Would your SHTF plan A be "leave the country"?‏

First of all, thank you for writing about your experiences in a real-life SHTF. In a protracted SHTF situation like yours, wouldn't the best plan be to simply leave the country? I am living in Canada, and I am both Canadian and Australian, and I figure if Canada's economy were to collapse, then I'm not going to risk my family suffering everything you went through hoping that the country will recover. I would try to get out of the country and maybe move back to Australia.
I don't know whether that option (to leave) was available to you, but if it was: would that have been your plan A?
thank-you for your time!
S-

Thanks S.
By a situation like mine, I suppose you mean Argentina after the economic collapse of 2001. As you probably know, I left Argentina three years ago and now live in Ireland. If that’s what you mean, then yes, when a country goes down like Argentina did, with so much loss of quality of life, crime and corruption being out of control, rampant inflation, overall sociopolitical deterioration, then yes, the answer is to leave and find a better place to reside. At the end of the day, that is for most cases the correct strategy to tackle long-term, worst case events.

Keep in mind, this is purely an objective, impartial point of view. For some people family, patriotism, or what happens in most cases, fear of change, means that they wont leave. Everyone will have his own motives but here we’re looking at it from a practical perspective. Also, understand that these things will take months and even years to develop over time. Crime may spike suddenly, but it may take years until it reaches a noticeable point of no return. The same goes for corruption. The social and cultural degradation may take up to a decade until you notice the extent of the damage done.
Having said this, bugging out abroad shouldn’t be your one and only solution. Its in fact the last one to be used, the more drastic one. You’re talking about leaving your country behind for good. In no way should that be your first reaction.

When is it that you leave then? That’s the million dollar question after all and an important one I try to tackle in “Bugging Out and Relocating”. The short version is that you leave when you clearly see that conditions have deteriorated beyond a point that you’re willing to tolerate. If you believe that the situation means that you’re no longer safe enough on the streets to live a normal live, that you can’t plan a financial future because of the inflation and overall economic instability, you see things going downhill for years and you don’t see much of a chance of things getting better then it time to leave. Both personal observations of the reality around you as well as data such as the one I include in the book about crime by country and US state, cost of living, education and live quality among others will help form a better picture of what you’re dealing with objectively and which should be your next step.

No. Bugging Out abroad shuldn’t be some kind of knee jerk reaction. It took me years to make up my mind. In the end we were running out of time because of rapidly deteriorating conditions but we had made up our minds about leaving by then.
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”.