Self-Reliance

Tough Things First

Sometimes we need to check with ourselves to see if we are positioned well for unforeseen troubles. In this Tough Things First podcast with Ray Zinn, has the keys to self-reliance.

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Rob Artigo: Good to be back. And I’ve got a copy of Zen of Zinn Two, one of your books here in front of me, and I flipped over to page 160 and I found something you wrote up on self-reliance, and what I’ll do is I’ll just mention the setup here to this and then we’ll go through, there’s seven steps, great list of things to think about, but basically it says, “Self-reliance should be the goal and objective of all of us. This means to have the following.” So I’ll go with number one, “A viable source of providing the needs of ourselves and family.” What do you mean by that?

Ray Zinn: Well, you have to have a way to assess who you are and that assessment, if you’re listening to those around you. They’re telling you, people are communicating with you all the time and you’ll get that self-assessment as to who you are.

Rob Artigo: Okay, how about number two, “A sufficient savings to sustain us through difficult times.” I mean, this is just about being prepared for downturns.

Ray Zinn: Yeah, that’s your life insurance. Not necessarily death insurance, but life meaning that that’s your insurance of a profitable life. If you have a significant savings to take you through the bad times because we’re all going to have bad times. In fact, statistically they say that 50% of our times in life are going to be bad, meaning they’re difficult. And so we have to be prepared for that. If there’s a 50/50 chance, obviously you got to be prepared for that, and that’s having that runway to be able to sustain yourself through a bad time.

Rob Artigo: There have been some pretty good advice out there from people about how much savings you should have having an emergency fund as part of that where you just have some money set aside for an emergency. I remember one commentator was saying, having a thousand dollars cash that will keep the lights on if for some reason, keep the lights on and food on the table long enough to recover from something. That could be a natural disaster or just the sudden loss of employment. You have to sustain yourself. And that of course depends on how large is your family, how young or old are your kids, and that kind of thing. It seems like sound advice to be diversified to the point where you do have some cash on hand just in case.

Ray Zinn: Well, I have a rule of thumb that you should have at least nine months of savings, meaning that you can sustain yourself for nine months, not living high on the hog like you were while things were running good, but maybe when in your cutback mode when you have to really cut back that you should have nine months of cutback savings in place, nine months minimum.

Rob Artigo: And you say also along with that, you’re going to have to have some savings of some real food. So you have number three is sufficient food storage to sustain during a crisis.

Ray Zinn: That’s that cutback thing I was talking about. So part of your cutback to minimize how much cash you need to have if you have a food storage, if you have an ability, maybe you’ve got to live off beans for a while, beans are still nutritious and while they’re maybe not the best thing that you want day in and day out, at least they’ll sustain you. So having wheat beans, flour, other things that you can fall back on in your storage that you’ve already saved up for as opposed to just hard cash will help sustain you through difficult times.

Rob Artigo: I know you exercise every day, it’s the first thing you do every day, but having a regular exercise routine.

Ray Zinn: That’s so true. In fact, I was thinking about that this morning as I was getting up and getting going as you and I. I exercise the very first thing, the very first thing I do other than say my prayers is I start exercising. And so that’s a very valuable aspect of my daily survival as you would is getting in that at least one hour of exercise. And it has really helped me at my advanced age. I look at my classmates around me and a lot of them are passing away, but I can just know who they are. I can see they really didn’t take care of themselves all that well, so they basically have shortened their lifespan.

Rob Artigo: Yeah, you’re showing some really energetic longevity, which is proof that what you’re saying is true. Also, just like you said, taking care of yourself is eating nourishing meals, eating healthy.

Ray Zinn: Well, that’s part of what I talked about and just having a well-rounded life is other than having the food storage, you got to be able to eat it. So whatever you store up, make sure it’s nutritional food storage and that it will sustain you. And so there are a lot of things online you can go to find about having what’s a good food storage type product, both that’ll store well as well as being nutritious. In fact, I’ve known people who had hard times, but they had a good food storage and they actually became healthier while they were living on their food stores than they were when they were just eating regular.

Rob Artigo: Yeah, I can imagine that. This is a big one for me is a good night’s rest, usually about eight hours a night.

Ray Zinn: We’re not preaching anything new here. We do need to rest. We do need to be able to take that time off and just get that natural rest during the day. I say seven to eight hours, nine hours is what we would consider a good restful habit. So again, to be healthy, you need to rest your body and that means to be able to shut down, close your eyes and get that nice rest.

Rob Artigo: The last one here, number seven, “Self-improvement, like a good education.” I know that you try to learn something new every day. That’s another part of your philosophy, so I can see why this would be a priority for you in self-reliance.

Ray Zinn: Well, we’ve talked about this, but it’s part of loving the things you hate. In other words, if you don’t like something, go after it. Find out what it takes to like it. And of course, if you persist in doing something, you will be more likely to succeed at it. Discipline, as I define it and is defined in our book, Tough Things First, is doing things you don’t like doing and doing it well. That’s discipline. So doing what you don’t like doing and doing it well is loving the things you hate.

Rob Artigo: Well, Ray, our listeners can go to ToughThingsFirst.com if they have questions or comments and also they can follow you on X and Facebook and LinkedIn and of course your books are available. Tough Things First and the Zen of Zinn series, that’s Zen of Zinn 1, 2, and 3.