4 Key Areas to Focus On as You Prepare for the Chaotic Events of 2024 and Beyond

Article by Michael Snyder from The Most Important News cross-posted with permission.

(The Most Important News)—Are you ready for what is coming next?  Recently, I have been getting a lot of questions about prepping.  Thanks to the war in the Middle East, a lot of people out there are realizing that we really are running out of time.  So in this article, I am going to give some very basic practical advice.  In the short-term, it is going to be very important for you to build up your emergency fund.  Times are going to get a lot harder, and in the midst of those hard times you are going to need to continue to pay the bills.  Looking beyond a short-term perspective, you are going to need to be prepared to survive in a world that has gone completely mad.

Those that are preparing for such a scenario are known as “preppers”, and “prepping” has become increasingly popular in recent years.

For example, the Daily Mail just published a story on a 38-year-old prepper named Rowan Mackenzie that has become extremely popular on social media…

A doomsday prepper, who has built a bunker, has revealed how she spent $75,000 to prepare for a nuclear disaster amid ongoing wars across the world and the soaring cost of the living crisis.

Rowan Mackenzie, 38, became a became a social media phenomenon after revealing she’s been prepping her home for 12 years because of fear of an emergency and has upped the ante, spending a whopping $75,000 on supplies as a result of the intensification of issues in the world – including the war between Israel and Palestine.

She has been able to accumulate so much because she did a little bit at a time for many years.

If you haven’t been preparing like she has, you have a lot of catching up to do, and it isn’t going to be easy.

I know that it can seem a bit overwhelming if you are just getting started, and so let me give you 4 key areas to focus on as you prepare for the chaotic events of 2024 and beyond…

#1 Food

Without enough food, you will not make it for long. If you can hunt or forage for edible plants that will help, but that will only take you so far.

Anyone that has watched “Alone” knows exactly what I am talking about.

When things really start hitting the fan, most Americans will get very hungry very rapidly. In fact, it is being reported that 18 percent of Americans are already not getting enough food to eat…

According to consumer data firm Dunnhumby, one-third of households are skipping meals or reducing their portion sizes to save money.

Researchers found that 18 percent of the survey’s 2,000 participants noted they weren’t getting enough food to eat.

Furthermore, 31 percent of households have reduced their portion sizes due to empty pantries as a result of rising grocery store prices.

I recommend storing food that you really like to eat and that will last for a very long time.

If you like beef, that is going to be a challenge, because beef now costs a lot more than it once did…

Being a carnivore has never been so expensive. According to the USDA, beef prices soared to another record high this week, and are expected to face a 100% increase next month compared to the same period a year ago. Steaks will likely be out of the dinner table of many Americans in the coming months as shortages already started leaving grocery shelves empty. Even cheap meats like ground beef are about to shoot up in price due to the lowest supply in decades, the Department said.

The nation’s shrinking cattle herd combined with surging input costs at U.S. farms and ranches have pushed wholesale meat costs to over $8 per pound, official data shows. Analysts predict that the figure could jump above the $ 10 mark in December due to the seasonal spike in demand. As a comparison, beef costs in 2022 were hoovering around the ten-year average of $5 per pound. The rapid price appreciation means that you will have to pay double what you paid a year ago to bring your favorite cut home this winter.

And thanks to the bird flu, chicken and turkey are going up in price too…

An additional 1.2 million chickens will be slaughtered to prevent the spread of the bird flu after the virus was confirmed on an Iowa egg farm in the second massive case this week.

The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship announced the latest bird flu infection at a farm in Taylor County Friday, and Iowa’s governor immediately declared a disaster there to make sure the state has the resources to respond quickly.

The Iowa case is just the latest one in the outbreak that began early last year and has prompted officials to kill a total of nearly 63 million birds. Earlier this week, 1 million chickens were killed on a Minnesota egg farm.

Ultimately, you will want to store up enough food for yourself and for everyone that will be depending upon you for as long as you plan to stay alive.

#2 Water

The good news is that water is not expensive.

But when it stops coming out of your taps, what will you do?

I do believe in storing up bottled water.  But you can only store it for so long, and no matter how large your property is you can never store enough.

Each one of us uses a tremendous amount of water every day, and in a survival situation you can reduce that amount quite a bit.

But you will never be able to store enough for a long-term survival scenario. So access to fresh water is key. You need to have a plan for gathering fresh water, filtering fresh water, and boiling fresh water.

#3 Shelter

Most of you already have somewhere to live. That’s great. But will it be suitable for a long-term survival scenario?

If not, you either need to move or you need to have a location to “bug out” to when things get really hairy.

If you are considering relocating, I give my thoughts on all 50 states in my new book.  But thanks to absurdly high housing prices and rapidly rising interest rates, it will now cost you far more to relocate than it would have a few years ago.

And no matter how great your location is right now, you will need to be prepared to leave if for some reason staying at your current home becomes untenable at some point.

#4 Energy

A great survival home won’t do you much good if you can’t heat it during the winter. And you are going to need to be able to cook your food and boil any water that you collect. So you have got to have a plan for energy.

If you have rigged your entire home so that it can be fully powered by solar energy, that is great. But that is not feasible in all areas of the country.

A gas-powered generator is always helpful, but what will you do when you can’t get any more gas? Whenever the lights go out, we are reminded of what a world without power would look like.

Personally, I recommend having more than one source of energy, because that way you will not be in a desperate situation if the one source you are depending upon ends up failing.

Of course everything that I have discussed above needs to be protected. If someone comes in and tries to take all the stuff that you have stored up, what would you do?

That is another question that you need to consider, because when things get really crazy out there a lot of people will suddenly become very uncivilized.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.