Master budget ladder

The page above gives three bands and a buy order, and the buy order is the important part. This adds the band that comes before all of them, and the honest account of where the money goes wrong.

The band before the first band

There is a zero pound band, and most of it outranks most of the three hundred pound one.

A household that has done all of that and owns nothing is better placed than one that owns the three hundred pound band and has done none of it. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the difference between having equipment and being able to act.

What households over-buy

Money in this hobby drifts toward the interesting and away from the useful.

• Trauma kit, ahead of the boring layers. Buy it, but after the plasters, the painkillers and the rehydration salts, which is what you will actually open.
• Freeze-dried meal pouches. Expensive per calorie, need water and fuel you may not have, and nobody eats them until they have to. Tins and rice are a fraction of the cost.
• Gadgets that generate small amounts of electricity. Thermoelectric stoves, hand-crank chargers beyond a radio, tiny solar. Fun, real, and low value per pound compared with a bigger panel or simply more batteries.
• Knives. One good fixed blade, as the parent page says. The second and third are a hobby.
• Anything bought as a set in a padded case. Retail kits are priced for the case and stocked for the photograph.
• Water filters beyond one per person. They last tens of thousands of litres. The bottleneck is containers, not filtration.

What households under-buy

The unglamorous list, and almost everything on it is cheap.

• Containers. Buckets, jerry cans, anything that holds water. The most common single gap, and the parent page's own line that you cannot have too many buckets is the truest sentence in the chapter.
• Socks and boots. Wet feet end a person's usefulness faster than almost anything, and foot injuries recur in every flood response. Two pairs of proper socks per person costs almost nothing.
• Painkillers and rehydration salts. Big bottles, in date, in a known place.
• Soap. More than feels sensible. It is the cheapest disease prevention available.
• Batteries, and the right ones. Standardise on one size across torches and the radio so a spare fits anything.
• Cash in small notes. Covered on the documents page, and consistently under-held.
• Cover material for the toilet. Sawdust by the sack. The system fails the day it runs out.
• A second warm layer per person, and a hat. Warmth bought as clothing is far cheaper than warmth bought as fuel.
• Reading glasses, spare pairs, for anybody who needs them. A person who cannot read the label cannot follow any page in this app.

The running cost nobody budgets

The three bands are capital costs. The stocked household also has a running cost, and ignoring it is why kits rot.

Two practical consequences.

Buy lithium primary cells for the things that sit unused, such as the torch in the go-bag and the one in the car. They store far longer than alkalines and do not leak into the contacts. Alkalines are fine for what you use weekly.

Set a rotation date and attach it to something fixed, the same trick as the drills. The clocks changing, twice a year, handles water, batteries, medicines and the go-bag repack in one afternoon.

Buying it slowly

Almost nobody has three hundred pounds spare in one go, and the ladder reads as though they do.

• Follow the parent page's buy order inside whatever you have. Water, fire, two weeks of food, light and comms, medical, energy, depth. Twenty pounds a month spent in that order beats two hundred spent on whatever was interesting that week.
• Buy the cheap end of each rung before the expensive end of any rung. A ten pound torch for every person beats one forty pound torch.
• Second hand is fine for most of it. Tools, buckets, jerry cans, camping stoves, wool blankets, hand tools, cast iron. Charity shops, marketplace listings and car boot sales. Do not buy safety-critical items used: not tourniquets, not gas hose, not a filter whose history you do not know.
• Free is available for more than you think. Food-grade buckets from bakery counters, sawdust from a joinery, pallets for firewood next winter, cardboard for insulation.
• Buy consumables in the normal shop, at normal prices, as part of the weekly order rather than as a project. That is how the deep pantry gets built without a single large outlay, and it is also how the rotation happens by itself.

And spend some of it on nothing at all. A first aid course, an evening doing the lights-off walk, a night in the garden with the go-bags. The parent page's own calendar is the best value line in this whole chapter and it does not appear in any of the three bands, because it does not cost anything.