Personal and financial survival techniques

Here are some high-level themes for personal and financial survival strategies in the 21st century:

Practice frugality.

Increase your savings rate to at least 20%. The reason is because the western economies are in long-term decline, and you'll need the money more later. You might be able to buy your way out of trouble.

Avoid predatory taxation. Tax evasion is illegal, but tax avoidance isn't. You can avoid at least some taxation by arranging your affairs so as to minimize taxable transactions. Tax avoidance is necessary in order to achieve high savings rates, because taxes are the biggest expense for most people in the "western" countries.

Diversify your savings (savings diversification) by spreading currency risk among several currencies and precious metals.

Diversify your investments (investment diversification) among both businesses and asset classes.

Learn investment strategy? to avoid unnecessary risks and chronically poor performance.

Arrange your career and your assets to have multiple streams of income. The reason is that if you have multiple streams of income, adequate savings, and practice frugality, the loss of any one income stream will be less devastating than if you lose the only income stream you had. You need to prepare for a future where employment opportunities are sparse, less reliable, and less long-lived than they were in the past.

Favor productive assets over use assets. Either sell unnecessary use assets and buy productive assets, or convert use assets into productive assets.

Run your own business if possible. Self-employment might entail hard decisions, but you can at least make them according to your own best interest. There are also opportunities to avoid taxable transactions.

Adopt a low-energy lifestyle. Live closer to work and closer to provisions. Walk if it's feasible (and drop the gym membership as an extravagance).

Consider moving to a strategic location. Most of the cities in the western countries are doomed due to globalization, which implies deindustrialization (negating their original reason for existence) and welfare programs for recent immigrants that the local governments will be looking for someone to pick up the tab for. There are also other problems such as a lack of incentive for governments to do anything about crime, and expanding and increasingly tyrannical governments, which will tend to set up videocameras and checkpoints in the cities first. The suburbs of major cities are probably even worse, because they are so inefficient of transportation and resources. Mid-sized communities away from large cities, smaller towns close to strategic lines of transportation, and arable farmland near those areas, are probably your best bets. Stay away from deep rural areas where lines of transportation and communication are already too tenuous, areas such as much of western Montana and Wyoming where it is too cold and too dry for survival gardening (often if the population density was extremely low until modern times, there was a reason for that), and from areas such as the American southwest where large populations are dependent on food and water from faraway sources.

Do not live alone. As life gets harder, mutual help will become more valuable. Personal freedom—in the sense of being able to make choices on a strictly personal basis, without regard to family members or friends—is a fairly recent phenomenon related to prosperity and relative personal safety that should no longer be taken for granted. Instead, base your personal plans on extended families and communities.

Use your family networks and community networks? to refer new business and take advantage of opportunities for cooperation.

Have plans to defend family and community members from predatory crime and military drafts.

Have escape plans in case a national crisis requires that you flee the country.

Practice food storage and food stock rotation?.

Practice vigilance as a permanent way of life. It is impossible to tell when the next crisis might happen, so it is prudent to live a vigilant lifestyle that can be maintained indefinitely, without hardship.