Today marks one year since we paid off our 15 year mortgage in about 7 years. That milestone was the result of applying the most important survival skill you can develop—budgeting. There is never a time where working from a budget is inappropriate. It is especially important in a survival situation where resources are thin and uncertain. Know where to allocate your resources, how much of them you have, and what obligations are most important to care for first.
When you realize that you are in peril; act. When the immediate danger has passed, assess the situation and make a budget. Take stock of the available resources — be they, first aid equipment, shelter material or fire building apparatus. Remember that your use of them will be limited by your available energy, the weather, the minutes of remaining daylight, or even your physical situation. Once you have taken stock of your assets then you must prioritize your actions to maximize your survival needs subject to the constraints of material, energy, and time. This is budgeting.
Building and using a budget is not equivalent to someone telling you what you should to do; you already know that. Quite the contrary, it means you telling your assets what they should do for you. Few people will care if you spend the rent money on a night on the town, as long as you follow through with the rest of the agreement i.e. allocating the food funds (or whatever else you have) to rent or perhaps choosing to relocate. The point is, whether you want to or not, you will eventually have to make a judgement about the relative importance of your life values. Life is just that way–choose wisely.
In a survival situation it will go much easier for you if you have budgeting practice. Oddly, it seems that practice is useful for improving performance. It might be important to weigh the effort spent on a shelter. Should you cut branches for your shelter or will leaving most of them long and breaking a few be “good enough” to achieve the immediate goal. If so, that just might leave you enough time to build a fire, or collect water before dark. You are the one who will live (or not) with the results of those decisions. Practice will allow you to explore the bounds of response. How lax can you be before your life is in peril– budgeting.
It took almost six years to pay the first half and eight months to pay off the second half. We were seriously motivated and worked very hard to increase income and decrease expenses. This was accomplished through budgeting. Just as in a survival situation you take stock of resources, time, energy, and money. Then allocate them to dealing with one goal at a time. If the plan is solid and the resources hold out success. If not, then reassess, refocus, and work on. It is this ability to continually adapt and refocus that yields positive results.
I am very grateful to my wife for finding many ways we could cut expenses and raise a bit more money to make this work. She made a paper chain with $1000 dollar loops. It hung in our bedroom where we looked at it each night. It became very important for both of us to purchase a loop by sending more money to the principle. This helped keep us on track and motivated.
If you want to learn more about zero-based budgeting check out Dave Ramsey’s site. In zero-based budgets income equals out-go. There is no residual either positive or negative. In a survival situation this means that your efforts are maximized; because all resources are allocated to their respective purposes.
In the same vein, the most important survival tool you can have, bar none, is an emergency savings account. While you may never have to use that tricked out survival knife, the odds are certain that you will have an emergency that can be rendered harmless with ready cash. Even if the emergency is as mundane as fixing your car, ready cash makes that much easier to accomplish. Make certain that you have a reserve to make this possible.