Living Life in Rural Iowa

Cookbooks are invaluable. They teach us so much about cooking, baking, canning, butchering, and more. They give specific instructions on how to do anything with cooking and the kitchen. They can really help the experiences and the novice alike.

While nothing really replaces the experience you get by doing and learning, having resources like cookbooks and cooking manuals is very important. You should have a good variety of cookbooks and manuals. Whether you are a canner, a preserver, a carnivore, a vegetarian, a hunter, or a gardener, you need to be well-rounded about you keep on your shelf.

In a crisis or a disaster, you may like to eat meat but meat may be scarce. Having some vegetarian recipes may mean you can have a filling meal with what you have on hand. You may not be a hunter, but you may need to know how to butcher your own meat. You may have a lot of produce from the garden or from gleaning and need to preserve it in a variety of ways.

You will notice that not all of these are c…

I like saving money. I like it a lot. I also have some quirks and one of those quirks are challenging myself to find new ways to do something cheaper. I also think reusing items is cool and recycling items are the best.

Those closest to me will just tell you I am weird and they look for opportunities to tell me when I go too far. Apparently, it isn't cool to take the Sunday coupon flyers out of the county recycling bins to see if there are any coupons you can use. I have also found out that it is better to say you got something from a free pile at a garage sale rather than say you trash picked an item.

I don't have a lot of shame in my money saving game. However, the ways I save money and live frugally are not glamorous. They will probably not wow you or anything like that. These hacks are probably more along the line of "Why didn't I think of that?!?!".

My Top 10 Frugal Living Hacks

1. I reuse plastic bags of every size and shape. Yes, I have a drawer dedicated to p…

While preppers can be some of the most positive people you could ever meet, there are some really hopeful preppers that need a reality check. A lot of people in forums and in groups talk about prepping for their bug out location or when they move to a rural location. While that is all fine and good, the problem is that they are prepping for a place that does not really exist at the moment.

Unless you live in your bug out location, you run a high risk of not making it to your bug out location. If an SHTF event really does happen, you may not be able to make there unless you have a fair amount of advance warning. You may have all the routes mapped out to get there and have many different plans with contingencies built in to get there, but you still run a high risk of not making it to your bug out location.

The same goes for a rural location. A lot of people say they will be ready or prepared once they move to a rural location. While people should move to a rural location if they want to, …

(I will be reviewing books as I read them this year. I have either purchased these myself or were given them for review. As always, I have affiliate links attached to this post to help make a little extra for my family and support this blog.)

I have been working through my stack of prepping books to be read. The Penny-Pinching Prepper: Save More, Spend Less and Get Prepared For Any Disaster by Bernie Carr has been one of the best comprehensive preparedness books I have read in a long time.

Truth be told, I usually go for specific preparedness topics in my reading because I always need to learn more. However, this caught my eye because it was frugally minded and written by a fellow blogger. We bloggers usually like to support each other whenever possible.

I started this book and could not believe all the information inside this book! She literally covers it all! Every area of prepping is covered in this book with tips, tricks, and ideas for being as frugal as possible. It is like she took…

Being a prepper and being way more interested in self-reliance, I have become a lot more interested in items that can be reused time and time again. I would not have bought most of these things fifteen years ago, but now? I couldn't imagine life without them.

These things I think are important for home and possibly your survival. They are things that should stand the test of time, but we all know that can't always be true. You should be able to use these things over and over again. They are the most basic things that I think should be in every home, but I have found out that they are not.

16 Reusable Practical Items You Should Always Have:

1. Hand Tools. While I love my battery powered drill, hand tools can be used anytime and anywhere. If you keep them clean and in good condition, they will last you a very long time. Besides that, can you think a time when you will not be fixing or building something? I can't.

2. Clothespins. Clothespins are just handy to have. Besides hangin…

As preppers and survivalists, we like to think we have an idea of what will happen after an SHTF happens. We all have ideas of what can be and how horrible it will be. However, we cannot really know what will happen after an SHTF event occurs.

Unless you have lived and dealt with the aftermath of a terrible natural disaster, you cannot really understand the magnitude of the damage and rebuilding that needs to take place. Unless you have lived through an extended power outage, you cannot understand just what you will need exactly to survive the situation. Unless you have survived political unrest, military actions, and war, you will not understand what you need to do in order to survive.

For most of us, we like to fantasize about what will take place and what we will need to do to survive and rebuild again. However, we don't understand the scale of the reconstruction that will need to take place. We don't understand the deconstruction that will happen and how rebuilding may be im…

I am going to preface this post today for you. I wrote this about four months ago. I have sat on this post since then. I am usually a pretty positive, fairly practical person. Not much really gets me down on a normal day. However, the state of our economy along with the financial situations of a good deal of Americans have gotten me fairly worried with a good dose of being angry.

This is me being angry after receiving my paycheck one day and realizing that between bills and groceries, there would be very little left over for anything else. I don't blame my employer for this. I consider them a fair employer who pays me fairly for my level of work. I actually enjoy my job, but enough is enough.

You have all heard the phrase, "Every day you can get up, go to work, and pay your bills is a good day" (or something like that). I suppose that is true, but wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to pay bills or work incredibly hard just to pay them?

Most people with a family…