It annoys me that so much of disaster preparedness is about stockpiling stuff – storing extra food, getting expensive wood stoves, buying sub-zero sleeping bags…
Not all of us are in a position to spend a fortune on disaster prepping, and the incorrect notion that prepping has to be expensive prevents many people from ever getting started.
Yes, having some basic prepping supplies stockpiled at home is smart. And, yes, this will require you to spend some money.
But there are plenty of entirely free ways to get prepared for disaster and even get free prepping supplies, too. Here are just some of them.
Let me know if you have anything to add in the comments!
Also read:
- Prepping on a Budget: How to Make Every Dollar Count
- Cheap Prepping Items which Will Be Valuable when SHTF
- Dollar Store Prepping Finds
Free Prepping Supplies
1. Buckets
Buckets are often overlooked but have dozens of uses during emergencies. The most important one IMO is using buckets to make an emergency toilet. This could save you from being in a SHTF situation!
Free buckets are pretty easy to find. I recommend asking at local:
- Ice cream shops
- Donut shops (including Dunkin Donuts)
- Bakeries (including ones at big stores like Kroger and Walmart)
- Nursing homes and schools often have them
- Delis have pickle buckets
- Auto repair shops
- Pool supply stores
- Animal shelters (kitty litter often comes in buckets)
2. Rainwater Barrels
Large 55+ gallon barrels are great for rainwater harvesting but can be pricey.
These are a bit trickier to find for free, but it is possible. Some local governments have rainwater programs and distribute barrels for free.
If you don’t have luck with your local government, try asking for free barrels at:
- Car washes – they often get large drums of soap in barrels
- Recycling centers
- Food manufacturing factories
*Avoid barrels that may have held toxic substances. Those cannot be safely cleaned out and would not be safe for drinking water or irrigating crops.
3. Dumpster Diving for Supplies
It is disgusting how many perfectly good items get thrown away each year. If you can get over the worry that your neighbors might think if they catch you going through a dumpster, you can find tons of free prepping supplies in the trash.
If you know where to look, it’s even possible to make $250,000 a year from dumpster diving. You might not find prepping items, but if you can find other items you need, then you’ll free up your budget to prepping items.
Here are some of the best places to dumpster dive for free prepping gear:
- Military surplus store dumpsters
- Outside of military bases
- College dorm dumpsters after the school year ends – great for getting free storage units and scrap wood for things like boarding up windows
- Hardware stores – you’d be surprised how many tools you can find in the trash because one item in a set was missing
4. DIY Gear
Knowledge is much more valuable than gear, including how to make gear. There are plenty of free preparedness items you can use as a DIY project. Here are some:
- Hobo stove from tin cans
- Rocket stove
- Vegetable oil lamp
- Emergency heaters
- Gear from recycled plastic bags
- DIY survival weapons
- Char cloth
5. Craigslist
If you have a way to pick up the supplies, you can find tons of great prepping freebies on Craigslist. Granted, a lot of the free stuff on Craigslist isn’t meant for preparedness – but it can be modified with a bit of ingenuity.
For example, I recently saw someone giving away free aluminum windows on Craiglist. These could easily be turned into a DIY greenhouse. It just shows that creativity is the most important prepping skill!
6. Switch to Pee Rags
After the panic over toilet paper during the pandemic, I finally stopped using TP for pee. Instead, I made some rags from old clothes (free!) and kept them in a basket next to the toilet. I use them for pee only and then put them in a separate basket for later cleaning.
This saves me money (which can be used for other preps), frees up space, and prepares me for a disaster where toilet paper might not be available. There are also these toilet paper alternatives.
Building a Free Food and Water Stockpile
7. Water Storage Containers
Water should be one of your main priorities when getting prepped. While they aren’t ideal, you can use recycled plastic bottles for storing water. You will have to rotate these bottles, though, as they eventually start to leak.
For more on that, read this reusing plastic bottles for storing water..
8. Dumpster Diving for Food
Back when I was a punk college student, I used to dumpster dive all the time. I even met one of my boyfriends in a Trader Joe’s dumpster – he gave me a bouquet of flowers that he dove out of the trash. 😀 Now, that same guy runs the recycling program at a well-known hospital.
I get that you might think it is gross or unsafe to get food from the trash. But, as someone who worked in supermarkets for years, I can tell you that much of the food in their dumpsters is perfectly good.
Label on a can of food gets torn? It goes in the trash.
One orange in a bag goes bad? The entire bag gets tossed.
Then there are cases of sheer laziness. Instead of taking food back with them, unsold food at farmer’s markets sometimes just goes in the dumpster. Go to a farmers market at the end of the day and ask them for food they don’t want. You’ll be amazed at how much you get!
9. Preserve Food
A semi-free way to stockpile emergency food is to preserve food you would otherwise have thrown away. Or, get free food by dumpster diving and preserve this. If you recycle glass jars, methods like pickling can be completely free.
10. Grow Your Own Food
Once you get it going, a garden gives you free food and saves you money. The problem is getting started – many gardening supplies can be pricey.
It is possible to start a garden for completely free. Even if you don’t have much space. Here are some ideas:
- Use free buckets for your garden (see #1) and start a bucket garden.
- Start a vertical garden out of recycled pallets
- Get free dirt – just take a shovel to a nearby wilderness area with rich soil
- Grow easy crops – I grow dandelion in a separate part of my garden. People think it’s hilarious, but the young leaves taste great, are nutritious, and the plant will survive even if you have no green thumb.
11. Learn Wild Edibles
There’s free food around us if you just know where to look. Knowing which foods you can eat could save your life in an emergency situation. And, if you learn to preserve food, then you can build a decent free food stockpile.
Read:
- Our guide to foraging
- The crab apple tree
- Wild edible roots
- Foraging for wild teas
- Eating acorns
- Edible lichen and moss
12. Fresh Roadkill
My sister used to work for a Wildlife Management agency in New Hampshire. They’d get a call if a car accident involved a moose.
Everyone would come to the scene to carve up the approximately 500 lbs of meat from the dead moose. The poor animal had already died, so might as well use it.
If you live where accidents with large wild animals are frequent, talk to your local police department or wildlife agency about whether you could get notified. Or get a police scanner and quickly get to the scene of any wildlife-related accidents.
Learning Outdoor Survival Skills for Free
13. Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts
The Scouts are a great place to learn all sorts of survival skills for free. You can still get involved as a troop leader if you don’t have kids.
14. County Office of Parks & Recreation
Check your local Parks & Recs website (better, visit, or call them). Many of these have tons of free classes on plant identification, animal tracking, safety, navigation, and more.
15. Join a Hiking or Orienteering Club
Hiking and orienteering are great ways to get in shape (which is important for prepper fitness) and you’ll learn navigation skills. The other members can also be a great free resource for survival skills.
Disaster Prepping Skills
16. FEMA Training
FEMA has a huge catalog of courses that will teach you how to respond during a disaster. This includes free online and in-person courses. Learn more at FEMA’s website.
17. Run an Outage Drill
An outage drill is a simple but very effective thing you can do to get prepared for disasters. It involves turning off your electricity and/or water for a set period of day (such as for the entire weekend). This gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live through a disaster and whether your preps are adequate.
18. Do a Preparedness Assessment
Even with a large budget, you should still do a prepping assessment. It will show you where your strengths and weaknesses are regarding preparedness. Afterward, you’ll be better able to make a plan and budget for your preps. You can do an assessment here.
19. CERT and NERT Training
CERT stands for Community Emergency Response Team. There’s also NERT – Neighborhood Emergency Response Team. This free training covers valuable skills like first aid, search and rescue, triage, hazard mitigation, and more. It’s also a great place to meet other preppers.
20. Do Situational Awareness Exercises
These are exercises you can do to increase your situational awareness, such as playing the “Can you find it?” game. I give more examples of these exercises in my book. Sorry, that’s not free, but we’ve kept the price low. 🙂
21. Free Books and Knowledge
There are plenty of places you can learn prepping for free. Make sure you are diligent about gaining prepping knowledge, such as assigning yourself a 15-minute YouTube video each night or reading a few blog posts on a specific topic.
If you aren’t sure where to start, look at our prepping 101 article.
Some of the places you can learn prepping for free are:
- YouTube videos and prepping websites
- Your local library – look for books on gardening, food storage, outdoor survival, etc.
- Army Field Manuals – these are readily available for free online
- Church of Latter Day Saints Preparedness Manual is free – click the link to get the PDF
- archive.org is a searchable online archive of over 20,000,000 books you can download for free.
Other Places to Learn Prepping Skills for Free
22. Local Agricultural Office
County agricultural offices or the agricultural extensions of universities often have many free courses for the public. Topics include raising backyard chickens, gardening, veterinary science, pesticide application, and more.
23. First Aid
You can learn first aid for free. The Red Cross offers many free classes. Your local fire department might have training.
If you volunteer with a local emergency service team you will probably also get regular training. Lear more about how to learn first aid skills here.
24. Sewing and Knitting Clubs
Knowing how to make your own clothes and repair them is a valuable skill to have. There are many sewing and knitting groups you can join, including ones for men and younger people.
25. Community Gardens
Most community gardens do require an annual membership fee. Some might have grants for low-income people or at least allow you to attend events such as classes or workshops without a membership.
Have any other tips about how to get prepped for emergencies for free? Let us know in the comments.
That library reference in your free prepping link is huge. I already had the LDS downloaded but the other one – WOW.
Take the time to learn survival skills from your grandparents and other elderly people!
Quite a few of them still have at least some knowledge of things that we ‘moderns’ don’t have a clue about. Gardening, traditional building techniques, food preservation, plant medecine, you name it. Most are very happy to share with you what they remember from their younger days.
Re: the advice on roadkill. Many U.S. states have enacted policies whereby any roadkill that’s edible is automatically donated to local residents who are suffering from food insecurity. Folks sign up with their local police department, sheriff’s office, wildlife management office (it differs from state to state), and if an animal of “size” (deer, moose, elk, etc) is found, the responding LEOs will bring it to the next name that’s on the list. Lacking anyone on the list, the salvaged roadkill is donated to a local soup kitchen or food pantry.
Other U.S. states have gone the way with “finder’s keepers” type legislation. If you come across roadkill, you’re entitled to salvage it for yourself (many do so after field dressing the animal just off the road where it was found)… so long as you notify some office of what you took (it might be a LEO office, could be wildlife management office). Often they’ll want info on the species, sex, location, and date of salvage.
There are other ways to provide in crunch situations. The means to cook and heat, especially in the winter are crucial. Most cities and towns have what is known as a “burn pile” or “brush disposal areas”. This is a great resource for free firewoods and also smaller branches to run rocket stoves. Folks also dump their leaves and grass clippings there too and local arborist companies dump woodchips. Shred the leaves and the grass clippings together and mix with the wood chips and you have the makings for great compost. Larger woodchips take longer to break down but here is a quick way to speed it up. Your urine is loaded with healthy anaerobic bacteria. Survival courses will tell you that you can use your own pee to keep yourself hydrated. But it also breaks down the woodchips so larger chips that would take two to three years would only take a year and half to break down. Large woodchips are great for garden paths, walkways, driveways, etc. They help control weeds, help retain moisture in the soil, and when you need some fish bait, there you have them in abundance! All of this will help you in your quest for food independence.
Those are great tips — though I don’t necessarily agree with the advice to drink your own pee. It’s something we’ve talked about here at PS before – https://www.primalsurvivor.net/drinking-urine-survival/
Hand sewing is a great prepping skill to learn. You can sew all sorts of prepping items and repair things in an emergency. This article mentions pee rags, but you can make reusable menstrual pads, too. Check out some free patterns here: https://sewingsociety.com/how-do-you-make-reusable-cloth-menstrual-pads-links-to-free-sewing-patterns/
Sewing has definitely shown to be a great skill during this pandemic with the masks shortage! Good point about menstrual rags. I personally use a menstrual cup but we’ve talked about reusables in this post: https://www.primalsurvivor.net/feminine-hygiene-emergencies/