I’m new to this forum, but have been in survival mode my whole life. I’m in my mid 40’s, and was conceived during the Cuban missile crisis and grew up on the Gulf Coast, so preparedness was something my parents took very seriously. They took a big hit from Hurricane Audrey in 1957, a storm that killed over 600 in SW Louisiana and SE Texas, and that event shaped quite a bit of their thinking. Add to that I was a teen in the late 1970’s, when the Russian were invading Afghanistan, the US Economy was going to hell, and it was pretty easy to see why we joined the survivalist push back then.
These days my wife, daughter, and I are living in central Texas, in a location that gets ‘bugged out to’ whenever there is a major hurricane. We try to stay as active and outdoorsy as we can. I shoot IDPA and Service Rifle, and play bass when I can gigs: I've done over 2 dozen musicals with a local theatre company as well as some jazz and church work.
I know BigDanInTX and JeremyA from ZS; even met them for dinner when I was in in Austin once. For those that haven't met BigDanInTX, "Big" is an understatement. GiantDanInTX is much more accurate.
Dan and Jeremy have been flogging me to listen to the pod casts for 4-5 months, I guess. Oddly for someone that does computer software for a living and sits at a computer 70+ hours a week, I'm something of a neo-luddite and did't have any way to listen to them beyond sitting at the computer more hours. We traded my old car in for an older one that gets nearly 40mpg in 2007, and the current old car doesn't even have a CD player. My phone can play MP3s and I have listened to a couple that way....
My wife is fully on board with the prep lifestyle. We are working hard to make sure we're ready when TSHTF, but also to be solid if the powers that be are successful at staving it off indefinitely. I tend to be very cynical about immeadiate predictions of doom. I mentioned that I'm a second generation survivalist - my dad has books from the mid 1970's about how the crushing US debt will overwhelm the market and cause a collapse. The same authors (Gary North comes to mind) revise those books every couple years and put them out as new works, continually pushing back their estimate of when the collapse will happen. Dad's got some Krugerrands he bought in 1981 for $850+ too, so don't go telling me that's a good investment, either. 27 years later, they are back to break even...
Still, there's no getting around the issue that Social Security and Medicare are $60 Trillion under funded, and there just isn't enough money to meet those obligations. I often say about the Gary North's of the world that constantly predict the collapse in the next 18 months that they will be right at some point.
