Along with who to tell about your prepping, you have the tougher decision of who you provide for. Depending upon your resources and generosity, you need to decide how many people you plan to be responsible for. Will it just be your immediate family who live with you or will it be a wider net covering other family and friends? Geography may have a big impact on that because getting everyone under one roof may not even be an option in a SHTF situation.

As with who to tell, your circle of possible dependents can rapidly get out of hand. Let’s look at those mouths to feed and see how it quickly becomes unmanageable (I am assuming a grown up family here as it is closer to my own position)

 

  • Of course you have yourself and your wife/husband/partner (Count=2)

 

  • Then you have those two grown up children (Count=4)

 

  • Their partners of course (Count=6)

 

  • But they have two children each? (Count=10)

 

  • Of course you’ve got to allow for yours and your partners parents (Count=14)

 

  • Can you leave out the parents of your grown up children’s partners? (Count=18)

 

  • Then we have our own siblings, our partner’s siblings (and their families!), the siblings of your grown up children’s partners, their children………….

 

 

 

That list got out of control pretty quickly and by the last entry it just spirals into impossibility. The reality is that you will end up having to be a lot more ruthless about your priorities than you would like and certainly more ruthless than you would be in your normal everyday life. You have to imagine the scenarios you will face and admit that what you would like to be able to do is well outside the reality.

 

Personally, my priority is to provide for myself and my wife. There is no-one else living with us so it’s an easy point at which to make the most ruthless cut. In following the KISS principle (“Keep It Simple Stupid”), I am keeping my focus on the smallest, easiest number of dependents. Once that is sorted, an expansion can be looked at although I cannot see any way that there can be a ‘fair’ division of family, it really is all-or-nothing once you start down that path.