fear.

So let's talk about hurricanes and these simple preparation items will be specific to hurricanes but I think will be very practical to you no matter what type of natural disaster that you face. With regard to hurricanes, there are two problems of the hurricane and this is the same again with most natural disasters.

There's the acute problem, the time during the actual storm, which is a relatively short period of time. And then there are the after effects of the storm. The acute problem is high winds, a significant amount of rain, the risk of flying projectiles coming through your window, etc. and invading your home and just simply the physical danger of that.

If you are living in a strong modern structure, generally you're not going to have much of a problem. If you're not in a strong modern structure, your best course of action is to leave. It's that simple. Hurricanes devastate people who live in mobile homes or who live in old poorly built houses.

Generally not that big of a problem, people who live in newer modern well-built structures. If you live in a mobile home or if you live in a similar physically weak structure, you need to leave. And it's the very best most important thing that you can do. Do not even consider trying to wait it out.

Leave. And this is definitely one stroke in favor of living in newer modern residences. As much as I wish building codes didn't exist from a political personal freedom perspective, it is certainly easy to appreciate them when you live in a structure where a big storm is coming. That's the major design of them.

And that's the time where you can appreciate them the most. During the acute problem of a storm, storms are generally fairly short-lived. We're talking, depending on the speed of the storm, 10 to 20 hours. And basically it's usually just a lot of rain, a lot of wind. It's rather fun and kind of exciting if it's your first time.

It's a little old after a while, but basically the wind pounds your house and you get tons of rain and watch stuff fly through the air. It's interesting. After you've done it once, you don't really want to do it again. But the after effects are the harder time. And these things are usually more of a nuisance than they are acute problems.

If a tree branch comes through your window and the flying glass breaks into your house and you wind up with your kids walking on it and cutting themselves, that's an acute problem. But the big problem is just simply the power outages and dealing with it. Power outage is the biggest hassle that most people face.

And so most of our preparations for something like a hurricane are simply preparing for being without power from anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. Now, the amount of time that you're without power will largely depend on where you live in relation to the power grid.

After a hurricane or a similar event, the power crews come in. Here in South Florida, they have a well-oiled machine. Our local power utility is Florida Power and Light. And they have this stuff down to an incredible science. They have disaster response teams. They have all the stuff mapped out.

They recruit power crews from all over the Southeast. Same thing when there are problems up in Carolinas, the FPL crews go up there and they come in and they start with the biggest number of people first. So if you live on a main line or if you live in an area where there are lots of people, chances are your power can come back pretty quickly.

If you live in a more remote area or where you're not on a main line, there's just a few hundred people on your line, chances are you're going to be waiting until the end. By now, you should probably know that. If you've lived there a while, you should know that.

If not, you may or may not be able to figure it out. But most of the preparations that we need to do for hurricanes is simply to prepare to be physically safe during the acute event during the storm and to prepare to do without power and utilities after the storm for a period of time.

So let's walk through some very simple preparations that you can make. The first most important need that you need to attend to is communication. Your ability to communicate with others and your ability to have information to know what's the best thing to do. Information and communication should be your highest priority.

And you should start with your cell phone. Cell phone is your most important communication asset. Now I'm a long time amateur radio operator. I got my license when I was – I'm sorry, I don't remember exactly but I think I was 10, 11, 12 years old, something like that.

And I spent years participating in the local emergency communication organizations. They call it the – there's an organization they call Amateur Radio Emergency Services, ARIES, and then there's another one called RACES. But these are the organizations that do disaster preparedness. When I was younger, I would deploy to the Red Cross shelters during the hurricanes and serve as a communications operator where you go and set up your communications.

In the amateur radio space, there's a long time idea that amateur radio – when everything else fails, amateur radio works. And that is true to some extent. But it used to be much more true than it is now. It used to be that in the past, the phone lines would go down and basically people couldn't communicate for days and days and days.

But cellular technology has completely changed all of that. Now in the early days of cellular technology, when a hurricane or a storm would come through, that would mean that the network would be down for a long time, many days if not weeks. And so in those cases, radio was even more important than it is now.

Today, however, the mobile phone companies have really done an amazing job of preparing for acute events like storms. What they actually do is they have these units they call – I think they call them CALS, cellular on wheels, acronym is CALS, where they bring in these mobile cellular trucks which are a mobile cell station all in self-contained with a power source, antenna, radio abilities.

And they bring these things into a disaster area and they'll reignite the network very, very quickly. And so if you look at past storms, the biggest one was Hurricane Sandy, and you compare the response time of the mobile networks and how quickly they came back online, it is dramatically better than it was in the past.

That's not to say that the cell phone system can't go down. And that's not to say that there's no place for things like radio. But for most people, the idea of getting into radio is going to be far bigger – far much – too big of a hassle for you to really want to really engage in.

And your cell phone is your best tool. It may not work during the acute event and it may not work during the first little bit of time after the event, but it will work better than it's ever done in the past. And the mobile phone companies do a great job of bringing the networks back quickly.

Incidentally, if you're interested why radio is still important versus a cell phone, radio is the way that you can communicate with other people without a centralized network that's being maintained by somebody else. So cell phones and internet connectivity through the cell phone is a far superior technology to radio signal during a time when the grid is up, to use a generalized term.

You can communicate and put a picture on Twitter and somebody on the other side of the world can see that instantly. That is powerful. And cell phones are – and mobile technology, because of the connection to the network, is just – the ability to communicate is unparalleled. It's unparalleled by anything in the radio world.

However, the disadvantages of things like a cell phone network is that you have to go through a gatekeeper. You have to go through a centralized infrastructure and that infrastructure can either fail or it can be controlled. So if you're depending on Twitter to organize your political resistance campaign in a closed-off totalitarian state, the state has the ability to shut off Twitter to some extent.

Now, you can work around that. You can tunnel in with a – hide your IP and mask your IP and come in through a virtual private network into the gateway in the country and you can work around it. There's – I mean VPNs in China are tremendous and people all over the world in the past when Netflix wasn't allowed in Europe, people would tunnel in with a VPN from the United States and there are ways around things.

But you're still dependent upon an internal infrastructure. But the way that radio technology works is you can work from point to point. So if I set up a long-range – it's called a high-frequency antenna with an amateur – with a ham radio, I can set up a radio in my backyard with string of wire across my yard and I can reach out to somebody and talk to somebody 8,000 miles away or 12,000 miles away if the signal propagation is effective and I can do it on a few watts of power where literally you can speak from one side of the United States to another or around the world on just a couple of watts of power if you use the right technology or you can do it with hundreds or thousands of watts of power.

And because you can communicate person to person, there's no need for any centralized infrastructure. One of the great things about radio is it's possible to do many of the digital things that other people can do over a radio signal. You can send email over a radio signal. You can communicate with digital modes of communication.

You can do texting. And there is better and better integration all the time between the mobile device and the radio signal. So radio does still have its place. But for the sake of the vast majority of you, which I probably lost going through all that, don't worry about it.

Just dig into – just use your cell phone. And it will work well very quickly after the storm if it goes down at all. The key to your cell phone is you got to keep it charged. And if you want indications of how important this is, watch the news.

Either watch the news after this Hurricane Matthew event or consider back to your past news exposure from Hurricane Sandy or other large storms. And what you see is that the number one thing that people want access to is a strip where they can plug in their cell phone charger.

Walk through an airport. What do you see? People are plugging in their cell phones. The ability to plug in and charge a cell phone is one of the primary things that you should plan for. But the best way to do this is not to walk around aimlessly around your neighborhood looking for somebody who has a generator and carrying your little dinky little three-foot cell phone extension cord with you to plug it in.

The best way to do that is to maintain a battery backup system for yourself. And the very best technology here is to own a few of the lithium battery backups, the larger battery packs. Now, most of you have probably seen these as a freebie given away at something like an event where they give away this little square, little battery pack that goes in your pocket.

That stuff is fine, but I recommend that you buy one that's much bigger. I will link in the show notes to a couple that I own. I own one that's called a Comashi 15,000 milliamp external battery power pack portable charger with powerful dual USB. I also own a RavPower 13,000 milliamp external battery pack.

And the reason I own these is because they were cheap. The best deal is this Comashi one. It's on sale right now on Amazon Prime for 17 bucks. And it's a 15,000 milliamp external battery power bank. So let me explain what this means. If you look up your cell phone battery rating, you'll get a number that is rated in milliampere hours.

So my iPhone 6S Plus is rated for about 2,700, 2,800 milliamp hour batteries. When you get those little freebies that you get at a show, those are great. But if you check the label on them, you'll usually see that they're rated for about 2,200 milliamps. So they're not even a full charge as compared to your cell phone.

They're not even a full charge. And they're not even a... They don't charge at a high voltage. And so they're very slow to charge. If you've ever plugged one in, they just grow very, very slowly. If you buy a real battery backup power bank, like the one I'll link to in the show notes, it's 17 bucks and it's rated 15,000 milliamp hours.

So that's in excess of about five full charges for your phone. If your phone were at 0% and you wanted to bring it back to 100%, you can do that about five times completely from this charger. And more importantly, well, also importantly, the charger has a very high output...

Has a high output port where it'll do this charging very quickly. And so if you do nothing else to prepare for a hurricane or if you do nothing else to prepare for life, you should own one at least, or preferably a few of these battery backup banks. You can get them as high, if you look around online, you can get them as high as 20,000, 22,000 milliamp hours.

The balance that you're always... The thing that you're always trying to balance between these is how physically large the battery is and how much you actually need. So I would recommend that if you don't own any battery power banks, you buy a diversity of sizes. And that way you'll always have one available to you to take in whatever form it is.

So you might have a large 20,000 milliamp hour pack that you carry when you travel. That's what I do. I carry a few when I travel. And that way, if you're sitting on an airplane or sitting in the airport and there's no power packs, you know that you basically have a very large battery pack.

You can use your phone the entire time. If you watch movies, read books, listen to stuff, whatever you're doing while you're traveling, you can do that and you can still arrive with a phone that's at 100%. When I'm traveling, for example, I was at FinCon 16 last week. The entire time I was there, I kept my 15,000 milliamp hour battery pack in my back pocket.

And it's about the size of a second phone. But it fits easily in the back pocket. I stick my cord in there and then I charge up my phone a couple times throughout the day. Because when you're at an event like that, you're constantly using your phone. You're constantly running it down.

And so it's very nice and very comforting to always know that it's in its high range of charge. It can be really damaging psychologically, if nothing else, if it's actually to your business or if you need it. There's an emergency and you need to access the mapping function. You need to access the communication functions.

Something happens. You had a car accident. Now you need to talk on it to get help there. All of a sudden, you've been using the battery all day. You didn't plan ahead for your battery backup and you're down to 10%. That's not so fun. And so carrying a battery backup system with you will be the best thing to do.

And this is the best thing to do for hurricane preparations as well. So for you and for all the members of your household who have a phone, you should have a battery pack. These are lithium ion batteries. They work really, really well. They maintain their charges really well. They charge up right from a USB port.

And so you just need to make sure that you have these and you charge them up. The best resource for this area of keeping your cell phone charged is Stephen Harris's website, which is cellphone1234.com. I've mentioned him on the show in the past. He's actually appeared on the show in the past all the way back in episode 85 where I interviewed him on how to really save money on utility bills.

Stephen is an energy expert. That particular show was not well received because of the way that he conveys himself. He comes across as somewhat arrogant and pompous, but he is a true expert in the area of energy. And years ago, I found his preparation classes, his hurricane preparation classes, and I instantly recognized the excellence of his theory when it comes to this area of emergency preparations.

And I'll mention and link a couple of his websites that are incredibly valuable. The best thing about his ideas, specifically with regard to emergency preparations, is they're much similar to the way that my ideas function in the world of finance, that everything is multifunctional and everything relates and everything is sensible.

So when he goes into emergency preparations, he doesn't approach it in a single way where it only works in this one way. Everything works together. And I found that his engineering prowess is fantastic. And so I've built many over the years, many of my own hurricane preparation plans around the ideas and topics that he has taught and that he discusses.

So I will link in the show notes and mention as I continue through my outline here more of his resources. But he is without question one of the best resources on this area. So your first need is communication. That's the first thing you should prioritize. That starts with keeping your cell phone charged.

If you do not have a highly functional car charger for your phone, which I'm sure the vast majority of you have, but get one. Again, don't get one of the cheap ones, dollar ones from the gas station. Get a good one that charges at a high voltage so it'll charge the phone quickly.

But most of you will use that as your primary source where if you need to charge your phone up, you put it in the car and you run it off the car battery. More about that in a moment. But keep your communications functional. Charge your phone up. Get some battery backups for your phone and make sure that you are prepared to keep your line of communication functional.

The next basic need that you have is cash, currency. You need $20 bills, $10 bills, $5 bills, and dollar bills. So if you don't have currency in your wallet or in your house, make sure that you go out and get some. Because when something like a hurricane comes through, often the power disappears.

The items are often available if you've got currency, if you can hand over stacks of green money. So make sure that you have stacks of green money. Again, the items are usually available, but often because the power is down, the company's credit card processing system isn't working, the phone line isn't connecting, so they can't run your card.

But if you have stacks of currency, you can make the majority of your problems go away. In addition to stacks of currency, have access to larger amounts of money. So when you're preparing for a storm, pull out your debit cards, pull out your credit cards, make sure that you have all of them ready.

Make sure that you have access on different networks. If you have an American Express and a Visa or MasterCard, make sure that you have access to the cards with large credit lines, things like that. If you need to evacuate your family and you need to get on and you need to buy all of a sudden a bunch of plane tickets or a bunch of gas, or you need to buy hotel rooms and things like that, that's where you want to have easy access to money.

This is the role of debit cards, credit cards, and stacks of cash. If you're like me, where you keep your checking account balances pretty lean in preparation for the storm, it might be good to go ahead and transfer over some money from your savings accounts into your checking accounts.

Make sure those accounts have a nice cushion in there during a storm or during the preparation for a storm or afterward. You'll probably fall a little bit behind on your budgeting system. You might not be writing down every dollar, tracking it perfectly. You might not do that. So transfer over enough money into your checking account so that you have a comfortable cash cushion to where if you're spending money on things that you need to spend money on, you're not so concerned with it.

You need to always be prepared to leave and evacuate. Anytime there's an acute crisis, you should consider seriously simply leaving. Getting away and getting out is often the best course of action. If you're going to leave, you probably will want to leave early in order to beat the rush.

So if you're preparing for something like a hurricane, the time to pack is now. Or if you're not ready to pack, at least make sure that you've got lists written down. What are the things that you're going to need to take with you? Simple examples, I have dogs. So if I'm going to travel, first I need to be prepared to travel to some place where my dogs will be able to be taken with me.

Hurricane shelter won't work because the hurricane shelters will not accept pets. So I'll need to have a different plan that's going to work for my dogs. And I need to do things like remember the dog food. And if all of a sudden you decide late at four o'clock on Thursday afternoon, the storm scheduled to arrive on Thursday night, you're like, "No, I got to leave." You're rushing around your house and you forget things like dog food or you forget things like diapers or you forget things like toys and entertainment for the kids.

And now you've got cranky kids, hungry dogs, and no diapers to put the kids in. So make sure that you have a plan in place to be prepared to leave and to evacuate. And this is the same for all of us, no matter any circumstance. I should be able to walk up to your house, bang on the door and say, "Listen, you've got to get ready to leave.

There's a riot that's coming down the street or there's a gas leak at the plant next to us, or there's a chlorine leak," or whatever it is. Usually, it's those types of things that need to...where you got to leave right away. Get in your car and go. And five minutes later, you should be able to have your family loaded up in the car.

You should be able to have the basics that you would need pre-prepared, pre-staged to be able to get you out, get you to a hotel, have the things that you need to be somewhat comfortable for the next few days. You should be prepared to do that and be able to leave in a few minutes under those circumstances.

Well, the way that you do that is you have a couple of bags packed. You have a bag with some simple clothes, with some simple food, some granola bars. You have some bags packed with a flashlight. You have your bags packed with something like a battery charger, ready to go with an extra cable for your phone and for all your family's phones so that if you run out and your phone was at 20%, you have a battery.

You're not stuck without a phone charge. Most important line of communication. You might have a couple of cheap of those Motorola FRS radios, family radio service radios in there so that you can communicate if you and your spouse are carpooling and you're driving two cars where you can easily communicate between the two cars while you're evacuating.

Things like that. You should be prepared to leave and evacuate. Now, generally, you're going to have more time than five minutes. And so you should have these lists pre-made of what you would need if you had an hour warning. So for me, if I had an hour warning, there's going to be a lot more things that I'm going to load up and take with me than if I have five minutes warning.

So make the lists now. If you've never done this, sit down, use the opportunity of an impending storm, and use it as a way to guide your thinking and say, "Okay, it's hurricane time. What do I need to make sure that I have things covered?" Reference some of the lists and things that are easily available from the various emergency disaster response agencies, and that will also be helpful to you to make sure you don't forget anything.

Also, reference your packing lists. One suggestion for those of you who ever travel is make sure that you always have a master packing list which contains everything that you might ever need for traveling. I did this 10 years ago, and if I ever need something that I don't have on a trip, I make sure it's on there.

But what it means is by having a master packing list, when I sit down for a trip, I just print out the master list. I go through it, and I can pack in about 20 minutes, and I never forget anything because anything that I could ever possibly need is on that master list.

I use that master list to jog my memory, and I decide I'm going to a warm place where I don't need all this winter stuff, but if I were going to a winter place, then I would need this stuff. Or I need to make sure that I have my chargers.

I need to make sure that I have my dental floss. I need to make sure that I have a backup pair of glasses, et cetera. So make sure that you have a master packing list, and use the next couple of trips that you go on to create that list, and then keep note of what you use, what you don't use, and then you customize it for each trip.

But when you're doing something like this, you should reference your master packing list and figure out what you would need for a trip, and then figure out what you would need for something like an evacuation. For an evacuation, I would add food and water to that list, dog food, dog leashes, dog collars, et cetera.

I generally have lots of food and water on my master packing list. But the point of these lists is to get you ready to leave quickly and early. If you think about when people evacuate for emergencies, again, the problem is when you get stuck with everyone else. So think back to Texas, back to that disastrous hurricane, I forget the name of it, that hit before Katrina did.

And now people ended up sitting on a Texas highway for 12 to 18 hours, and they sat there and they ran out of gas sitting there on the highway because they were stuck in traffic. If you think you're going to leave, go early and beat the rush. Now to be prepared to go, you need to have a destination in mind.

So first, think about friends and family. And hopefully you have a network of friends and family that would extend beyond your own city and your own county. And just think about can you go and visit them. If you're going to visit friends and family, you'll find number one, that's probably going to be cheaper because you won't be incurring large hotel bills.

And it'll also be more fun. So instead of sitting in a hotel room and stewing for three days, which might lead to you're not wanting to leave and evacuate quickly, you may just enjoy having a visit with a friend. Thus, you can have a great little mini vacation by staying with friends and family and you won't have as big of a reason not to go because you're looking forward to actually being able to go and stay with friends and family.

So consider, and if you've never done this before, or if you're preparing for a hurricane, sit down and look at a map and say, "Where are the friends and family located that I know that are within a few hours of me?" For example, here where I live on West Palm Beach, I think about friends of mine that live on the West Coast of Florida.

That is generally, it's a couple hours away, about three hours away. That's generally far enough away that I can be way away from any effects of a storm. I have friends and family that live in Central Florida. It's a little bit closer. Sometimes the things that would affect Eastern Florida or Southeastern Florida will also affect Central Florida, depending on something like the track of a storm.

Then I can go northward. So I have friends and family up through the north that I could get to in a few hours. So plot those things out on a map, whether that's physical or mental, and consider where you would go. Then when you do something like look at a hurricane track, that will inform your decision of who to contact and which direction to go in.

You want to be away from the hurricane track and you want to be away from the potential changes of a hurricane track. Something like Hurricane Matthew, which looks like it's going to be continuing, coming up the Eastern seaboard, I would not choose to go north to evacuate. I would go west or southwest.

Generally wouldn't go south because if things change, you're stuck down in the worst part of Florida to be stuck in. But west gives me lots of options and I can still go south or north if I need to. Friends and family, plot them out. Hotels also work. One thing that might be a good thing to do is if you think you're going to evacuate, sit down, look at a map, figure out where you're going to head to and make a couple of hotel reservations.

Try to find something that would be an enjoyable, inexpensive place to stay rather than last minute and you're stuck at some flea bag hotel on the side of the interstate. Why not stay at a place with a pool where your kids will have something to do when you have that option?

So think it through, plan it through, and make a couple of ideas as far as what you can do. Next, fill up all the gas tanks on all your cars. This is always the easiest way to store gas. It is to have gas in your car. A good habit to get into as far as simple preparations is to keep your gas tank mostly full.

When my gas tanks start to get to about a half a tank, I start looking around for gas. I have a few gas stations that I regularly frequent because they are consistently the lowest priced. Here in my region of the country, Racetrack almost always has the cheapest gas. They have the best customer service.

They have beautiful stations. They're well lit. And so I generally almost always go to a Racetrack. That's what I do. But for you, you probably know what the gas stations around you are. And so make a habit of keeping your gas filled with... Excuse me, your car filled with gas.

Most vehicles will have a range on them of about 400 miles. And if you're filling up your gas tank around a half a tank, you'll usually almost always have a range of about 200 miles. And 200 miles will get you out of the problem areas for most disasters. It'll at least get you to where you can get more gas.

So don't be one of these people who runs your tank down to an eighth of a tank and then starts looking around. If you get down to a half or a quarter or a third, make sure at that point in time you go ahead and fill up. It'll buy you some good peace of mind in life to build that and develop that as a habit.

One benefit of having extra gas tanks and fill up all your cars is that if you stay put and you need gasoline, you can always easily siphon the gasoline out of your gas tank. All you need to do is just stick a little piece of tubing down. You can start a siphon manually, just with your mouth, a gravity-fed suction siphon.

Be careful, a mouthful of gasoline is not fun. Or you can have a little hand pump made up. And if you are one who has a generator and has gas set by for your generator, a siphon should be a standard part of your equipment. Go ahead and get some extra water and food, but do it sensibly.

Best way and cheapest and simplest way to store water is to get cases of water bottles at one of your big box stores, Costco, Sam's, BJ's, etc. Especially if you live in a house or you live in an apartment like I do, this will be just your simplest way to do it.

I primarily have two aspects of being able to provide water for my family. One is cases of water bottles and two is a water filter. At Costco right now, you can buy trays of Kirkland brand water bottles. I think they come 40 water bottles to a pack and they're half a liter each, 500 milliliter bottles.

Costco sells those for about $3.68. Let's just say $3.70. If you actually look at the numbers on it, there are 5.26 gallons in a case of those water bottles. That comes out to be about 70 cents per gallon. The most important thing is that these water bottles are in a very convenient form of water.

I'd much rather have stacks of these cases of water in 500 milliliter bottles than I would have gallons, jugs of water or five gallon jugs of water because they're much more convenient and able to be accessed little by little. They're easily able to be distributed. If you just have five gallon bottles of water, that's great to be able to store a lot of water simply.

That'll be the cheapest way if you have five gallon jugs or gallon jugs or soda bottles that you filled up from the tap. That'll be cheap, but it's inconvenient for you to be able to give away five gallons at a time. But if your neighbor needs water and you have lots of these water bottles, then you have little bottles of water that you can pass along to them.

The other thing I like about storing water in this methodology is that it is compact and efficient from a spatial perspective. So I have in my pantry, I have a shelving unit, one of these robust, strong shelving units that you can buy. They're not too expensive. But on the bottom of it, I just have stacks of these cases and I have 60 gallons, 60, 70 gallons of water.

This just sits there and I always have water available. And then the great thing is because these are in a convenient form, they're very convenient to rotate out after a few years. Water doesn't go bad. When you're talking about things like this for emergency preparations, I'm not going to worry too much about the risks of plastic toxicity in water or things like that over time.

They're very convenient to rotate them out and you can go ahead and get new ones and use them for your picnics or your camping, et cetera. So buying flats of these water bottles, although it's not the cheapest thing to do, I don't consider 70 cents a gallon and $3.68 to have five gallons of individual half-liter water bottles set by.

I don't see that as a major problem. But the other aspect, especially to me living in an apartment, is having a water filter. And in our household, we use a water filter that's called a BERKEY, B-E-R-K-E-Y. It's very popular. Many people have them. But what they are is a gravity-fed filtration system.

And there are no moving parts. There's no pumps. It's not hooked up to the taff or anything like that. So it's very, very simple technology. It's got a hopper on the top and you pour the water in and gravity pulls it through some filters that are carbon or I don't remember what they're made out of.

I think they're carbon filters. And you can add on there additional filters that filter out the fluoride and the chlorine from the water filtration from the water as well. So if you live in a city and you're on a city water system and you want to filter out the chlorine from the water and/or the fluoride, then you can add these water filters as well.

So all of the water that we drink goes through the BERKEY system. They're not cheap to buy. They're expensive to buy. But the cost per gallon is extremely low. And the great thing about it is on a day-to-day basis, this will remove, number one, the chlorine and the fluoride and also it will remove any potential toxins that get into the city water supply.

So that way if you get a boil water notice for your area, it's not as damaging to you as it may be to some other people because you've already been filtering the water. But another big aspect reason I have it is because it's part of our disaster scenario where let's say that we have a hurricane system and the city water grid is down and I run out of bottled water because living in an apartment, it's hard for me.

I don't choose to put 50-gallon drums of water down in my basement. I don't have a basement. I don't have any place where I can do that. If I lived in a place where I had a basement, I would keep 50-gallon drums of water in the basement or outbuilding shed, et cetera.

If I lived in a place where I could have a stock tank, I would do that. If I could have a pond, I would put in a pond. But living in an apartment, that's just simply not sensible or practical. The risk of my ever needing those things is very, very low and the cost of doing it is much too high.

But it doesn't mean I still don't need a plan. So the Berkey is something where if I run out of bottled water, I can literally pour pond water into it and it will make the pond water safe to drink. So I have a wagon, a little cart that can be used.

I know where my closest water sources are for the canals to my house. I've got buckets so I can take some buckets and I can put them on my wagon. I can go get water out of the pond. You pre-filter the sediment out a little bit, put a fabric, use some t-shirts or coffee filters or whatever.

T-shirts are usually fine. Filter out any large sediment and you pour it through the water filter. It'll come through gravity fed and it'll render the water safe to drink. So by using some storage and then some filtration, you wind up with an essentially unlimited water supply for your hurricane preparations and disaster preparations.

Now again, for a hurricane, this is usually not going to be relevant. You're going to have the water back in a few days, a week, something like that and there will be options available to you. But that's one. So a couple of ideas for you of simple practical preparations that are useful in a day-to-day scenario and also useful in a disaster.

Also prepare for food. The key with food is to remember that for a hurricane, you should focus on things that are simple and that are easily consumed. We're not talking about the zombie apocalypse and the end of the world as we know it. You don't need a bucket of wheat berries to grind up and bake bread in your solar oven for a hurricane.

Just a little bit of junk food, crackers and whatever junk food that's pre-prepared and pre-packaged and doesn't need refrigeration is perfectly fine and perfectly adequate. There are lots of things that you can do that will be uncooked options and this would be ideal. Peanut butter and jelly work great for a hurricane.

They're good, they're tasty, they fill you up. They're great. Now the thing you see that people do when hurricanes are coming is they rush out and buy a bunch of bread and a bunch of milk. Bread and milk don't work all that well for hurricane preparations. First of all, milk goes bad if it's non-refrigerated.

You're likely going to lose power so you're going to lose refrigeration. Now your milk is going to go bad. Bread molds quickly. So my suggestion to you is instead of buying bread, buy tortillas. If you go to your store, they sell these at all the grocery stores, you can buy the large packages of, in my area, the brand is Mission.

Mission flour tortillas. These things last weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks without molding. They're way cheaper than bread and you can make a great peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of them. They're delicious just to eat on their own. Unlike bread, I don't care so much to eat whole wheat bread on its own without something on it, but I don't mind eating a tortilla on its own.

You can put some salt on it and you can cook it up and fry it up so it's crisp and that makes it a little bit interesting and different. You can use it as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You can put meat and cheese on it. They're very, very flexible, very, very cheap.

They last a long time. So think about doing something like that. If you're at the grocery store and you need to get some food, look at the tortillas instead of the bread. That's what would be my suggestion. Milk doesn't work very well because of the refrigeration, but if you want to have milk, for example, your family eats breakfast cereal, then you can go ahead and buy cereal.

Cereal's not going to go bad. You can buy milk, but don't buy milk in the gallon jug from the refrigerated section. Look for what's called UHT milk. UHT milk stands for ultra high temperature pasteurized milk. The brand name in the United States is a brand name called Parmalat, P-A-R-M-A-L-A-T.

Comes in these white bottles with blue lettering on it. You may or may not be able to find it in your area. Sam's Club sells these by the case. Costco doesn't, so I have my parents buy the stuff for me from Sam's Club because they're still members there. Costco doesn't have it, but you buy the stuff by the case.

UHT milk is what most of the world lives on. Refrigeration is difficult in many parts of the world. This ultra high temperature pasteurization is the methodology that they use to be able to have access to milk on the grocery shelves. This milk comes in these little, what are they called?

I think Tetra packs. These little cardboard boxes that are foil lined, kind of like boxed wine. Comes in a box similarly. You buy this milk and it's shelf stable. It'll last for months and months at room temperature. You can set aside a couple of cases of this stuff and then you can use it.

It comes in small containers that are very practical and usable. For a family and cereal, you'll be able to use up a bottle of the milk for breakfast. Once you open it, it does need to be refrigerated, so you need to drink it quickly. These are very practical emergency preparations.

It's a very simple way for you to have milk on hand because they come in small containers. You can drink them up in one sitting or breakfast and lunch. You can have the entire thing. It tastes great. It doesn't need any refrigeration. Most of us in the United States would prefer to have a nice cold glass of milk versus a warm room temperature glass of milk, but it's milk.

It tastes like milk. Don't make any claims as to the health benefits of it. It ain't no raw milk, that's for sure. You can do your own research on that. But for something like a hurricane, it can be a great comfort food. It doesn't require refrigeration. You can set aside a couple of cases of that and you can use it over time.

You'll use it at some point. We use this. In my family, we don't really drink milk. Oftentimes, we're cooking and we don't have milk on hand to make the recipe, but I keep a couple of cases of the Parmalat, the UHT milk. That way, when I need milk, we'll go ahead and grab it.

I'll use it in the recipe. I've got the milk and you can go ahead and work from there. Another way to do milk is powdered milk. If you're unfamiliar with powdered milk, I grew up drinking some powdered milk from time to time because powdered milk is an excellent way to save costs.

But you can set aside some powdered milk and this is also useful for those of you who cook, which hopefully is all of you, and you want a way to keep some milk on hand that doesn't require you to have it refrigerated in the refrigerator. Powdered milk works really well as well.

Doesn't require refrigeration. But when thinking about food, think about cheap, uncooked options, boxes of crackers, pre-prepared meals, et cetera. Just go around your big box store or Publix and just think about what could I have on hand that doesn't require refrigeration. Buy some extra fruit so you have something tasty, et cetera, and you can get yourself through a week with no power pretty simply, even if you don't have any method way to cook.

Now, hot food is really nice to eat. But you need a way to cook it. So you need to consider a way to be able to cook in the wake of a power outage. I have an electric stove. So my electric stove is useless. And an electric stove requires a tremendous amount of electricity to operate.

So it's just simply not going to be practical. For the majority of you, your primary way to cook should be your simple gas barbecue grill that's probably on your back porch. So if you have a gas grill, you should make sure that you have your propane tanks filled up and that you always have a couple of extra propane tanks on hand.

Generally, FYI, it's cheaper to fill your propane tanks than to swap them out. You'll get a larger amount of gas at a cheaper price. The major time that you swap them out is just simply if you need to upgrade an old tank to a new tank. You can go ahead and do that through the swapping procedure.

But go ahead and take your propane tanks down to the local gas station or U-Haul dealership or wherever, camping store, wherever in your area they refill propane and have those things filled up. Keep those set by. If you have a grill, you can cook most of the things that you want to cook.

You can grill your meat, which is the first thing to do. If you lose power, consider grilling your meat. Come back to that in a minute. And also, many of your gas barbecue stoves will have a side burner that's a propane burner. You can put a pot on that and cook a nice pot of rice or any other hot food that you have, beans and hot dogs, whatever it is that you have set aside in your canned food stores.

You have that little side burner on there that can be helpful. One thing I make, one recommendation I make to people is if you have a grill, consider buying a griddle for your grill. A while ago, I got turned on to griddle cooking and I have a portable propane grill.

It has three burners on it. It's called a Camp Chef Pro 90. It has three propane burners on it. And I have a large griddle that sets on top of it. And this gives me, like in a restaurant, a large griddle surface that I can use to cook all kinds of food for large groups of people.

But in my research for that, I've discovered that there are companies that will make a custom-sized griddle for your barbecue grill. And I've turned a few people on to this and all of them have been very satisfied with it. But what it is, it's a sheet of carbon steel or steel that you put down on your grill and it turns your grill surface into a griddle, which is useful because now your propane grill will be very efficient for you to be able to make eggs, bacon, pancakes on.

If you want to have a nice Saturday morning breakfast outside or you want to cook for a lot of people, it's also useful for you to be able to make a stir fry or make fried rice and all these things on. And it can be useful as part of your emergency preparations.

If you're facing a storm next week or this week, you're not going to be able to get a griddle made in time. But consider that. Do some research online for a griddle that'll go on top of your propane grill. Very, very useful. Also, it's good to have a backup.

So many of you will have a camping stove of some kind. I have one of those little Coleman stoves, two burner Coleman camping stoves, and I just keep a supply of little two pound propane tank bottles set by. So that way, you've got a couple of backups, got a couple of ways to be able to cook.

If you have a charcoal grill, make sure that you set aside some bags of charcoal. Charcoal grill work great, but set aside some bags of charcoal. If you have the need to cook, incidentally, and you make sure that you can cook very efficiently with a small amount of charcoal.

So if you have a few bags of charcoal set by, then you can use that. If you don't, you can use it in a grill or whatever, and you could just put a pan or a pot on top of that. In much of the world, you go around, you see that people make their business.

One of the businesses that you see is street food. The way that many people do it is they take a wheel from a car and they use that wheel and turn that into a little mini charcoal grill. Use a few pieces of charcoal, light it up, get it going, and you can cook in a skillet over that.

You can roast over that. A little bit of charcoal can work very, very well. If you lose power, a couple of things you want to consider. Start with keeping your refrigerator and your freezer closed. And when you're in the middle of a storm, this is your best thing to do.

Keep things closed. Also, if you've lost power, consider doing something to help with the insulation for your refrigerator and your freezer. Consider some blankets or sleeping bags around them. Wrap them up to keep the cold in and the heat out. One thing that you can do if you have a freezer especially, or if you have a refrigerator and you're heading into a storm, make sure that you go ahead and put in things that are very dense, things like a gallon jugs of water.

Leave a little bit of room on top so they can freeze, and you can go ahead and freeze these gallon jugs of water in your freezer. And that will serve as a cooler and it'll keep your freezer cold for a longer period of time. In a minute, we'll talk about how to keep your freezer cold without power.

But for now, if you assume that it's just simply going to ... you're not going to have power, then just try to keep it closed. Minimize the opening and closing of it. Don't allow the kids to go in there. Just do it one time real quick, in and out.

Get your stuff and do it all at once. That will be very helpful to you. If you feel like you're going to lose food, start by eating all the food that's going to go bad first. So eat your ice cream. Get out the big bowls and eat the ice cream before it melts.

Start grilling your meat. If you lose power, bring out the meat and start grilling it little by little. That's where you can have a nice big barbecue, throw a big barbecue for the neighbors if you have too much meat. But don't let stuff go bad. Grill it and share it.

Other people will be happy for it. And that's the best thing to do with it in the wake of a storm, is don't let it go bad. If you are looking at things and you're considering things, don't be stupid and just start throwing things away because they simply got warm.

Remember, cows are not kept at 12 degrees Fahrenheit when they're alive. Things don't spoil instantly. You'll start to hear food safety regulations and things shared around that says, "Okay, if your food has been above 40 degrees, you got to throw it out," or whatever the number is that's being used.

Don't do that. Use your common sense and use your eyes and your nose. So look at things and think about what is this good or is this not. Trust your nose and trust your eyes to tell you if something is good or something is not. If something is spoiled, you'll know it.

If you're concerned about something being spoiled, just make sure that you cook it well enough. And remember that people throughout history have been eating all kinds of things that are not perfectly refrigerated and they've figured out how to get through it. So cook things well if you're concerned about it and trust your eyes and your nose.

Throw away something that your eyes and your nose tells you is bad. Don't just follow an arbitrary rule. When you're cooking things, I meant to say this a moment ago under the cooking section, it's helpful to conserve energy. So if you only have a little bit of gas, for example, you don't have three backup propane tanks and all of a sudden you've got one that's only half full and you're concerned about it.

Think about efficiency with your cooking. So cook with an efficient pot, for example. Use a pot that's a heavy material and very, very thick and very efficient so it'll retain the heat. Use that instead of a thin and flimsy pot. Consider using something like the hay box or straw box method of cooking.

The idea here is if you want to cook something, you can heat up your pot to the appropriate temperature, get it hot, and then you put it into an insulated container. The historical one that used to be done with a hay box where you take a box and you wrap it up with straw.

You put your food in there, cover it with towels and blankets. And the insulating properties of that keep the food warm and help it to keep cooking without you continually putting more power into it and using up your fuel and your energy reserves. Today, you can easily substitute a cooler.

So if I only had a little bit of fuel, first I would cook with a big pot and I would make a big pot of rice. I've got canned beans set aside. I just need to cook a big pot of rice. So bring it up to the temperature. Make a big pot.

Bring it up to the temperature. And then as soon as I've got it boiling with rice, I would put it into a cooler and wrap it up with towels, close the lid on the cooler, stuff the whole thing full, get the insulation as best as possible, and then leave it in the cooler to do all the cooking without leaving it on the heat and using up more fuel.

And if you keep it insulated, you'll be able to get more cooking done using this methodology. It'll take a little bit longer, but it'll use far less fuel. So think about conserving fuel. Now here's the simplest way to prepare in advance to keep your house functioning without power. And that's simply to use your car to power your house.

Again, I learned this from Stephen Harris. And after years of having generators and dealing with generators, I realized the ingenuity of his solution. The idea is this. Many people buy generators, and generators are great. Generators have their place as part of your emergency backup systems. The challenge with generators, especially as regards something like a hurricane, is people don't maintain the generators properly.

They don't run them regularly. So the carburetor has fuel in it. The fuel varnishes, and the generator becomes unusable because they didn't run it regularly. People don't treat the gas in it. So the gas goes bad and damages the generator. Most people don't store fuel for the generator. It's completely absurd to see how many people will go and buy a $500 generator and one five gallon can of gas, which won't even last them, maybe last them a few hours.

Far better to have a $50 generator and $450 of gas than a $500 generator and five gallons of gas, whatever that money winds up being. So generators have their place, and they're certainly great to have, but they don't necessarily need to be the first step for many people. And here in South Florida, my power grid is very, very stable.

I don't have the problems that some of you have in other parts of the country where power goes away regularly. So I no longer – actually, I do have a new generator on my camper van, which is part of my backups. But for a while now, I haven't had a generator.

I got rid of my generators when I sold my other house to downsize into an apartment. And so the major plan that I've had is just simply to use a power inverter. So if you look at your car sitting in the driveway, you can picture that car as a generator because you have an engine and you have an electrical system that creates electricity, feeds a battery, and that engine is something you've paid thousands of dollars for.

It's probably something that's in excellent shape or it's well-maintained. It's got a nice gas tank that's pretty big that's attached to it. You've got a really great generator sitting in your driveway already. You don't need to trot down to Sam's or Home Depot and buy yourself a generator unnecessarily.

Start with the one that you have sitting in your driveway. In order for you to use that generator, however, you need to buy something called an inverter. An inverter, you'll picture this, many of you, as something that you plug into the cigarette lighter that allows you to plug your household appliances in in the car.

Useful travel tip. You can't usually do this with a cigarette lighter, but you can do something like if you have an inverter hooked up where you've got enough voltage, you can do something like use a crockpot in the car. So a good way to save money while you're traveling across the country is set up a crockpot or other similar slow cooker in the car, and you can cook a hot meal while you're driving down the road.

And then instead of stopping and spending $40 at a fast food restaurant, you can pull over to the rest area on the side of the highway, and you can have a nice hot cooked meal right there from the crockpot that cooked while you were driving down the road in your car.

So an inverter is a way of accessing the battery's energy and turning it into alternating current, 110 volt alternating current, which is the system that your house works on if you're in the United States. What you need is the type of inverter that doesn't plug into the cigarette lighter because the voltage that you can access out of the cigarette lighter is very low.

What you need is the type of inverter that you can access because you plug it in directly to your battery. You connect it with a couple of clamps onto your battery. And one of these inverters, you can get an 800 watt or a 1200 watt. I have a couple of them.

I have one 800 and one 1200 watt. These inverters will be very useful and you can use them to run a little at a time the different things that you have in your house. So you can use this to actually run something like your refrigerator and your freezer. The way that you want to do this is when you're running something that has a high current draw, you want to keep your car on during that period of time so the alternator is charging the battery.

So you park your car in your driveway, you plug on your clamps, the clamps from the inverter onto the battery, and then you run an extension cord into your house. What you should do is you plug in your refrigerator and run it for a short period of time, an hour, something like that.

Let it get down to temperature and then you unplug it again. Keep it closed, keep it insulated, but you keep it unplugged. Then you can turn your car off for another four, five, six hours, something like that. Then go ahead and plug it back in, turn the car on, plug the refrigerator on, and go again, cool it down again.

Using this methodology, you can keep your refrigerator, your freezer cold and functioning using simply your car for many days if you have a full tank of gas. Turn it on, run the car for an hour, cool it down, and you're good to go. Now, you should also be able to run some other things.

So if you think about what you need in the wake of a power outage, your needs are very basic. You need some lights, you need a fan here in Florida because it's very hot and humid after hurricanes. That's usually the worst, no air conditioning and no fans. You need some simple fans.

You need the ability to charge up your cell phone, perhaps to charge any other batteries that you use as well. So you can do that with the inverter. You don't have to run the car for that. You can just simply use the inverter and drain the battery down a little bit.

Make sure that you don't drain it down too much, but you can use it to drain it down some and run the car every few hours in order to charge the battery up. This is the best way to keep your house going without you needing to go out and buy a several hundred dollar generator.

Very, very simple. Anyone can start with this. I will again link to Stephen Harris' information on this. He has an entire audio show that he recorded on the Survival Podcast about how to do this. He's the expert. I'm just giving you the idea. Those of you who are technologically savvy can take it and run with it just based upon what I've said here.

I'll link to a couple of inverters. I have a Cobra inverter. I'll link to that in the show notes and I'll also link to Stephen Harris' websites where he links all the stuff. He is way more detail oriented than I am about going through and researching this stuff. It's not my area of interest.

This is a good way for you to start and just simply cycle this on and off. You can with a full tank of gas, you can be fine probably for four or five days, maybe even a week without just using your car to keep things going. Stephen Harris says that the calculation that most cars can idle for about 24 hours on one tank of gas.

If you figure that let's say you're idling your car for about four hours a day, first thing in the morning when you wake up for an hour, middle of the day, another time mid-afternoon and the last thing at night before you go to bed. If that's 24 hours a day, that gets you through six days of idling your car just with the gases in the gas tank, let alone any extra gas.

Really great option. Very, very practical. You don't have to buy a generator. That'll get you through the vast majority of things like hurricanes. If you're preparing for a hurricane, now's the time to charge up your batteries. I use rechargeable batteries in all of my kids' toys and all the flashlights, things like that.

Whether you have some of the newer battery technology, if you have a newer flashlight or whether you just have AA's. I try to standardize everything, flashlights, toys, et cetera, in my house on AA's. AA's have a good amount of energy in them and I use rechargeable Panasonic Eneloop batteries.

This is a nickel metal hydride battery that lasts and can be charged a couple thousand times. Way better than some of the old rechargeable battery technology. They're not cheap to buy, but they last. So I use these in flashlights, headlamps, et cetera. So get out the battery charger, charge up all the batteries, get ready to go in case you need all these flashlights.

Your kids will be using the flashlights a tremendous amount. They're lying around in the dark to read books and to play with games. So this is the time to charge up batteries, charge up phones, charge up Game Boys, charge up all of these things. Charge up your car batteries if you got the chance.

One little financial tip for you is if you keep your battery regularly charged on your car, that will help your car batteries to last. Now most of the time we're just simply driving around and the more you drive, that'll be good. The thing that kills the life of a battery is being discharged all the way and then having to be charged up again.

So if you want to maintain the life of your battery, you want to keep it charged as the highest point possible. Now of course you own the battery to use it, but the premise and the fundamental basis of battery life is keep the battery charged up to the highest point possible.

So if you want to help your car batteries to last a little bit longer, the mechanics say that one of the best things to do is to keep them consistently charged. What you want to get is a smart battery charger, an intelligent battery charger that clamps onto the battery and charges it up.

One brand that is really, really great is a brand called CTEK. C-T-E-K, I'll link to it in the show notes. But the CTEK battery charger is these very small intelligent chargers and if you put one of them on your batteries once a month and charge it up once a month, that will help your car batteries to last longer than they otherwise would.

Well if you have a battery charger like that, make sure that your car batteries are all charged up. Incidentally, one of the things that Stephen Harris teaches that I think is a really great idea as well is setting aside a simple – using a deep cycle battery and using that in your house as a simple battery backup system.

I'm waiting for all of the Tesla batteries, Elon Musk's batteries to work really great and be in every household. But until then, one deep cycle battery set aside and kept charged up can do a tremendous amount for your household utility with lights and a little bit of fan and et cetera.

Set aside in a closet, it can be tremendously useful to you in times of power outage. So those are some very simple, very practical ideas for you with regard to preparing for a hurricane. Now, finally, I'll close with this. If you're not in the path of Matthew, which many thousands of you are simply because you've got basically the entire eastern seaboard and you got a category 4 hurricane coming, who knows, but that affects a lot of people living on the eastern seaboard of the United States.

But if you're not in the path of Matthew, make sure that you think about a scenario like the one I've described. Anytime you see disaster strike other people, think about it and then prepare for that same disaster to hit you. If you're at a funeral for somebody's loved one that died, then you should be thinking about what would happen to my family if I were the one that were dead or if my wife were the one that were dead or my kids were the one that were dead.

How would we get through that? And what would I need to do now to make that circumstance a little bit easier? So think about that. If you see somebody who's facing a hurricane, think about, "Well, if I faced a hurricane, what would I need to do?" Take these ideas and think about them in your own application.

If you see somebody whose house burns down from a house fire, think about that. If you see somebody who's flooded out like the people in Iowa right now or the ones in Louisiana a few weeks ago, think about how would that affect me. Sit down and at least go through the mental exercise of jotting out some notes for a plan because these things are always weathered better if you've prepared in advance.

And use the impetus, the motivation to increase your own levels of preparation for the circumstances that life throws at you. And if you do this, one of those most powerful beneficial aspects of it is that you will be prepared in such a way that you can go out and help others.

Because no matter how great this show hopefully was for you, there are many hundreds of thousands of people who will never come across or seek out information like this. And those people need a helping hand. My heart aches for the people in Haiti. Having been to Haiti and traveled there, I can understand firsthand how utterly devastating it is for people there.

Or in Cuba, same thing. This storm will be utterly devastating for them. And it will be devastating in terms of loss of life, but it will be also devastating in terms of loss of lifestyle. Because when a storm goes through, dealing with the after effects, it just goes deep.

So if you are prepared and if you're strong and you're coming from a place of strength, then you'll be able to reach out a helping hand and help your neighbors. If you've got plenty of water set by and you have a water filter, you won't be looking at your store of water and thinking, "Is it going to last?" You'll be able to go across the street to your neighbor and say, "Here's a case of water bottles." If you've got a battery charger in your back pocket and your neighbor's wandering around with their cord desperately looking for an outlet to plug in, you can just say, "Hey, here, plug in here." So one of the major reasons for you to be prepared for natural disasters, events like this, et cetera, is that you'll be able to reach out a helping hand to somebody else.

And that'll build a relationship, that'll build community, and that'll build strength and resilience in your neighborhood. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance. If you're interested in building financial freedom for yourself and your family, please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode.

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