$100,000 in "preps"… and having to evacuate and leave it all behind.

I was reading about this in a forum. The guy lives in South Carolina, spent a lot of his money over the years prepping his home yet when evacuating because of Irma all he actually ended up putting to use was the gas (and vehicle). He mentioned that he felt he failed at prepping because he didn’t build his house of reinforced concrete.

I don’t know all the details of this particular case, or even if it’s true at all, but I do understand what it means to put all your eggs in one basket and see it disappear right in front of you. I’ve never suffering such a thing myself, but I get emails often enough, mostly from people that lost everything due to fire or floods. Sometimes it personal financial or family disasters (divorce).
My point is, yes, your home is important. It’s your shelter, it’s your castle. It may even be what puts food on the table, at times literally speaking. And this is indeed a great asset. To produce at least some of your food, to have a workshop for projects, to run a business. I get it.
I also get it that SHTF and worst case scenarios are precisely about what isn’t convenient and what’s uncomfortable to even think of. Loosing it all to a flood, yup, that’s not the kind of thing anyone looks forward too. Yet thousands have gone through just that these last few days. For others it was fires. For someone else, in some other parts of the world, it was war or social unrest.

You need to plan for what’s likely, but you also need to think about those worst case scenarios. A worst case scenario isn’t bugging in in your retreat just in time, full of supplies, in some idyllic location along with your best buds (who also happen to be Navy SEALS, all of them) and all of them married to hot models that are also brain surgeons and homesteaders (wait, isn’t the divorce rate among military kinda high?) and everyone happens to get along just perfect without personal interests getting in the way of the finely tuned harmony of the survival retreat. Oh, you also beat the UN which happened to invade your county for some reason.
Seriously. SHTF is about when things DON’T go as planned. When that you’d rather not even think of ends up happening. Losing your farm sucks? Many have gone through just that these last few days alone.

This needs to be planned for. As I say in the cover of my second book “Bugging Out and Relocating”. You need to know “what to do when staying is not an option”.
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”