Deal Alert: One Year’s Supply of Food (Mostly Mountain House) for $4,250.00
billj 09.16.14
It’s National Preparedness Month, and I usually take some time right about now to go over my preps. One of the big issues that has come up in the past few years is our family food supply. I’ve got a large cache of MREs, and many of them are starting to expire. So, I took this opportunity to do a big food purchase–specifically, a one-year supply.
While Wise Foods are typically among the cheapest, I’m not as big of a fan of them. I prefer Mountain House. So when I came across this Nitro-Pak special on 1-year supply of mostly Mountain House food at 2000+ calories per day for only $4249.00, I was pretty excited. This is a really good price for this amount of long-term storage calories, and shipping is free on it. (Note: We don’t get any kick-back or benefits for posting this. I’m just doing it as a PSA. If anyone knows of a better deal, please post in the comments section below.)
This is a few hundred pounds of food, but I’ve cleared out a space for it. When it’s dropped off, I plan on having them stash it behind our wooden gate and fence, and then I’ll move it into the house at night for OPSEC reasons.
$4K is a lot to drop at once on food, but if you can spring for it and (this is key) you don’t have to borrow to do it, then it’s basically like buying a roughly $450/year food insurance policy for the next 25 years.
How did I arrive at that number of $450/year, you ask? This is based on the cash plus opportunity cost, which depends on one’s expectations about a safe return on $4K for the next 25 years adjusted for inflation. If you don’t know how to compute the time value of money when purchasing preps (or anything else, for that matter), then you’re screwing yourself. Retirement savings are the ultimate prep, and any sort of catastrophe preps are a very, very far distant second or third (or fourth or fifth) to that.
