When The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints simplified their food storage (home storage) program in 2007, a light bulb went on for me. IT was plain and simple!
- Food Supply (three-month and long-term)
- Drinking Water
- Financial Reserve
Gathering emergency water was simple. It just took one Saturday to get focused, find containers and have my husband fill them up.
As far as a financial reserve (aka emergency savings), I came up with a monthly amount of money our bank automatically transfers from checking to savings. Slow and steady wins the race. Every so often, I get some cash out in small bills, and bring it home for emergencies.
Gathering long-term foods can be simple if you learn to use what you store. I know, I know. Everyone wants to buy freeze-dried food they don't actually eat until there's a disaster. But the counsel is to gather food storage gradually and USE IT, so it gets rotated. Then when you lose your job or are financially strapped when a family member has a long-term illness, you can use that food. It's not just for natural disasters.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks, an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, gave us this counsel:
“We need to make both temporal and spiritual preparation for the events prophesied at the time of the Second Coming. And the preparation most likely to be neglected is the one less visible and more difficult—the spiritual. A 72-hour kit of temporal supplies may prove valuable for earthly challenges, but, as the foolish virgins learned to their sorrow, a 24-hour kit of spiritual preparation is of greater and more enduring value.” Preparation For the Second Coming, May 2004
I want to be one of those five wise virgins in the 25th chapter of Matthew and gather temporal food and spiritual oil. I hope each of you wants to move forward with preparedness too. It can be just plain and simple.
Valerie Albrechtsen
The Food Storage Organizer
Valerie Albrechtsen
The Food Storage Organizer
Thank you for this post! I've been reading your blog for over a year now, and I appreciate the work you put into it. I'm slowly building up my long term storage. Slow and steady and simple wins the race!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Stephanie. :-) Glad you enjoy following along. Best wishes to you and your family.
DeleteThank you! Very well said and thought out. I, too, have been doing food storage for years, and have had to rely on it several times when job losses came. Empty nesters here and it is now hard to not buy quite so much.
ReplyDeleteSo happy you've had food storage when you needed it most. And yes, it does get easier and less expensive.
DeleteWise counsel. While raising our family my motto was store what you eat and eat what you store. We went through wheat, beans, rice, canned goods, oats, etc., as part of our everyday diet. I've adjusted quantities now that we are (sort of) empty nesters. (Two children are here temporarily while one finishes college, and the other saves money for the next step.) But the motto is the same.
ReplyDeleteIt's surprising how many don't see that "long term" part in the recommendations for food storage. They think 3 months is the current guideline. When it is just the beginning of longer term storage. Thanks for the reminder. Hopefully others will not make that mistake and suffer later.
ReplyDelete