Survival Box

Today I would like to introduce the concept of a survival box.

I used to have an expense pyramid used to discern where I needed to make cuts when the going got tough. In the end the choice would be between food and tobacco and the time would come to make some money or suffer. The pyramid doesn’t apply because I am not really skint these days and I quit smoking a couple of years ago.

The survival box comes from the same period of my life. The idea is simple: once you have a very small sum of money left (it was probably a fiver), you buy the essentials, put them in a box and stick it under the bed. That ensures that you have the essentials when you are desperate and that you don’t spend your fiver on 6-for-5. You can see the survival box in these bad pictures taken with my laptop:

Inside you can see cat food and Sainsbury’s Basics kidney beans, some other beans (borlotti?) and chopped tomatoes. The idea is that you always have some rice/pasta lying around and with chopped tomatoes+beans you can live. For about a week. Then you start craving vitamin-rich food.