Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and SAFE. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit sdge.com/fera to find out more. - Good morning, Radicals. Happy Monday to you, and 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 10 years or less.

Today, we're gonna talk about insurance, practical, (laughs) practical insurance. If you're anything like me, perhaps you've been fascinated and, not sure the right adjective to use. I was gonna say impressed, but that makes it sound positive. Just fascinated and, I don't wanna use horrified, 'cause that's just far too strong.

Interested, let's just go with interested. If you're anything like me, you've been interested to watch the unfolding disaster in Houston, Texas right now, and all throughout that part of Texas with the impact of Hurricane Harvey. And it seems as though the situation is bad and just simply getting worse.

Perhaps most dramatic, simply because of the number of people affected. Houston, of course, being about the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States and being deeply, deeply impacted. And talk about a huge disaster when you have this many people affected by a disaster, you can get wall-to-wall coverage.

And so I've been fascinated, love the world that we live in with the access to the internet to be able to pull up the local live streams from the TV stations. I've been watching that over the weekend. And I thought it'd be helpful to share with you just some simple ideas that may be of use to you as you consider a disaster.

Very little of this will be helpful to listeners in Houston or the surrounding area, but my intent is to help all the rest of us who are not in that specific situation. Anytime you hear about a disaster or hear about a problem, I think it's very helpful to use the circumstances that you hear about or the circumstances that you watch and think through your own situation.

Chances are you're not gonna face the same disaster that somebody else faces, but by thinking through the disaster that somebody else is facing, you will be able to consider solutions to it. And because you're not experiencing the emotional weight and the emotional trauma of seeing your house filled up with water or seeing all of your things blown out the door in a hurricane or a tornado, you can think a little bit more dispassionately and logically.

And by thinking about it, when you're not facing the emotional trauma of the situation, you'll be better prepared to face it when it happens to you. Now, of course, most of the disasters that face other people will not happen to you. Your disaster will be unique. But if you go through and list out the common disasters that we face, whether they're due to inclement weather or not, most of the time you wind up with a suite of common solutions for those disasters.

There are fundamental principles that will apply regardless of the actual causative event. In many ways, facing personal financial crisis due to a job loss has a tremendous commonality of solution with facing the death of a family member or with a flood in your home or a hurricane or a blizzard or an earthquake or any other number of disasters, a forest fire, any of those types of things.

There is some common, there's just some common things that we need as human beings, and we all have similar needs. And so when you start to address these needs and you do it in a diversified way, you can build up for yourself a strong and resilient platform to move from.

This, of course, may ultimately save your life when you face a disaster. Even if the impending threat is not life-threatening, it will hopefully allow you to pass through a difficult time and turn a crisis into a nuisance and help you to come through it in a stronger place. And most likely what will happen is because you come through in a stronger place, then you can help someone else from a place of strength.

And that's the goal of thinking through things. We want to build resilient households and strong households so that we can be of use to those who are close to us and be of use to our neighbors. This is in many ways the paradox of good planning. When you plan well and you plan and implement good financial planning for yourself, chances are you probably won't need it 'cause again, you turn things that would otherwise be a crisis into something that's perhaps most accurately called a simple nuisance.

And that's a consistent process that can be applied. But in watching the events that have unfolded in Houston this last weekend, I thought it'd just be helpful for me to give you some practical, thoughtful solutions as I've considered the disaster that many millions of people there are facing. And as I've used that disaster to think through my own plans for facing such a disasters.

Living here in Florida, I'm very familiar with hurricanes and have been of course for many years. And in the past, I used to be involved with some of the volunteer organizations for disaster management and hurricane preparation, et cetera, primarily for years as an amateur radio, I still am, but as an amateur radio operator and would go and volunteer in the Red Cross shelters and been through a number of hurricanes with that, a bunch of friends in public safety and the emergency operation centers, et cetera.

So I've thought through a lot of these things for a long time and I'm pretty familiar with hurricanes and hurricane planning. So let me share with you some very practical bits of advice that I hope will help you. First lesson that I think is very apparent from Hurricane Harvey in Houston this weekend and this week is that in most disasters, the best solution is to leave, to get out of there long in advance.

If at all possible, you don't ever wanna show up on a TV screen, you don't wanna show up and have some dramatic footage being captured of you going out on a boat. Now, thankfully, if you're in that circumstance, you're being helped and you're gonna live. And thankfully, the loss of life so far has been minimal.

It's one of the benefits of living in a strong, structured society, such as Texas, as compared to other places in the world. It's heartbreaking sometimes to be in other places where just simply the houses are built so poorly that a simple windstorm can come through and destroy houses, kill people within those houses, cause a mudslide coming down the mountain and hundreds of people are buried.

This is a common occurrence throughout the world. We just don't hear that much about them in Western media. But if you start traveling a little or pay attention to the global events that are outside of the Western context, oftentimes you'll see that this is a regular occurrence. So thankfully, the loss of life so far has been minimal.

But you don't ever wanna be in that boat, nor do you wanna be in those floodwaters. You don't want to be facing the TV crew that's outside your house showing your wind blown off and your roof blown off by the wind. And the reason is you wanna be gone from the disaster zone.

In the vast majority of disasters that can happen, the best solution for you to come through it well is to leave and to leave in advance. Now, in order to be able to leave in advance successfully, you'll need to be prepared to go a little bit early. Better a little bit early and wrong, meaning it wasn't as bad as you thought, than late and facing serious problems.

It's very frustrating to be stuck in long lines of traffic and in crowds of people. It's frustrating and it can be dangerous. It can turn what, at the very least, if you're stuck in a long line of people in a massive traffic jam on the interstate, it will turn what usually was interesting and perhaps scenic two or three hour drive out of town into a frustrating 12 hour event.

This last week, I went up and viewed the solar eclipse from within the 100% band up north of where I live here in Florida. And my intention and goal was to come out of there as quickly as possible. So I had planned ahead to be very close to the interstate and basically that the eclipse was over and I was going to just jump on the interstate and get home as quickly as possible.

Well, of course, millions of other people had the same idea and I was prepared for that. I knew that was the probable outcome. So I had full tank of gas, et cetera. But even so, it was such a frustrating scenario to be in where I was sitting there and waiting with millions of other people just sitting on a highway.

It took me about five or six hours to go about 70 to 75 miles home till finally I just abandoned it and said, "This is ridiculous," and quit and drove home the next day with empty roads. But in order for you to be able to leave in advance of other people, you'll need to be planned.

What causes most people to just not to act is either they lack the resources to act, this happens and affects many, many poor people, people who they have to go to work and if they don't get that one day of work, then they're going to not make their bills or they don't have the money to be able to put gas in their vehicle to get out of town.

You watch any kind of hurricane coverage and you'll often see this. The news will find and go to a trailer park or interact with poor people and they just don't have the resources set aside to get out of town. And so they make unwise but desperate decisions often to stay in inadequate housing and simply because they lack the resources to get out of town.

So that's one thing. If you lack those resources, then do everything else we talk about in other shows and put those resources in place so that you can have gasoline to get yourself out of town. It requires planning and preparation. But the other thing that keeps people from moving out of town is just lack of decisions, lack of being sure about what to do and thinking through the alternatives and think, I don't really want to go out of town.

So the key is to think through your plans in advance. Which direction would you go? Start with a plan of how, if you need to get out of town to escape a hurricane or a blizzard or something that's a flood, a potential flood event, put through a plan for you to go in all four cardinal directions from your place of residence.

If you live in the middle of the US, that helps helpful for me. I can't do four cardinal directions because I run into an ocean. But think through and sit down with a map and try to figure out which directions you would go. Of course, the best opportunity is to stay with friends or family members if possible.

So if you sit down with a map and you look east, west, north, and south of you and think, what friends or family members do I have that are a few hours away? And make notes of those people. If you have that, then getting out of town could be relatively simple.

It's a matter of saying, well, worst case scenario is we go and spend a few days with some friends. That'll probably be enjoyable. It'll cost us a little bit of money and gas, but it won't be a huge financial cost and it won't be a huge burden. It wasn't a really bad scenario.

And if you talk with those family members or friends in advance and let them know that that's on your list, then that'll be even easier to make the call. Hey, there's a hurricane coming. Would you mind if we came and just stayed with you for a day or a couple of days to see how things shake out?

If you don't have family members or friends in all four directions, I recommend that you pick a few towns that are 100 miles, couple hundred miles. Usually that's enough to get significantly outside of where you are. Just think a tank of gas. How far can you drive on a tank of gas?

Usually most vehicles is about 400 miles. And choose a few hotels that are reasonable, comfortable, inexpensive hotels. Write down those hotel names and the phone numbers. And that way, if you decide, you know what, we're gonna get out of town, you pick up the phone and you call the phone number for the Holiday Inn that's three hours north of you.

Give them your credit card number and make a reservation right away before they start getting hordes of evacuees coming in and filling up all the rooms. Make your reservation, get yourself the hotel room and hit the road. These things are not that destructive or intrusive on your lifestyle, especially if you can work it out with employment.

If I were facing this situation and I had a job that I needed to do, I would, and I had to be in one place, I would seriously consider, especially at this point in my life where I have three young children and two dogs, I would seriously consider saying, hey, just for safety and make my wife's life easier with three young children, let me have her head up to the hotel or let me have her head over to our friend's house and I'll stay and do the work.

And if nothing else, she can come home in a day or two. This is a simple and easy plan, but most people don't think it through and they don't write down those names and phone numbers. Doesn't cost you anything. Just write down the names and phone numbers of your family and friends and keep it someplace where you'll know that those papers are so that you can, when surveying the information that's coming, you can say, let's go ahead and hit the road.

You wanna be able to leave quickly before the crowds of people start filling up the roads. That probably means you wanna be able to leave quickly before any official voluntary evacuation or mandatory evacuations are ordered by the local governing officials. I believe it's valuable to listen to your local emergency operations officials.

They have a serious job and they take it very seriously. All they do is think about how they can protect their town and put contingency plans in place for the residents of their town. Again, I have a number of friends that I've interacted with personally who work in the emergency operations systems here where I live.

But I believe a little bit of healthy skepticism is in order. Maybe not skepticism of people's intentions, but recognize that you probably don't want to be part of the masses. The biggest challenge that emergency operations people face is they have to deal with hordes of people and they're unlikely to want to move quickly because they know that any word they say is going to affect hundreds of thousands or millions of people.

Simple example is watch what has happened here in Houston this past weekend. The emergency operations people, the Houston mayor and his staff, declined to recommend evacuation. The Texas governor strongly hinted at evacuation, but the local mayor declined to order evacuation. Well, why did the local mayor decline to order evacuation?

Because he didn't think that there was going to be an impact on their local area? No, the emergency operations people knew that there was going to be a serious weather impact on their area. They were well aware of it. Houston has a long history of flooding. This storm was uniquely set up to be very destructive with regard to flooding and they knew this.

The reason they didn't want to do this because they didn't want to order a couple, three, four million people out onto the roads all at once and wind up with another disaster of people sitting on the highways as it happened in previous storms. And so they're trying to balance the needs of masses of people, but you're not masses of people.

You're an individual. So listen to the officials, but don't wait on them. Don't be with the masses of people. The masses of people sometimes works out, usually it doesn't. I would generally always have a little bit of skepticism or I would read between the lines when listening to the local officials.

If you're on a barrier island and a hurricane is coming your way and they issue you a mandatory evacuation, be smart and leave. But if you recognize that they're moving in that direction, but they're hedging a little bit, just to wait and figure out exactly what they're going to do, hit the road.

Now, when you leave, you need to be able to take the things with you that you need and you need to think this through in advance. So here's some practical ideas. Your number one need is gasoline. That's the biggest thing that you need to get out of town is gasoline.

Good practical way to do this is try to keep your car at least always partway full. In the same way that we don't spend our money down to the last dollar waiting for the next paycheck to come in and we don't drain our checking and savings accounts down to nothing, don't drain your gas tank down to nothing.

If you're the one who has a habit of driving until the last 16th of the tank and the little orange light comes on on the dash and then looking for a gas station, stop it. Keep your car full of gas and reset your point of comfort to say half a tank.

Whenever you get to half a tank, stop and fill up the gas tank. If you always have half a tank of gas in your car, that'll always give you usually about 200 miles out of town for most vehicles. That'll get you away from most problems. Remember, you don't want to be around the problems.

You might be hanging out in your house and Saturday morning and all of a sudden, there's some protest going on and all of a sudden, people start rioting and protesting and you see the TV crews coming. If you see the TV crews coming, get up and leave. Don't do stupid stuff with stupid people in stupid places and mobs of people or it's a dumb place to be.

So always keeping gas in your car means you can get out of most problems. Now, in addition to that, make sure you always store some gasoline at your house, at least enough to fill up your tank in case you neglected to fill it up, in case you wind up and you're down to an eighth of a tank and you need to get out of town but the waters are rising and the gas station storage tanks are starting to be contaminated with water.

You don't want to go down to that and get gas at that point in time. You need to be able to get out of town and so you want to make sure that you store some gas at your home, at least one full tank's worth and anybody can do this.

Obviously, a simple and easy way to do it is get some gas cans. Get some five gallon gas cans, four of them will be one tank worth for almost any vehicle. Very safe, it's built for saving gas. What I recommend is for safety, if you have an outbuilding, of course, that's superior.

In general, you want to minimize the gasoline that's stored in your house or near your house. If there's a fire, it's better not to have an exploding closet full of gasoline, although that risk is probably less than you might think. If you have no other place to store it, you might store it in your closet but there's always options outside of that.

If you have a garage, store it in your garage. If you have an outbuilding, store it in an outbuilding. If you don't have an outbuilding, go down to the home improvement store, buy one of those little outdoor rubber made little things, shed things, storage cabinets or get one of those, they call them deck boxes, that are designed for storing on a dock, storing water gear, ropes, lines, things like that, that are stored on a dock.

You pick up one of those, they're vinyl. Another option would be some of these storage benches that it's a bench but it has a storage compartment underneath. If you put a storage bench out in your garden and you put four or five gallon gas cans in there, then that will be an effective way for you to always have some gasoline on hand.

Rotate it out, use it once a year, put some fuel treatment in there, either some Stabil, S-T-A-B-I-L, fuel stabilizer or some P-R-I-G fuel stabilizer in there and you can have gasoline in there that swap it out once a year and you'll be fine. That'll be a great and easy way for you to save some gas.

And if you always have some gas on hand, then you can get out when you need to. Another option, of course, if you don't wanna use gas cans, by the way, one simple thing that makes gas cans easy, especially if, for me, for example, my wife is not a large woman.

So the idea of her needing to gas up the car and manhandle a big five gallon tank of gas, especially with these new stupid carb compliant ones where the nozzles don't work and they're a pain, pick up a little 12 volt pump. They sell a little 12 volt battery, or nine volt, some of them work on little nine volt batteries or you can get 12 volt and hook it up to your car battery.

But still pick up a little pump that you can just put a pump into the fuel can and click it on, battery powered, and use that to transfer the gas from the gas tank into the car. Just keeping some gas handy, 20, 40, 50, 60 gallons. Most people can do that pretty simply and easily.

And if you think creatively, you can store it in a safe way and it'll be available to you. If you don't use it for an emergency, that's fine. Now, once the gas starts to get a year old, take a little piece of tape, write on it the date when it gets a year old, just dump it in your car, take it down to the gas station and get another tank of gas.

Another way that you can store fuel, this is of course never gonna be officially sanctioned, but it works perfectly fine, is you can buy some high, what's it called? High density polyethylene barrels or drums, HDPE drums. This is the same stuff, that's just the fancy name for the plastic, that gas cans are made out of.

And so you can buy little 15 gallon drums, you can buy 33 gallon drums, that would be the max 'cause it's gonna be so heavy. Of course you could buy big 55 gallon drums, but it'd be so heavy that it'd be very hard to use. But this is a simple way for you to store larger amounts of fuel.

And as long as you protect fuel from air and you make sure that it cannot evaporate and the air can't get in and get out, your fuel will last much, for a much longer period of time. That's the number one thing that's important with fuel storage is not to allow it to have access to the air.

So get a little outdoor shed, get yourself some of these 15 or 33 gallon HDPE drums, fill them up with gasoline and rotate them out every few years. And you can protect yourself to be able to get out of town. Remember at least one tank, whatever your car takes, at least one tank, that'll get you out of most problems, get you out of most of the hard hit areas, it'll get you out of the flooding, it'll get you out of the hurricane zone where the power is out and the gas station pumps can't get the gas out of the tank.

It'll get you out of the lines of people so you can skip town. That is priority number one, gasoline. Priority number two is navigation. How do you get from where you are to out of the area? So a couple of simple recommendations for you. First, make sure that you always have some paper maps on hand.

When you're at the gas station, at the local truck stop filling up your gas, when you're on a road trip, pick up a map of your state and pick up an atlas, one of these road atlases. We are all getting so lazy with the convenience of our phones having constant free GPS.

And Google Maps and Apple Maps, these are phenomenal resources, but they have a fatal flaw. And that's they require a good data connection to work. And also require a battery power. But let's deal with the data connection. I was interested when I was last week up watching the eclipse I'm interested in what happens when you have hordes of people moving together.

And especially when there are emergencies and evacuations and mass migrations of refugees. It's always interesting to see what happens. Now we've made tremendous progress in infrastructure advancements in the last decade. Back in the mid 2000s, I was involved in a lot of local emergency communications. And at that time when there would be a hurricane that would come through, voice calls would have a hard time going through.

Text messages would usually get through pretty reliably, but even there simple SMS messages weren't all that great. If you go back to September 11, 2001, you think about what New York was like. It was very difficult to communicate at that point in time. The cell phone carriers have made tremendous progress in being prepared for disasters.

A lot of the local cell phone towers have backup power. There's a lot more redundancy in the system and the cell phone carriers have large pre-prepared systems. So what they call COWS, acronym for C-O-W-S, cellular on wheels, I think is what they calls for. And when there's a hurricane coming, the large cell phone carriers will stage big trucks.

And as soon as they can get in after the disaster, after the wind, they drop right in and start set up their towers and the cell phone systems are online quickly. That means that voice calls and SMS messaging is remarkably robust now compared to what it used to be.

Data is not as robust. And as our access to data has increased in quantity and decreased in price, we've started to use much more data. So the way that many people are keeping in touch with one another is during a storm, is they're on Facebook, communicating with their friends, posting messages about what's going on.

Individual neighbors are on the Nextdoor app, communicating with one another. Here's what's going on in our neighborhood. And so all of this requires data. And amazingly, the data does a good job. But the other thing that's dependent on data is GPS. The GPS on your phone, whether it's Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze, that needs data in order to pull those maps in.

So immediately after the eclipse, I was testing the GPS systems and I was using my phone and I noticed and observed that for about 45 minutes after leaving the area of the eclipse when it was just so clogged and everyone was getting in their cars trying to navigate their way out, the data would not work on my phone.

Waze, which is one of the GPS apps that is very popular now, W-A-Z-E, Waze, the Waze app would not load. Waze is very popular because it uses real-time data from all of the users' cell phone devices, positioning and speed recordings in order to try to have the computer map out the most efficient route out of the area.

And so as I observed kind of the massive traffic jam, many people were using Waze and trying to use it to get on the back roads. When is it better to get on the back roads? When is it better to get on the highway? But it wouldn't work for about the first 30 to 45 minutes after the eclipse was over and everyone was trying to get out of town.

So you need to be prepared for this, whether the data signal is down because the towers are affected by a storm or because they're just down due to overclogging. And there's two simple ways. Way number one is have paper maps handy so you can navigate your way out of town.

Way number two is have a GPS unit that is not connected to the cellular grid. Get yourself a Garmin or a TomTom, that type of unit. A cheap one is totally fine. This business was destroyed by cell phone navigation systems and so you can pick up, for under 100 bucks, you can pick up a perfectly fine, brand new little Garmin GPS or TomTom GPS and these things work great.

And they're not dependent on the cell phone system. They pull the GPS signals in from the satellite but they don't necessarily have to have the data connection. Now, of course, there are fancy ones that will give you all the real-time traffic but you don't necessarily need one of those.

But if you think of trying to navigate out of Houston and trying to figure out your way around all the back roads, it is a lot easier if you have a GPS system that is pulling in the GPS signal and is constantly rerouting you. You hit a roadblock with a river going across the road, you stop and you turn around and you move on to the next one.

So the map is helpful but the GPS and its ability to constantly update your routing is very, very helpful. If you're doing that with crowds of other people, you might have a situation where the data signal doesn't work. So protect yourself. Pick up a couple of those GPSs. They're cheap.

Keep one in each car. That way, the cars are well-equipped and you'll have a good chance of being able to make your way out of town. So number one need is gasoline. Number two is navigation. Number three is cash and access to money. So one of the most valuable things you can do is just simply have cash.

Those who have cash can usually buy their way out of a problem area. You may be able to stick out your thumb and hitch a ride down the road. But if you can stick out your thumb with a $20 bill held behind it, you can hitch a ride a lot farther down the road.

Many times if somebody comes up to you in a gas station and propositions you for a ride, if they can put some cash and say, "Hey, I'm trying to get in this direction. You're willing to give me a ride?" A lot easier to get a ride out of a trouble spot.

So keep cash handy. Keep cash in your wallet. Keep cash secreted in your vehicle. Keep cash secreted in your house. Keep cash in a strong box tucked away. Keep cash somewhere close by. But you should be able to put your hands on 1,000 bucks whenever you need to. And 1,000 bucks will get you and your family out of town.

So at a very minimum, if you are affluent, make sure that you protect yourself still farther and have access to cash. When the electricity is down and the ATM machines aren't working and the credit card machines aren't working, cash is king. Cash is always king. Also have access to money that may or may not be in your checking account.

So it's good to keep a couple of credit cards that are empty and have decent balances available. So if you need to make that hotel reservation, you just simply pull out the credit card, make the hotel reservation and hit the road. So you need to have money available to you.

With that, gasoline to get you out of town, navigation to navigate your way out of town, and money to pay your way out of town, you can get out of the vast majority of problems. Now there are, of course, a few more very simple and practical things that should be considered.

Water is next. You should always have some water available. And if you're loading up the car, you should be able to load up some water. Simple and easy. Go to the warehouse supply store, Sam's, Costco, BJ's, whatever you use. Pick up a bunch of packs of the 24 packs of water bottles.

They're four bucks a piece for 24, actually they're 24 bottles of water. Stack up a bunch of those in a corner closet somewhere. The great thing about it is it's inexpensive, it's easy, and it's divisible. So instead of dealing with something like a five gallon bottle of water that's hard to move and that requires you to be pretty strong to move and how do you dispense it, you've just got lots of little water bottles that you can use for drinking, you can use for washing your hands, you can use for brushing your teeth.

It's pretty easy to stack up 50 gallons of water bottles in the corner of your garage that's just ready to go, and it's just a tiny little stack and doesn't cost you very much money. So have some water on hand. Of course, consider having larger quantities of water at home, maybe a couple barrels of water in case things go down.

If you know, of course, the storm is coming, that's where you fill up other things with water, but here I'm just primarily talking about getting out of town. Keep some food on hand, some food that is easy to eat in the car. It can be candy bars, it can be trail mix.

Just buy some packages of food that can get you out of town, and then make sure that you're prepared with the important papers of your life brought together. The important papers for yourself, your birth certificates, your passports, for you, your children, marriage licenses, insurance policies, things like that. And make sure that you don't neglect important papers for your pets or any valuable items that you have, paperwork for the businesses that you own, or for the LLCs that you control, or for the family trust, copies of your will.

The pets are important. You need to make sure that you remember to have vaccination certificates. Simple example, the Red Cross, when you're taking your pet to a Red Cross shelter, they require that the pets have current vaccination certificates ready to go and able to be proved that they're vaccinated in order to let them into the shelter.

So make sure that those important papers are organized in a way that's simple to grab. A filing cabinet is fine, but if you can't take your whole filing cabinet with you, get yourself some kind of useful little way to transport papers, and make a list of what you would need to grab if you needed to leave with your family.

So write down the list, birth certificates, passports, mortgage deed certificates, insurance policies, and put with your filing cabinet one of those little folder, file holder things, little plastic things that you can fill up with papers and toss it in a bag and hit the road. Of course, a couple of other things that are convenient is things like having airbeds and sleeping bags and blankets and some extra clothes.

If you're gonna go to your friend's house and you're gonna show up all of a sudden, they're probably not gonna have a lot of beds for you. Of course, you can always sleep on a carpeted floor or on a wood floor if necessary, but if you just grab a couple of cheap airbeds and you have those ready to toss in the car with some sleeping blankets and some clothes, that is going to make your life a lot easier.

Now, of course, you could take this and go beyond. It's not a bad idea to have some bags that are pre-packed at any point in time. Just go on the internet, start searching for, just search YouTube for bug out bag, and you'll find about a bazillion videos of people who take the subject extremely seriously.

Very impressive, some of the work that they do, to be able to go out and live on the road and have everything you could possibly need as time goes by. That stuff's awesome. I think it's cool. It's fun to watch people who obsess about things like that. Problem is, a little overwhelming and daunting to get there.

If you just do what I've just outlined for you, you cover gasoline, navigation, cash, water, food, important papers, something to sleep on, as part of food, make sure you remember medicines, and you have a plan for making sure you have all your prescription medications if you use prescription medications.

That gets you 80% of the way there, and those are some simple things to do. That's all a matter of leaving, and if you leave quickly and early to get out of the problem area, you'll probably be well-served. Now, here's one more list that you can and should make, and here's what's happening with Houston.

If I had been in Houston for the hurricane, I probably wouldn't have evacuated for the hurricane because the chance of windstorm was low. It wasn't gonna be a huge deal. Biggest problem, of course, was the rain, and I don't know what it's like to live in a low-lying area.

I'm not a Houstonian where they deal with these floods all the time. That, to me, is a unique situation. You should think seriously before living in a place like that, but the biggest challenge of Houston has been the sheer volume of the water, and so even as I record this on Monday, August 28, 2017, there are a lot of people whose houses haven't even necessarily been flooded or haven't been flooded much, and they're about to be flooded more because they're releasing water out of the reservoirs, and this is flooding new neighborhoods, and they're doing it for the safety of massive numbers of the city, but if you're in a situation where you have more time, you're not trying to get out to beat the hordes, you should think through what you would do.

If you have more time, like a day or a couple of days, to pack up and go, what would you do and what wouldn't you do, and here's the other thing. They're expecting, as of current forecast, they're expecting that many of these houses will be filled with water for weeks.

That means the home will be uninhabitable for months. That's a huge deal. So if you had a little bit more time and you expected that you were going to need to vacate your home for weeks or months, then what would you do? Make this list. Now this will be much more personalized to you.

You might have valuable property that you would want to make sure that you took with you. Maybe you have valuable electronic equipment or valuable personal items that you wanted to make sure that you cared for. If you think about this in advance, think about if you had to exit your home, let's say I give you a day, a day and you got to get out of your house, what would you do?

Now the first thing you got to do is think, what do I have that I want to protect? A couch might be not a big deal, but you might have an heirloom family piece of furniture that you'd like to protect. How are you going to get that out with you?

It's obviously not going to go in your trunk. So here's where we get to something like thinking ahead of the crowd and renting a U-Haul truck. If you see something happening, is there a way that you might need to go and get a U-Haul truck? Or would it be a good preventive item?

If I had to live in Houston and I were seeing this flooding on a screen, or if I lived in a low-lying city and I had valuable personal equipment, I would be considering doing something like renting a U-Haul truck in advance. So it costs you a hundred bucks to have it in your driveway for a couple of days.

But if you had to evacuate, it could be worth doing. Hard to do after they shut down, but it's just one idea I had as I was watching it. You can't do it once they shut everything down, but if you could do it in advance, or maybe pick up a U-Haul trailer, it's going to cost you 50 bucks to have it there, but you don't usually have a trailer.

Well, in that situation, you may be able to load things up and get out. How would you get your stuff out and what would you take? So if you make some prioritized lists of what you would want or what you wouldn't want, that'll get you probably the vast majority of the way through what you need to do.

Some people take this idea to the extreme and do practice load outs and figure out how they can pack all the stuff in their car. That's cool if you want to do it. I admire you for your hardcore-ness, but trying to give you some practical things that'll apply to most people.

So make some lists. How would you prioritize? If a forest fire were heading your direction and you knew, "Hey, I needed to get out of here," how would you prioritize the things that you needed to get out of your house? What would you take and what wouldn't you take?

In a way, it's a matter of saying, if I had five minutes to get out of the house, how would I get out in five minutes? If I had an hour to get out of the house, how would I get out in an hour? And if I had 24 hours to get out of the house, what would I have?

Most of the time, you get notification on stuff like this. Flooding, fires, hurricanes. You have often time to get out. So make those lists and prioritize your personal items. You don't always have time. I was fascinated a couple years ago out in Colorado in Estes Park in the mountains, they had serious flash flooding and I was fascinated to read several accounts of people who were awakened in the middle of the night, knock on the front door by the local fire department saying, "You got five minutes to get out of here." They had five minutes to get out of the house and then their house was basically destroyed in the flash flood.

Or the Fort McMurray wildfires last summer up in Canada. I watched a bunch of stories from people up there where they'd be sleeping, having a nap in the middle of the day. And then the fire just start flowing through. So there are times when you gotta get out in five minutes.

Think about it. Couple of comments on insurance and we'll wrap up today's show. Hope it's been helpful to you. Obviously, when you see things that are flooded out, you should go back and consider the topic of flood insurance. As hopefully you know, homeowner's insurance generally doesn't cover floods. That's a separate policy.

I don't know how to advise you on what amount of insurance you should have. I'm generally pretty skeptical on a lot of property and casualty insurance because the benefit of property and casualty insurance is you're insuring a specific property that can be, the value of which can be calculated.

This is different than liability insurance. And this is different than something that has major dollars like life insurance or health insurance. The risks of life insurance, obviously, somebody dying can be catastrophic in terms of the lost income or health insurance. When you're insuring against a health cost, you're insuring against an unknown, possibly massive number.

Somebody had a serious medical scenario. It wouldn't be strange to have a million dollars of expenses in a serious medical crisis. But with something like a house and homeowner's insurance, there's a specific amount of damage that could be done. It's the value of the house. What would it take to raise the house and start again?

Well, that might be, that's a specific calculable number. Maybe it's $150,000 if you live in a $150,000 house. So when I look at property and casualty insurance, in some ways, I'm much more comfortable with self-insuring because the risks have a limit. There's a limit to the risk. Your house could be totally destroyed, but that's not an unlimited risk.

And here's where you need to consider how valuable that property is as compared to your overall lifestyle. People often approach this subject emotionally and irrationally. Think about it in the context of insuring a TV. Would you insure your TV, specifically against the risk of getting destroyed in a flood?

I hope you wouldn't, because if your TV is so expensive that it would cause you to have serious problems financially, you're doing it wrong. And I kind of apply this same philosophy towards your house and your car. If the complete loss of your car would cause for you serious problems, that means you're either very young or just working your way out of poverty, or you're doing it wrong.

If you don't have any money, you shouldn't have a $40,000 car. If you don't have any money, you should have a $100, or a $400 car. You should have a cheap car. Don't have cars and boats and RVs and all that stuff that are worth more than one-tenth of your annual income.

So if you make $75,000 a year, the total value of all your cars should be 7,500 bucks total, until you're a millionaire. Well, in that situation, if you lose a $5,000 car and you make $75,000 per year, it should be relatively easy for you to go out and buy another car.

You should be able to pull the money out of your bank account and go buy the car. If that scenario doesn't describe your financial situation and your cars, I, to my opinion, I think you're doing it wrong. You're doing it in a way that's not going to lead to wealth.

Don't own a bunch of expensive stuff that's not very valuable. That's the point with cars. So if your car gets flooded out, that's a bummer and it may be destroyed, but personally, I personally would generally choose not to worry about making sure that I have comprehensive insurance on my cheap cars.

And in some ways, I think the same thing applies to your house. One thing that's unique about many very wealthy people is although they might live in very fancy houses, the house has a small portion of their net worth. Now, this is unfortunately where we get into very sensitive territory because most US Americans, I don't know about the rest of the world, but most US Americans who own homes have an out-of-whack portfolio where they have far too much risk in their personal house.

It's very common that the biggest asset that somebody owns is their house and the most money that somebody has is tied up in home equity. That's a big, big risk and I don't think that's a smart way to do it. I think it's much smarter to diversify your risk and keep your house, which is a consumption item, keep it as a small portion of your net worth, as small as possible.

The problem that we have is this is not always practical. You can't always practically work this out just like you'd want to. Of course, we'd all love to be able to rent cheap houses and buy cheap houses, but it's not always practical. If you live in Houston, Texas, you may not be able to find a cheap house to live in.

And so just simply due to the lack of availability, the lack of supply of homes, it's frequent that you might wind up with more house and more equity than you would love. And the other problem that's compounded is even if your actual equity in your house isn't huge, you're still probably on the balance for a mortgage and your mortgage company is going to require, very intelligently, a significant insurance policy.

So when you're considering these things, you need to carefully calculate for yourself the actual risks and what you can handle, look at your finances, et cetera. If you don't have a lot of money, if you find yourself in a situation where you have a lot of house and don't have a lot of money, better buy a lot of insurance.

If you find yourself in a situation where you have a lot of money and not so much house, you could probably forego some of the insurance. The premiums are going to make a big difference for you. I know when I looked at flood insurance, when I previously owned a house, I looked at flood insurance, I calculated the premiums, I sat down and thought, okay, if my house were flooded three feet up the walls, which is very unlikely in where I lived, didn't live in a floodplain, et cetera, my house were flooded three feet up the walls, what would be the cost?

I went around and kind of tabulated everything. And the way you deal with this stuff after the flood is you basically get in there as quickly as you possibly can take everything out of the walls down to the studs. They do that in order to help with mold mitigation.

So the disaster relief looks basically like you have crowds of people that come in, cut all the drywall above the flood line, the high water line, cut all the drywall out, pull the insulation out, take everything out down to the studs and throw it out to the curb. And the idea is the quicker you can get that done, the better.

And so you run a lower risk of keeping the house sodden and soggy, which leads to mold problems, which is much more work to eradicate. If you have mold problems, you gotta get it down to the studs oftentimes in order to kill the mold and to deal with that so you can rebuild and then come back and put in fresh flooring, put in fresh insulation, put in fresh wall treatments, et cetera.

But I went around and I thought about it. I thought about how much that would cost. And of course I have, and as many of you have as well, you have the benefit of certain physical skills. I can put up drywall, I can run insulation, I can do flooring and network.

If you have a large network of people, friends, fellow church members, family members who can help you, a lot of times those are big costs. And so I was comfortable taking on the risk of the flood myself, knowing that I could recover. And when you calculate, you know, two or three, $4,000 per year of flood insurance premiums, you can start saying, what's the risk of me facing a flood in the next decade?

A lot of times I'd be comfortable with that risk. I came to the same conclusion with windstorm, with hurricanes. I've been through hurricanes, seen roofs destroyed. You calculate the cost of a new roof. You look at the actual structural integrity of your house. And a lot of times, as long as you don't have very little money and too much house, you may be able to take on that risk yourself.

Go up, reinforce the attic, brace everything, make sure your strapping is on track. And hey, if I need to re-roof my house, I can do it. I've roofed plenty of houses before. Point of all this is to say that that's why I'm often much more skeptical of property insurance and excessive amounts of property insurance than I am liability insurance or insurance for risks that don't have a clear maximum value.

Your house has a clear maximum value, and you can therefore make more of a calculated decision. Health insurance, a little harder to find that clear maximum value. So I'm not sure how to tell you what you should do in your situation, but look at the flooding that's happening in Houston, and then think about what you would face if you were in that situation.

I think that's enough to point you in the right direction today. Your plans and your own personal approach will change over time. Now, one of the things that I have learned in this current stage of my life is that there are many lives that depend on me. I've always been, if I were hearing this advice a decade ago, get out of the problem area, get out of the disaster area, I would have laughed.

My philosophy is always run to the disaster area and go and serve and to help. And I still have that instinct and that impulse as I always wanna be in the thick of it. But at this stage of my life, it would be irresponsible. You have to start by caring for those close at home.

And the number of lives that depend on me is more significant. This is not the stage of my life for me to go and wade into a disaster area. So your plans and your ideas and your approaches will change over time. And what I've shared with you today, none of this has been intended to be comprehensive.

The unique variables of your location and your circumstance will make a difference for you. If you live at the foot of a volcano, your risks are different than if you live on the edge of the seashore. If you live in blizzard country, your risks are different than if you're in an earthquake zone.

If you live in a wildland forest fire area, your risks are different than if you live in a low-lying flooding area. If you live downwind of a nuclear reactor, your risks are different than if you live in a city like a Washington DC or a New York, which are high probability of terrorist, targets for terrorism or for attack by a foreign nation state.

So sit down and look at your own risks and then think about the plans. What you'll find is if you do, if you do that is there will be a few unique aspects to your own risk planning. You might stock a little bit more potassium iodide if you live downwind of a nuclear reactor than if you live at the base of a volcano.

But the end of the day, there's just some simple common things. Get out of the area if you can, stay home if it's safer, be able to support yourself and take care of your needs for food and water and sanitation and health and comfort. Make sure your important papers are squared away.

Think through these things. I will link in the description for today's show. Back when there was a hurricane coming through West Palm Beach, I did another show or two on just some simple ways, for example, to stay at home. Talked about the importance of being able to charge your cell phone.

I kind of skipped over that today, but as you see your cell phone is your number one tool and you should always have multiple methods to keep it recharged and ready to go. It's a huge, huge issue and it's easy to solve. Talked about ways to stay at home and have that.

So I'll post some other kind of emergency preparation shows I've done that are from the archive in the description for today's show if you'd like more. But look at Houston and think about your situation and look for opportunities to help. If you're in a place of strength, you're in a place of abundance, that positions you very well to be able to help those who are hurting.

God bless. This show is part of the Radical Life Media Network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at radicallifemedia.com. - Hey there treasure hunters and bargain seekers. Are you on the lookout for a local thrift store that has it all? Look no further. Pix Exchange is your thrifting paradise right here in the heart of Torrance.

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