When it comes to bartering most of the focus on what physical goods/products we can use in an exchange. But bartering with tangible goods can come with some risk. Once someone knows that you possess something they want or need it’s very possible that they make take matters in their own hands and just take it from you by force.
But if you possess a useful skill you can use that as a bartering tool. It can not only eliminate the danger involved in bartering with your prepping supplies, but it can also enhance your value to the community overall. Even making them want to protect you and keep you in the community so they can continue to benefit from the skills you provide.
But you will need skills you can barter with. So take some time to consider what can you bring to the table in a survival situation.
Skills You Can Barter With:
- Survival Skills: If you’ve already started to prepare for an emergency situation then you are most likely already learning many of the skills that will be useful when a disaster arises. Even a simple skill, such as starting a fire without matches, a lighter, etc. can be of great value to the community, especially if you’re the only one who knows how to do it.
- Purifying Water: Most people have NO idea how to purify water beyond boiling it. But that could be more of a problem when the power goes out. You could use this skill to barter with a neighbor, they haul the water and you use your skills to purify it.
- Providing First-Aid: Hospitals and emergency health care facilities are often the first places to become overwhelmed during a disaster. Something as simple as properly cleaning and bandaging a wound or splinting a minor fracture, because you have a well-supplied disaster first aid kit, could save someone’s life. But be careful not to take on more than you can handle. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you could face legal liability for causing harm to someone while you were trying to help.
- Midwifery: Babies are born when they’re ready and even a crisis isn’t going to stop them. If a woman in labor can’t get to a hospital, or if the hospitals are
swamped, the ability to help with safe childbirth can come invaluable.
- Home Repair: Property damage is often a result of disaster situations. So having the skill, and supplies, for even simple, temporary, an emergency home repair can be of great value to the community.
- Mechanical Repair: Vehicles have become more and more complicated and fewer people have the skills to do even basic repairs to get and keep, them running. This can be a great bartering skill if you have the knowledge and the tools to repair mechanics.
- Small Engine Repair: Small engines tend to be simpler than car engines but most people still don’t know how to repair them. In a crisis situation, more people will be using small engines to power their generators as well as other equipment. The ability to repair small engines can be a very useful bartering tool!
- Growing a Survival Garden: If you grow, or know how to grow, your own survival garden to feed your family you can offer your expertise to your neighbors who will need to do the same. Offer them seeds in exchange for their assistance or other needs you, and your family, may have.
- Animal Husbandry: If you have the skills to raise goats or chickens, just like growing a garden, you can use it to help your community.
- Neighborhood Defense: Each group or neighborhood will need to organize a self-defense plan in case of an outside attack. If you’ve studied survival self-defense you can become that go to person, take command, and come up with a plan to get everyone involved in neighborhood self-defense.
In a survival situation, everyone will have the same basic needs. Think about that as you’re prepping for you and your own family and you’ll come up with the best skills you can barter and use as leverage if it becomes necessary. If a crisis causes you to lose the job you’re currently in you’ll have your survival skill(s) to create a new way to support you and your family until things return to normal.
Start prepping now by keeping in mind any basic supplies and/or materials you’ll need and build up a stock of them in advance.
When a crisis hits, supply lines will be effected immediately. Your stockpile of supplies and materials may be all you have to work with for a while, but they’ll give you what you need to take action immediately rather than having to wait until supply chains are re-established.