Ask yourself the following questions:

1. How organised are you in terms of being prepared for future problems?
2. What will I do if Council Rates go up with the new goverment?
3. What will I do if the cost of vehicle fuel or heating fuel goes up?
4. If I loose your income, how will you pay your bills, or even worse, your debts?
5. If your rent goes up, will you still be able to pay it?
6. If your mortgage interest rate goes up to 18% like in the 1980’s, and the value of your house drops by another 20%, what will you do?
7. If one or more major banks close their doors, like what happened with Northern Rock, will you survive the time until the government covers you by their £50K guarantee?
8. If the Katla volcano next to the present Eyjafjallajökull volcano errupts, will you survive without air travel?  What if medications cannot get across the Atlantic as was about to happen with the initial air closures?
9. If you live in a city and riots occur near your house, like recently in Greece, how would you cope if this was prolonged?
10. If crime rises significantly when the people illegaly claiming benefits have them cut, will you feel safe in your present home location?
11. If the mobile phone masts were to fail for a prolonged period of time, would you have any serious consequences from this?
12. If any or all of the electricity, gas or water supplies to your neighbourhood, stopped for a prolonged period of time, how would you cope, would you freeze or run out of drinkable water.
13. If the local supermarket were to close, because of financial collapse, how would you keep fed along with all the other people in your community.
14. If an organised criminal gang moved into your neighbourhood, and you were at risk of being attacked, would you be able to avoid conflict, and if you or your family were approached and attacked, could you defend yourself by legal means?

While the above list might appear long, these are only a fraction of the scenarios that we should all have thought through, and if we havent already, then we really should make a start as a priority.  Preparedness is a very important way of life.  Our ancestors lived by this on a daily basis, planning for the next meal, the next days work, the next seasons farming, keeping ahead of the game.  But nowadays, for many of us in the UK, things are just too easy.  Our food is all prepared and provided for us by supermarkets, electricity, fuel and water is all on tap.

It is a well known phrase in the preppers world that the average person in the UK is only a few days away from starvation.

Think about it. It might save your life.

Over the last few years the credit crunch, bank bailouts, volcanic ash clouds, homes flooding and so on, to name just a few, everyday people in the UK have started to think more about how to best prepare for these types of situations, big or small.

In many cases recently, Joe Public has learned about prepping the hard way, by having their home flooded or loosing their job and having been ill prepared for it in advance.

This is what the ‘Prepper’ movement is all about, Prepper being a play on “Preparedness”

Preppers come in various forms however, depending on your concerns for the future,  some of us are looking for ideas to keep ahead of the game in case of losing our job perhaps, while others are concerned about much bigger scenarios that may come our way such as H1N1, economic collapse of the EU, peak oil and global warming.

How much you feel you need to prepare all depends on your awareness of what is going on in the world, and how much you perceive that you are at risk from these events.

Prepping in some peoples minds is essentially a form of Survivalism, however the general term Survivalist has a lot of stigma attached to it, primarily from visions of a stereotypical extreme US citizen that has an underground concrete bunker filled with enough amo to fend off the US army for months.  Preppers are not gung ho gun toting maniacs living in remote forests.

Prepper cannot be loosely pigeon holed into this ‘Survivalist’ category.  Preppers are just ordinary every day families, individuals and groups seeking to better insulate and protect themselves from the problems the world faces now faces with ever growing alarm and uncertainty.

A Prepper will primarily aim to have all the knowledge and preperation done in advance so he/she can survive for as long as possible without the need for supermarkets, water supplies, electricity or gas supplies.  A prepper is usually a more enlightened, better educated but equally concerned member of society that the image of a US survivalist might portray.

More and more people across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Europe have reacted in response to the huge rise in global terrorism, natural disasters and massive economic and social instability affecting the world.

Internet communities or hubs of Preppers have flourished in the last five years, and from this trend a  ‘Preppers’ Network has evolved, first as is so often the case in the USA, then expanding into Canada, Europe and now in the UK with UKPreppers.com.

The UKPreppers.com website is primarily aimed at families, so that they can plan in advance to minimise the effect of any potential problems that may come their way.  In it’s basic form this can mean having the best First Aid books at hand, having other irons in the fire in terms of employment or family income, stocking up on storable food, having appropriate fire extinguishers or even learning about cooking and gardening so that if money gets tight, it doesn’t evolve into a complete disaster.

Please feel welcome to join the UKPreppers.com forum to learn more about us.

Al – Admin