It sounds really dramatic to say there’s just ONE WAY to handle a crisis, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say just that. We’re looking at very hard times coming up – heck, they’ve hit many of us already. And I think there’s only one way to survive 2023.
Frugality.
We have to make different choices with our money.
Many of us will be forced to do it. We will make different choices because we won’t be able to afford to make the same ones we’re making right now. We will have to cancel some of our regular expenses and downsize parts of our lives.
Others might be able to squeak by spending as they have been for a little bit longer. We saw this over Christmas. A lot of people put the holiday on credit cards. They bought the same food as traditionally served, epic gifts for the entire family, and decked the halls full on. They wanted “normalcy” and “one more good holiday” for their families. It’s not the decision I’d make, but I do understand it. Change is hard. Seeing your children forced to adapt can be painful. Getting a spouse on board can be next to impossible.
One way or the other, 2023 is going to look different for nearly all of us.
What is the projection?
We don’t need a crystal ball to know that the outlook for our economy is rather grim.
First, there’s inflation. Many experts expect inflation to increase in the coming years due to rising demand and the impact of government stimulus measures. The Federal Reserve predicts that inflation will remain below 2% in the near term, but could rise slightly above 2% in the long term. Of course, anyone who has visited a grocery store recently can attest to the fact that the “official” inflation and the real-life effects are entirely different numbers.
We’ve also been dealing with supply chain issues since the Covid outbreak in China in 2020. Exports dwindled, and store shelves emptied. While we recovered to some degree, our supplies have never reached pre-pandemic levels, and prices have remained high.
And it isn’t just shortages causing economic issues and supply chain problems. The U.S. economy is heavily dependent on international trade, and the ongoing trade tensions with China and Russia will continue to have an impact on the economy.
Then there are the bubbles.
There are several subprime lending bubbles that could potentially burst in the US economy, including:
- Auto loan bubble: The subprime auto loan market has been growing rapidly in recent years, with many borrowers taking on high-risk loans with high interest rates and low credit scores. If people begin to default on these loans, it could lead to a wave of auto loan defaults and potentially a recession.
- Student loan bubble: Student loan debt in the US has reached an all-time high, with many borrowers taking on high-risk loans with high interest rates and low credit scores. If people begin to default on these loans, it could lead to a wave of student loan defaults and potentially a recession.
- Mortgage bubble: The housing market has recovered since the last recession, but there are concerns that the subprime mortgage market could still be vulnerable to a bubble. If people begin to default on their mortgage loans, it could lead to a wave of foreclosures and potentially a recession.
If these bubbles burst and people begin to default on their loans, it could have serious consequences for the US economy. It could lead to a wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures, which would negatively impact the housing market and the overall economy. It could also lead to a drop in consumer spending, as people struggle to pay their debts and bills. This could lead to a recession, as businesses struggle to make ends meet and lay off employees.
And not only is this a threat to our overall economy – it’s going to be very difficult for us on personal levels.
It’s not our first rodeo.
The thing you have to remember is that, as a country, this is not our first rodeo. We’ve been through difficult times before. Very difficult times.
- The Great Depression (1929-1939): The Great Depression was a severe economic downturn that lasted for more than a decade. It was triggered by the stock market crash of 1929, which caused a widespread panic and led to a collapse in demand and a sharp contraction in economic activity. The depression was marked by high unemployment, low industrial production, and declining prices, and it had a profound impact on the United States and the rest of the world.
- The stagflation of the 1970s: The 1970s were marked by a combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth, a phenomenon known as stagflation. This was caused by a variety of factors, including rising energy prices, supply shocks, and monetary policy mistakes. The stagflation of the 1970s had a negative impact on the US economy, leading to slow growth and high unemployment.
- The savings and loan crisis (1980s-1990s): The savings and loan crisis was a financial crisis that affected the US banking industry in the 1980s and 1990s. It was caused by a combination of factors, including regulatory changes, economic downturns, and risky lending practices. The crisis led to the failure of hundreds of savings and loan institutions, and it had a significant impact on the US economy.
- The dot-com bubble (1995-2000): The dot-com bubble was a period of rapid growth in the technology and internet sectors, followed by a sharp decline. It was characterized by the rapid rise of internet-based companies, the overvaluation of their stocks, and a speculative frenzy that eventually led to a burst of the bubble. The dot-com bubble had a negative impact on the US economy, leading to a slowdown in economic growth and a decline in the stock market.
- The Great Recession (2007-2009): The Great Recession was a severe economic downturn that affected the global economy, including the United States. It was caused by the subprime mortgage crisis, which was characterized by the widespread issuance of risky mortgages and the subsequent collapse of the housing market. The Great Recession had a significant impact on the US economy, leading to high unemployment, slow economic growth, and a decline in the stock market.
The common link between all of these?
Despite leadership that may or may not have sufficed, we survived each and every one. We adapted. We made the changes we had to make. We got through it.
And we’ll survive this one too.
How can you adapt?
There are big ways to adapt and small ones. The changes you make will depend on your situation. You’ll adapt to your unique circumstances.
If your circumstances are dire, you will be forced to make huge adjustments because there’s simply no alternative. The credit is gone. The money isn’t there and won’t stretch to cover newly inflated prices. If you are in this kind of scenario, you may need to revisit your living arrangements, consider dropping down to one vehicle, or cancel extracurriculars for the kids.
Others may be able to pick and choose the changes that they make. Lots of smaller cuts can be easier to handle for some people than huge, dramatic cuts. Little things like dropping down to the next level of internet service, skipping the daily drive-through coffee, and swapping out name brands for generic can make a difference if you don’t have to overhaul your budget entirely.
Slashing your budget in one way or another will happen for just about everyone. But we’ll survive. It’s what we do as human beings. We’re wired to get through stuff.
It doesn’t have to be miserable.
The way you approach the upcoming changes will greatly affect how you and your loved ones handle it. It’s essential to adapt philosophically too. You can’t think about everything you’re losing. You have to find the positive things. Maybe your life doesn’t look like it once did, but it can still be good.
Look, I’ve lost everything. EVERYTHING. And it happened after I built myself up from nothing as a single mother making minimum wage. I lost my house. I lost my car. I was forced into radical changes. I had to move to a tiny little apartment with my girls, and it had to be close enough that I could walk to work. Then, I lost my job, too, during that delightful Great Recession mentioned above. I ended up getting an old beater of a truck and moving out to the boondocks of Canada in the Algonquin forest in a drafty cabin that only had wood heat. It was literally the cheapest rental in Ontario. That was my search parameter. And there, I rebuilt my life again. I went in a different direction, re-budgeted, and I started over.
And you know what? It turned out to be awesome. It’s how, eventually, I found freedom.
It was a different kind of awesome and it certainly wasn’t immediately wonderful.
Suddenly I didn’t have a job with benefits and a boss. Everything was on me. I worked a lot. But I also learned a lot. I started a new career and a business of my own. I had outdoor adventures living out there in that frozen wilderness. Instead of going out to lunch, we went for a hike and identified animal tracks in the freshly fallen snow. We learned to look forward to the days when the power went out because we could play games and read books without guilt for not working. We found new ways to enjoy life, ways that didn’t cost us a lot of money.
I had to keep going to get to the good part. To the new happiness. To live well.
And that’s what it’s all about. Living well. Sure, we’ve got to spend less money. But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed to a life with no fun, no joy, and nothing to look forward to.
It’s all in how you approach it. What you see depends on where you put your focus. Are you focused on what you’re gaining or what you’re losing?
Check out our new PDF book, One Year of Life-Changing Frugal Living Ideas and Philosophies. Get more than a thousand pages of savings, large and small. Our philosophy is that you can live well while spending far less money than the Jones next door. We’ll show you how to do it in this epic roundup of more than 200 “Thrifticles” that will make it easy to live well while spending less. We want to make this available for everyone, so this weekend, you can name your price for this PDF book that will seriously change your life. Go here to get your copy.
Don’t plan to just grimly live through it. Plan to find some happiness while still adapting to your circumstances. That way, you’ll not only survive, but you’ll grow as a human being.
Americans are resilient.
There’s no denying that the very fabric of our nation has changed over the past 50 years. Heck, America now is practically unrecognizable from the country of 20 years ago with all its wokeness and PC nonsense.
But the idealist in me believes that deep down, the resilience of our ancestors remains. I sincerely hope we will channel the resourceful spirit that has seen us through every other difficult time in our history.
Your attitude about the changes you’ll face will be everything. The difference between success and failure is all in your mind – and your mindset. You can set an example for your family and help them with their own perspective.
The only way to get through this upcoming economic melee is frugality – perhaps even extreme frugality. Nobody’s version of this will look the same. We can’t individually repair the entire nation’s (and the world’s) economy, but we can change the way we manage our own money. We can roll with what life throws at us. We can thrive.
What do you think?
What do you believe is the key to surviving 2023? Are you concerned about the economy? Are you making changes to handle looming inflation?
Let’s talk about the future. Let me know what you think in the comments. Article cross-posted from The Organic Prepper.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
The value of money is based on security and contract law.as big gov fails us,money devalues.nobody wants a hot check from a judge.judges have failed us.sure i could go into details but i wont.you either know me or you dont.if you do know me then you know i know whats wrong with this country.its called traitors.its really simple.lawyers betrayed this country.lots of lawyers.
So no i will not say how to save us.i tried for ten years plus to save us.drown in your lawyers and maybe get a recipe book on eating lawyers.i wasted seven months in jail trying to save america.fuck it.let it burn.fuck trump,fuck biden,fuck obama,fuck bush,fuck clinton.fuck the usa.im tired!
Feed yourself!
Want to survive the future, period?
GET RID OF THE KHAZAR MAFIA!