Do you keep a supply of food on hand?

[Timothy W.]

This is not to be apocalyptic but to bring back to the front of people's minds a tradition that seems to have been lost recently. People used to keep pantries with significant stores of preserved food on hand in the case of emergencies or a temporary loss of income. I have personally experienced times when I've not had the money to buy food and have had to not eat for a day or two and/or eat for about $1 a day. Having been through that, whenever I sell a property or do a deal that flushes me with quick cash one of the first things I do is increase the preserved food stock.

In real estate, investing and just life in general for that matter, you have to anticipate the possibility that you may be without capital for a while for some unforeseen reason. I have a sense we are especially prone to this in real estate as not many other investment vehicles may need unexpected repairs and in the event of a natural disaster hitting your portfolio, you're not only dealing with the damage to your home but the income from your portfolio is instantly gone until you reach an insurance settlement and repairs are done.

For these reasons, I personally think it's smart for a person in the feast/famine lifestyle of real estate investing to keep at the bare minimum a one month supply of nonperishable food on hand. It's ridiculously easy to accomplish - even for apartment dwellers. I was able to create a stock that I could put inside an 18 gallon rubbermaid tub that could be pushed into the back of a closet. If anyone wants some photos of how I did that, I could put that together.

So let's hear it. Do you carry at least a 1 month supply of nonperishable food on hand? If not, speak up and within 7 days I'll help you get set up to where you can say yes. I'm willing to work with folks on this to get this set up. A 1 month supply is not the end game, but it's an easy start that most folks can handle.

Tim

[Timothy W.]

Alright, when putting together a store of food, I like to start with simple numbers to see what exactly per day I need to survive. The average diet is 2,000 calories per day. A week's supply is simple. Assuming you are healthy, you can go without a lot of things for a week and be ok so we're going to start with simplicity here. This is also intended to be a "no cooking needed" stash. Keeping this as simple as possible....

I'm going to start this out with the simplest method - buying canned food. Canned food is simply an excellent means of getting together a stash of food FAST for a surprisingly cheap price. Nobody has beat Walmart on price yet for me, not even Aldi. A can of pork and beans runs about 385 while a can of kernel corn runs about 210. Beans and legumes have a very high caloric density for their volume which is why they were a standard item of every explorer/prospector/settler's kit. A standard can of tuna has about 100 calories. I don't have canned chicken in front of me but I have to assume it is close. Think simplicity here. You need carbohydrates, fiber and protein to keep going and can fill in everything else around it. Indians would often survive on a simple diet of corn, beans and squash supplemented by protein from hunting kills. You can get canned squash if you're into it but I'm not so I supplement the Vitamin C I would have gotten with squash with canned fruit - peaches and pineapple are fine. Someone check to see if they have calcium in them too. I forget at the moment though you'll live for a week (tums tablets are a good calcium source in a pinch). Unfortunately I don't have a commercially canned fruit in front of me as I can my own fruit so I can't give you an exact calorie count but being packed in syrup easily puts into a couple hundred. The beans are killer complex carbs too so they're better for you than simple carbs. Plus what I like with the pork and beans cans is the tomato paste in them giving you the potassium you need and they even have a bit of protein.

So for 1 week, let's get a base of 14 cans of pork and beans per person, 14 cans of corn per person and 14 cans of tuna or chicken per person and 14 cans of canned fruit per person. Let's assume the worst - running $1.50 a can at the most for a total cost of $84 per person. You should be able to shop smart and get that to less than a dollar per can which will be under 50 bucks a person. That will give you all the calories you NEED per day to survive and it will easily fit inside a small rubbermaid plastic container. In a situation where you are holed up and using your food storage you will actually find you need less calories as you really aren't going anywhere and doing much. You will go nuts though after a while with all the same thing. Don't be ashamed to buy a wide variety of spices to throw in there and even candy to help change things up while you wait for the 1 week apocalypse to pass.

This will get more complex as we go further but this is just the first baby step. You can go and get this done in an hour. Let me know when you get it done and we'll go to week two.

FYI - before anyone starts jumping up and down about water, I'm not addressing it here. This is specifically about food. How you secure water is so dependent upon your locality that I would have to do something different for each scenario and it would take up way to much space.