I am going to try to be real­is­tic here.  There are posts all over the Web on prep­pers sites about start­ing your prep­ping for $5.00 a week.  But what does $5.00 real­ly buy these days.  In my case $5.00 can buy:

- 3 — 4 cans of soup,

- 3 — 4 cans of tuna, chick­en or turkey,

- One 5LB bag of rice (48 indi­vid­ual serv­ings, see Repack­ing Some Core Preps for Porta­bil­i­ty, Ease of Use, Care Pack­ag­ing, and Rota­tion

- Five bags of assort­ed beans

- Two 12oz. cans of SPAM

- One can of Car­na­tion Instant Break­fast (About 14 serv­ings / Two weeks worth of break­fasts)

- One box of instant milk, mak­ing five quarts of milk.

- etc.…

This all adds up over time, but, as you know we are impa­tient crea­tures, and we may want to accel­er­ate some of our prep­ping by pur­chas­ing more when we shop.  This is not always fea­si­ble, and I get it. How­ev­er, “if” we can increase our bud­get to $25.00 per week or even every two weeks, you can accel­er­ate your food stor­age dra­mat­i­cal­ly.  For instance.  Based on this post, (Repack­ing Some Core Preps for Porta­bil­i­ty, Ease of Use, Care Pack­ag­ing, and Rota­tion) and find­ing foods that are core foods for your prep­ping you can stan­dard­ize on a few items for pur­chase.  i.e. two 5lb bags of rice will give two peo­ple 24 serv­ings of rice twice a day for 24 days.  And you spent $9.60 of your $25.00  If you watch for sales on canned chick­en, tuna, etc. you can pick up for or five cans for $5.00 (rough­ly, these days) and you have spent, $14.60 of your bud­get.  Or you can pur­chase 12 bags of assort­ed beans for $1.00 — 1.50 a bag to give you a cou­ple months of core food stor­age based again on por­tion size.

So you can see, if you can afford to increase your bud­get just a lit­tle bit, and if you “plan” your food stor­age shop­ping trips around that bud­get and know what you want to get pri­or to enter­ing the store, you will most cer­tain­ly accel­er­ate your food stor­age expo­nen­tial­ly.

As an aside, do not for­get water stor­age.  The more dry goods you pur­chase, the more water you will require for cook­ing.  This is some­thing I do not hear many peo­ple men­tion when they talk about buy­ing food stor­age whether dehy­drat­ed or freeze dried…