Being a homemaker means making a home for you and your loved ones. Once you embrace the simplicity of homemaking, all sorts of exciting new paths open for you in terms of caring for your home and those who live in it. To help women make the most of their homemaking, I created a series called The Prudent & Prepared Homemaker.

Why did I choose that name for this series? It’s very simple. It brings together the three important aspects of what we need to accomplish in our homes. Those are:

• Prudent – Being wise
• Prepared – Being proactive
• Homemaker – One who makes a home

So this series is for women who wish to be wise and proactive makers of their home.

(Please Note: This series was originally published in 2019 in my now-closed forum. I moved it to blog posts in 2020.)

The Prudent & Prepared Homemaker Series

In this series, we’re going to explore practical methods and strategies including:

• How to develop a prudent and prepared mindset
• Why you need a pantry
• Why you need to prepare for unknown circumstances
• The first person you should prepare for
• How to grow a pantry for your individual home needs
• Dealing with your own anxiety and stress
• The very first thing that should go in your pantry
• The mistakes you could make that would make all of your preparing worthless
• How I personally prepare for storms and weather events
• Where to find extra money to grow your pantry
• Why most “First Things to Buy” prepping lists are worthless
• How to involve your children and discuss these topics with them
• How current events, the economy, and natural disasters can impact your individual family

Throughout the series I will be referring to The Prudent and Prepared Homemaker. This is important resource is available in my shop. 

While you are working through these blog posts and the pages in The Prudent and Prepared Homemaker, you will be killing two birds with one stone (so to speak). You’ll be building a pantry at the same time you are preparing your home and life for unexpected events. They truly do go together as you’ll see as you progress through the various posts.

The Benefits of a Pantry

A pantry is at the heart of a prudent and prepared homemaking life. A well-stocked and organized pantry can make your life so much in easier in several ways.

Save Time: It will reduce trips to the store thus saving time. If you create a system for stocking and replenishing your pantry, you will rarely run out of things you need. This will virtually eliminate last minute dashes to the store because you run out of something important. This potentially saves you literally hours each month.

Save Money: A pantry can be a significant money saver. In a later posts, I’ll explain how a pantry can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year on groceries and other supplies. If you don’t have a strategy in place for stocking a pantry, this could be a huge boon to your bottom line. A pantry also reduces money spent on gas when you dash to the store at the last minute for forgotten items.

Prepare for Challenging Times: A pantry is the first step in preparing your home for challenging times. Whether it is a job loss, illness, a weather emergency, or a national emergency, a well-stocked pantry will give you peace of mind when things become difficult.

Food Savings Account: A well-stocked pantry is a food insurance policy or savings account. Instead of putting the money into a savings account, you’ve put it into your pantry. You’ve invested in tangible goods while they were available and, hopefully, at the best price.

Homemaking Encouragement: It can provide you with encouragement in your homemaking. Seeing your well-stocked shelves is a tangible achievement in a vocation that sometimes feels full of non-tangible accomplishments.

Taking a Realistic Look at Life

An important step in moving forward is looking realistically at life and accepting that bad things will happen. It’s natural to want to go into denial and not think about the bad things that can happen. For some people, not thinking about them makes them less real. If that’s you, then here’s my tough love moment for you.

Bad things happen and pretending otherwise isn’t going to change that.

However, being in denial about bad things happening could leave you and your loved ones in a difficult place. If you have people depending on you, then you have to accept that potentially bad things could happen. If you have little people depending on you, you especially owe it to them to prepare for their needs.

Make a Choice

Here’s the choice. There is a weather event or crisis of some kind. You can either:

• Be prepared as best you can and know that your loved ones will have the things they need OR
• Look at your loved ones and know that you are in trouble because you chose denial and didn’t follow through each time that niggling feeling came at you in the past to do something

I truly hope you aren’t going to leave yourself in the situation where your family has pressing needs that you could have prepared for and you didn’t. I hope you’re going to do the best you can for your family within your individual means.

I hope you will use the information in this series to make a plan to be both prudent and prepared.

Make a Plan

After deciding to face reality, the best gift you can give your loved ones in this part of life is to put together a plan. We have a responsibility to love and care for those in our circle of influence. We have a responsibility to make wise choices with our financial resources.

Being prudent and prepared is where you bring your caring role and your financial stewardship role together in very practical and actionable ways. It is where you say “I love you” in tangible ways. It is thinking of the needs of each person you care for as being the love of Christ in action.

“Nobody knows what will happen,” Pa said. “Prepare for the worst and then you’ve some grounds to hope for the best, that’s all you can do.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie

Why You Need to Prepare

When people hear the term preparedness or prepper, they think crazy people who live in the woods and have enough beans and rice to last until the next century. While those people certainly exist, that’s not what I’m talking about.

It was only a few generations back that basic preparedness was a way of life. Our great-grandparents and beyond would have found the idea of being dependent on just-in-time delivery unthinkable.

Just-in-Time Delivery

If you aren’t familiar with how just-in-time (JIT) delivery works, it is a manufacturing technique used by companies primarily to reduce costs. They receive supplies just in time to create their products and then ship the products out to arrive just in time for the store to sell it to a buyer. The biggest reason JIT exists is to cut inventory costs. If manufacturers don’t have to store materials, they don’t have to pay for the inventory space.

This is great for the companies, but leaves the consumer in a precarious situation.

Since JIT became the operational norm, the amount of stock on grocery store shelves has dropped significantly. I am old enough to remember when every product had many more available on the shelf. Now you are lucky if there is a dozen or two at any time. How often do you go to the store and intend to purchase something on sale only to find it completely sold out and with no new inventory expected for a couple of days?  JIT contributes significantly to this problem.

While this doesn’t matter much in your day to day life when everything is flowing well, it can be a tremendous problem if the JIT process is disrupted for any reason. Why?

This is a link to a paper published by the American Trucking Association (ATA) in 2015. It offers an outline of what would happen if the trucks stopped moving goods around our country and how quickly it would happen. (May 2020 Update: This PDF was available until just recently. I had to go to the Wayback Machine to access it again and put the link here.) In When Trucks Stop, America Stops, they describe the impact on food, healthcare, transportation, waste removal, retail, manufacturing, banking, and other areas. I’m linking to the PDF because they give such an excellent overview of the reality we would face if the trucks stopped for some reason.

Please take the time to read it. It is sobering to think how much we depend on trucking alone to get what we take for granted every day. Now imagine ships, airplanes, rail, etc. having difficulties making their deliveries. We are incredibly dependent on goods moving around this country constantly, all day and night, every day.

JIT has its benefits for the companies. I imagine the consumer benefits slightly with lower prices if inventory costs are lower. But it also leaves your family and mine vulnerable. It’s time to consider how to minimize the impact negative events could have your family.

So are you ready to become a Prudent & Prepared Homemaker? I hope so.

The Prudent & Prepared Homemaker

Read All of the Posts in the Series

3 Reasons To Become A Prudent & Prepared Homemaker

5 Reasons To Keep Written Pantry & Emergency Notes

4 Must-Know Tips About Stocking a Pantry 

3 Tips for Building Your Pantry 

7 Places To Find Extra Money For Stocking Your Pantry

3 Reasons Most “First Things to Buy” Prepper Lists Are Worthless

4 Tips to Deal with Emergency Anxiety

4 Facts About Preparing For Emergencies

3 Unusual Tips For Emergency Preparedness

11 Ways To Prepare Your Home For A Storm

4 Important Tips About Safe Water

4 Types of People Who Should Buy a 14-Day Emergency Food Supply Pack

4 Tips For Discussing Emergency Preparedness With Children