I’ve spoken already about how it’s possible to save money with your preps, but preparedness can be taken one step further – it can actually earn you money if you use your skills as a prepper in the right way.
For those of you who don’t struggle with finding money in your budget for prepping because your full time job leaves you plenty of wiggle room to fund your preps – this article probably isn’t for you, but if you fall in one of the following camps of people, you’re likely to really benefit from using your preps to make money:
- You don’t earn enough from your day job to feel comfortable spending a lot on preparedness.
- You have extra time in your day that you don’t mind spending on side hustles that will earn you an extra income or even just a little extra cash every once in a while.
- Your spouse doesn’t like you using up your regular salary on prepping, though you’d like to have some money to fund your preps (if you’re in this camp, by the way, check out this article: My Spouse Doesn’t Like Me Prepping: What Can I Do?)
Is earning money from your preps easy? Depends on your attitude towards it.
Some of these suggestions could earn you a quick and easy pretty penny every once in a while – whenever you found the time to spend on them to earn a little extra on the side. Others are a bit harder to work, but could actually turn into full-time gigs if you’re looking to replace a full time job, or want to basically have part or full-time employment even in retirement. It all depends on the approach you want to take.
But enough of an introduction. I think you get the picture here. There’s ways to make serious cash with your preps. Now let’s address how.
How Preppers Can Use Their Preps to Make Money
1. Sell some of the items you bought for your stockpile.
This is one of those ways of making money I think is a lot harder to do en-masse, but if you’re looking to make a few extra dollars on the side here and there, it’s an excellent way to go, especially if you’re particularly good at couponing, or getting items for free for your stockpile.
Have too much of a certain thing? I suggested bartering or trading these items in my article about saving money prepping, but you can use these items to sell to friends and family and others who may want them as well. Cheaper for them to get them through you, and a little extra padding for your own wallet as well.
2. Learn a labor-related self-sufficiency skill and find work using that skill.
There are so many self-sufficiency skills you could teach yourself that would be beneficial for you to know as a prepper. So many. Want a visual? I wrote up a huge list of these skills here, and I’m sure there are plenty more I’ve forgotten.
Some of these skills are more profitable to teach yourself than others. If you end up being interested in the right one, your knowledge could earn you a healthy side income if it’s something you’re interested in pursuing for money on the side. Eventually, your side gig can even replace your day job entirely, if that’s the direction you want to head in, or if you’d prefer – become a part or full-time gig during your retirement.
Examples of these self-sufficiency skills: carpentry and woodworking, electrical and plumbing, car repair. Knife sharpening is also a great one for transforming into a side business.
Want some ideas for which self-sufficiency skills to dive into that could help you make or save a lot of money in the long run? Check out these articles:
- 10 Self-Sufficiency Skills That Will Save You a Bundle
- 10 More Self-Sufficiency Skills That Can Save You a Killing
3. Learn a crafty or creative self-sufficiency skill and sell your creations.
Think this is ridiculous? It’s not! In this day and age where everybody and their mother loves looking up DIY posts, staring enviously at the result, and yet never doing anything of the sort themselves, there’s plenty to be made from a crafty self-sufficiency hobby that you picked up from your grandmother or originally learned to be more prepared.
Some examples of these types of self-sufficiency skills that translate into lovely creations that can be sold for a good sum on sites like Etsy: knitting, soap making, clothes making, leather working, and yet again – carpentry.
Even if you didn’t originally learn your skill to make money, doesn’t mean you can’t capitalize on your skill. You could even end up with a healthy small business on your hands in a few years time.
4. Sell hunted or fished meat to friends, family, and neighbors who are interested.
Meat you can grab at the grocery store just doesn’t taste the same as hunted meat – it’s not even half as good at the grocery store, at least not to me. There’s a quality about the taste of hunted meat that makes it worth so much more in my, and many other people’s, eyes. Same with fish you’ve fished yourself – rather than the farmed fish you often find at the grocery store.
If you have friends, family, neighbours, or acquaintances who don’t hunt and fish themselves, but love the taste of hunted and fished meat – you can stand to gain if they’re willing to pay you for what you’ve snagged in your spare time. With enough people interested, and going out often enough, you can really make a healthy side income doing this.
5. Sell excess fruits and veggies from your prepper garden to anyone interested.
Just the same as hunted and fished meat is infinitely more delicious to many than anything you can grab in a grocery store, home-grown organic fruits and vegetables are ridiculously better tasting when compared to their non-organic supermarket counterparts. I don’t think anyone in their right mind would deny this.
If you’ve already got a prepper garden started, you can try selling your fruits and veggies as is, or if you can or jar the fruits and vegetables yourself, can try selling them that way for extra as well. Make jams? Same as if you made homemade soaps – your handy DIY creations up for sale could result in you having a very healthy side income, or even a booming small business. All depends on what you want and how far you’d like to take things.
If you’re not comfortable selling these home-grown foods to friends, family, or neighbours, you can always try trading or bartering them for items they have that you need. It won’t help you make money prepping, but it sure will help you save money, since you save yourself the bill of paying for the items you traded for.
Want to Save Money Prepping?
Interested saving money while building up a prepper stockpile & prepping in general? Take a look at the following articles for some tips & advice:
- 14 Ways Prepping Can Actually Help You Save Money
- Hate Budgeting? How to Build Killer Savings Anyway
- How to Stockpile Items for Free or Next to Nothing
- 10 Tips for Building a Stockpile on a Budget
- How to Stockpile Food and Other Goods Cheaply
More Ways to Make Money Prepping?
As usual, I’m sure I’ve left out a lot of ways to make money with your preps that just haven’t crossed my mind.
Have an idea I didn’t list here? Leave it in the comments down below!
Ever tried any of these (or other) ways of making money with your preps? How’d it go? Was it a success or not worth the effort? Would you do it again, or do you still do it until today?
Let me know!
Ms. Xavier, just stumbled across a few of your blogs and wanted to simply say thanks for a few fresh perspectives. I don’t disagree about the term “prepper” being faux pas at the local get together or it being stigmatized as the doomsday farce tv shows but 24 countries in 20 years working with some of the best and brightest on the Brit side and with SOF, CENTCOM, SOCOM & SOCCENT really schools you on the fact none of us are authorities on anything but reading and actually listening to suggestions by highly successful and well trained SME’s does nothing but enhance your odds at living through some crazy shite. A SEAL in Pakistan taught me to take all the “tacticool shite” off your M4 and add more mags to your kit to save weight. The SOF boys taught me about armouring civilian vehicles on the cheap with telephone books and kevlar blankets. People who have actually been in the fan and got out for whatever reason got out because of their team, luck, a wpn jam or all the above but they got out. I say talk to vets; ask them for tips or off the cuff “what would you have like to have had when/if”etc. Ask to record them and buy the a beer or whatever and just listen. You are sure to get some really great ideas on essentials for kit and how to use what you have and learn to live without too. Just my two cents but my former assistant Scoutmaster in the 80’s was SEAL TEAM 1 and was 130 lbs and very unassuming but taught me so much because I just asked. only when Don die last year did I meet other members of his team riding for his funeral run. Find these people and learn and pray you never need to use your kit or skills be “Be Prepared”. Be safe and keep blogging on. JJ
“De Oppresso Liber”
Liberate the Oppressed
Good article. Might get peoples minds engaged into thought. And of course some people are incapable of any rationale thought by themselves…
Thanks, Texas Ranch :)
Well isn’t that something..a couple of these comments in here are positively intended to demoralize. If You can’t say something good then STFU.
Good Article. Many of Us are not in the place whereby We can say that we have truly landed in a self sufficient situation whereby our needs are being met in an independently constructed fashion that could be called off-grid prepared or dug in for the long haul.
The skills that I have learned in setting my self up have value to others and I for one have no problem leveraging them in order to achieve my end goal which is to turn my Lakeside home into where I work with everything that i need to be able to look after and provide for myself.
If folks are coming here to disparage the efforts of others in not thinking this way, it is probably because they are trapped in their situation, without any skills that parting with would profit them. Without hope, skills, or a plan any positive suggestion to them is just rubbing it in..
I myself am going to take several of these suggestions as proof that i am going down the right road for myself, and whoever says against only proves that working for the future is futile because they don’t see one for themselves. Keep up the good work !
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Thanks for that, Dan ;).
I wish you the best of luck with turning your Lakeside home into where you work and do everything you need to do. Working from home may not be the easiest or most profitable thing to do, but it’s rewarding, I think more rewarding than a regular job.
Hope it happens for you sooner than you expected!
I had no intention of demoralising anyone, just offering my opinion. If I wanted to demoralise anyone I would tell them to STFU, I wouldn’t do that of course, I was raised to behave in a better manner.
Sorry about that..i was just hoping that your better manner of being raised would honor the efforts of those trying to make ends meet by utilizing what resources they have, instead of precluding those same survival opportunities as a luxury only affordable to royalty.
Realistic cost/benefit analysis is not demoralization. It’s the difference between surviving and not. Making one dollar with two dollars of effort leaves you poorer than when you started. Counseling someone toward a fool’s quest is not helpful to them.
And, hey, don’t lump me with that effite limey wanker, Jon, typing his Hollywood hillbilly slang–I’m afraid that chap wouldn’t be able to discern sniping from snipe hunting.
14 years in the armed forces, and 10 years as a prison officer says I can cupcake.
Limey wanker? Possibly,,, but the word you were looking for was effette. No such word as effite.
Hunting in the UK? The only people who hunt in the UK are the idle rich. We don’t have vast areas of land that you and Billy Bob and Bubba can just drive to in your pick up truck, ready for a good ole weekend huntin an a fishin.
You might be able to catch some crabs off a jetty, but I doubt that you would make any money.
The majority of people who have the time and the guns here are criminals, politicians, and royalty. All of whom incidentally, sponge off society.
Howdy Jon,
Whilst I appreciate your perspective, its not representative of the UK, right off the bat- plenty of people in the UK hunt and fish, its not exclusively a past time for “the idle rich”. Plenty of empty land to hunt and fish on too- creeks, rivers are literally everywhere and the bulk of farmland have agreements to allow hunters free access.
Maybe you haven’t been spending time with the right people- go to http://www.thehuntinglife.com/forums/ and introduce yourself, I am sure you will find folks in your area (at the very least, within driving distance) who would be more than happy to introduce you to a rich and diverse community of like minded folks!
As for firearms, plenty of guns too (although, not compared to the states obviously)- as of 2010; 1,809,653 firearms that are registered in the UK alone. That doesn’t include blackmarket firearms, people who have been grandfathered in with what are now considered firearms and the common SxS shotgun found on most farms and rural properties that just haven’t been declared.
Its actually quite easy to get into firearms here, its just the “variety” that is limited. From a hunting perspective, all you need is a FAC or Shotgun Certificate which isn’t particularly hard to get. As a sidenote, the number of firearms owned by civilians here is growing considerably https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/firearm-and-shotgun-certificates-in-england-and-wales-financial-year-ending-march-2015/firearm-and-shotgun-certificates-in-england-and-wales-financial-year-ending-march-2015
Highest number since 1988 for straight issues and highest total since they started collecting stats.
Now that we have the UK out of the way, its worth remembering that MTJS has a global readership with a heavy bias towards U.S.A residents and thus any advice or article should be read without local prejudice as legislative and social norms differ significantly. A common example is the ubiquity of firearm suppressors in France (no regulation) vs the FBI Form FD-258s / BAFTE Form 4s in the states.
With all due respect to a pretty good prepper aggregator site…you just jumped the shark. Prepping from a U.K. apartment and making up articles like this? Someone desperate enough to try these ideas would do better panhandling.
As always, the best way to make money is usually not DOING the actual thing, but by teaching, hyping and selling supplies to newbies who think they’re gonna profit by doing the thing. Think Robert Kiyosaki….
Hi Max!
Before I respond to your points, just wanted to thank you for dropping by. Always nice to see what other people see if you catch my drift.
Anyway;
1. We are not a content aggregator site in any respect. In fact, this is probably one of the only sites in the prepper community where you won’t find anyone else’s content besides our own (we don’t even feature guest posts on here). All articles are written either by myself or Thomas.
2. We already wrote about why we moved to an apartment in the UK here, but in case you haven’t seen it/read it before: we ended up in a flat after being faced with a tough choice: rent at outrageously inflated prices or buy a place outright (the banks would not happily lend to us after our move to the UK) and seeing as how what we could afford outright was an apartment/flat, we decided that’s what it would be best to live in. No debts is a huge advantage from a prepper perspective, and whilst this is in no way our forever home and we do hope to upgrade to a detached house soon, the extra income has helped us pad our emergency funds at an unreal rate and left us with the ability to dump money into our other preps – something we were never able to do before.
Our first home was your standard 5 bedroom detached house in Canada – great garden and everything. From a prepper mindset, might sound perfect, but the enormous mortgage we had makes us feel like we’re in a much better position now, detached house or not. Frankly, Thomas and I value financial security above all else, and at this point in time, that means having made the move we did.
3. In my opinion, we aren’t selling hype or fear. Not in this article nor any other we’ve published. Of course, I know exactly what you are talking about with regards to the hype in the industry because we see it everyday, but it’s not something I believe we’ve ever done ourselves. If you think this article is in some way selling a hyped up message, I’m sorry you feel that way, but I most certainly cannot agree with you.
There are definitely plenty of ways to make money, and no none of these will land you the “big bucks” you’re talking about making. But in my honest opinion ethics should definitely be a factor in how you go about making money. You talk about panhandling like it’s not profitable. It is – it’s immensely profitable, especially in cities like Toronto where I used to live. But anyone who’s willing to do that is in my opinion morally bankrupt; I’m sure anyone willing to sink to that level could probably get more out of a day panhandling than most small businesses get in a week. Doesn’t mean I would.
This article has nothing to do with how you can make the *most* money – or feed off of people’s insecurities to make a killing off of prepping – it has to do with how you can use your prepping to ethically make a modest income, something extra on the side if you want/need to.
This common narrative of selling hope to the desperate is frankly disgusting. Living respectfully with what you have and not depending on others should be the American dream in my opinion, not predatory marketing to sell get rich schemes to those living month to month like Kiosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”.
:/