Top 10 Survival Items At The Dollar Store Worth Buying

Welcome back survivalists. Today we're gonna talk about 10 survival items that you can buy at the dollar store. So I think that there's a misconception that prepping for emergencies has to be expensive and that the average person just can't afford that. But I'm hoping to kind of disprove that myth but showing these 10 incredibly valuable items during a disaster and emergency situation that you can buy for only $1. So the first item is going to be matches and lighters. So I went ahead and bought both of them while I was there today. I got each of these for $1 each. So here I got 10 books of matches with 32 matches in each of these books. And here I got three lighters for only $1. And ideally, I recommend having both in your survival kit, having a lighter and a book of matches. Fire is one of those things that is so important that you want to have redundancy. At a very minimum, you wanna have two sources of fire, maybe even a third source for absolute emergency is kind of worst case scenario. So these would be great if you're trying to build a get home bag for everybody in your family or a bug out bag, or just a home emergency kit or just a power outage kit. Having multiple sources of fire in there is going to be absolutely critical. And this is not an expensive item to check off your list. You can literally get these for a dollar. So fire is a very easy one to check off your list when you're building a survival kit. And just going to the dollar store and buying some lighters and some matches is gonna be a good place to start. So the next item on the list is going to be candles. And the dollar store has a huge variety of candles, from big candles to tea lights to four packs of candles, even Jesus candles. And candles are pretty simple to make. They're literally a wick and some wax. So you don't necessarily need to spend a lot of money on getting some really fancy emergency candles. If you're just starting off building your survival kit, buying a little four pack of candles like this would be a great addition to your blackout bag or your home emergency kit. Now I do recommend that you try to get the unscented candles when you can. If you're in an emergency and now you have to smell lavender or potpourri or something like that on top of everything, it's probably just gonna drive you crazy. And not only are these gonna provide you with light in emergencies, these can also provide you with some warmth. If you're in a winter blackout, for example, I recommend that you isolate everybody to one room. If you have a couple candles going, containing all that heat in one room, maybe even in a tent in your home, that's gonna be enough to heat up the air in that one small room, you know, a small amount. So candles are a simple thing to add to your emergency kit that you can purchase at the dollar store. The next item you can purchase at the dollar store is going to be Band-Aids. Now not technically Band-Aids because that is a brand, but you can get flexible fabric adhesive bandages, so they're pretty much just as good. And in fact, there's quite a bit of other first aid items that you can purchase at the dollar store as well. If you're willing to spend $5 or $6 instead of just $1, you can actually build a pretty decent first aid kit just from items that you purchase at the dollar store. Now you may think that a little Band-Aid like this is really not gonna do all that much for you, but I would disagree. If you're in a really bad situation, let's say you go without power for four days and you get a little cut on you, but you haven't showered in days and your hygiene is probably not where it usually is, you're probably not washing your hands very often, you're probably not having the best hygiene when you're going to the bathroom or eating food, that little cut could get infected pretty easily and that could turn a bad situation into a really bad situation. And that's really where these bandages come from. I don't think that they really help you heal that much quicker, but if you have a little cut on you, it's gonna help keep that cut from getting infected and keep other bacteria and germs into that cut. So I absolutely think that having some Band-Aids in your first aid kit or in your survival kit or emergency home preparations is pretty important just to keep you from getting infected and from a little minor cuts that you have. And personally, I think that building a first aid kit from items that you buy at the dollar store is a perfectly fine strategy. So next up is going to be water. Every survival kit should have water in there and at the dollar store, I was able to purchase this quart of water for $1. They also had a couple of other options where it could have gotten smaller containers as well. So going to the dollar store to buy water like this for your individual survival kits is not a bad idea. Now, ideally, I would say you probably wanna have two of these, so at least two quarts of water if you're building a fog out bag or some sort of survival kit, but this is definitely a good place to start. The next item you can purchase at the dollar store is going to be bleach. Now, bleach actually has a couple of different purposes in a survival situation. One, it can help with sanitation. You can clean off surfaces using bleach and clean your clothes and other items using bleach, but you can also use bleach to purify water. So let's say you have that quart of water, you completely drink all of this, then you fill it back up with a stream, maybe you try to use your shirt to filter it a little bit, but that would be dirty, undrinkable water. You can use bleach to clean that water, essentially, and make it drinkable. So according to the CDC, you need two drops of bleach per quart of water, and this is one quart. So you don't need much at all, literally two drops. Ideally, you'd have like an eyedropper, but you could probably figure out a way just to get two tiny drops in there and then let that sit, let it really kind of go to work and disperse throughout the water. But having bleach in your bug out bag or your home emergency kit may not be a bad idea. If you have no other water filtration system or you don't have the water purifier drops, this is a decent substitute. It's going to make the water taste a little funny. It may not be ideal, but if you need clean drinking water and you're on a budget, you can buy this for only $1. And considering you only need two drops to purify this much water, if that's all you're using this entire container for, this is going to last you a long time. You'd be able to purify a lot of water with the one container of bleach like this. I do want to point out when you buy the bleach, you want to get unscented bleach, right? You don't want your water tasting like roses or something like that. It probably, you could probably drink it, but it's just going to taste really funky. So buying a small container of unscented bleach at the dollar store to put in your home emergency kit or in your get home bag or your bug out bag or wellness survival kit, whatever you like, I think that this is a pretty good deal. So next up is going to be food. And at the dollar store, you can buy canned meats and canned vegetables and canned chili and whatever else. You can buy pastas and macaroni cheese and ramen noodles. Today I decided to go with the ramen noodles. I was able to buy five packs of ramen noodles. That's five meals for only $1. Now, ramen noodles get a bad reputation in the prepping community and kind of rightfully so. These things have practically no nutritional value whatsoever. And, you know, you'll see preppers that say, oh, I got a thousand meals at home. And really they spend a hundred dollars on ramen noodles. I can't imagine going an entire week eating nothing but ramen noodles, right? They have no nutritional value. Just assume that they have no nutritional value. But they do have a place. And I think that in a short-term disaster, if you're building a 24-hour kit or 72-hour kit, or you're just building something to sustain yourself during a multi-day blackout, ramen noodles are perfectly fine. You can go a couple of days relying on ramen noodles. They're not good for long-term preparation. I don't want to go a week or a month eating nothing but ramen noodles. But if you're just trying to build a 72-hour kit, having five packs of ramen noodles in there, hopefully with some other items, is not a bad place to start. And frankly, I think that having a warm meal like this is very psychologically beneficial. You know, whenever the power goes out, I usually cook ramen noodles and it really warms you up on the inside. And, you know, I enjoy the flavors as well. So buying some food for your emergency kit at the dollar store, I think is not a bad idea. And you can get five packs of ramen noodles, which are incredibly lightweight, by the way. This weight is something you also want to factor into if you're building a bug-out bag or wilderness survival kit. But buying five packs of ramen noodles for only a dollar is a pretty damn good deal. So the next survival item you can purchase at the dollar store is going to be batteries, right? They've got a wide variety of batteries there. Some are name brand, like Panasonic. Some are, you know, knockoff or no-name brands that I haven't heard of. But batteries are pretty important during an emergency situation. You know, most of our gear, our flashlights, our headlamps, our lanterns, our emergency radios typically rely on some sort of batteries. So buying some backup batteries at the dollar store is a good place to start. And during a really bad emergency situation, you can also barter with these, right? You can give these to your neighbors in exchange for something else. Or you can build little survival kits that you can hand out to your neighbors. Go door to door and hand out, you know, essentials like this to your neighbors. And having, you know, some no-name batteries in that kit that you give to your family and friends is not a bad idea. Now, one thing with batteries is that you wanna make sure whatever tools you have at your house that require batteries try to make it so that they all take the same type. So they all take double A batteries or they all take triple A batteries. You know, the most frustrating thing is when you have some weird, obscure battery, right? There's a lot of flashlights that are super powerful but they have a weird battery in there that you just don't find very often. You know, or they have the little batteries in there. I try to make sure all my gear inside any one kit all takes triple A batteries or double A batteries just to make my life a lot easier. And once you kind of figure out which one you wanna go with, you can easily pick those up at the dollar store. So next up is going to be medicine, right? They have things like anti-inflammatories there and aspirin and ibuprofen and something similar to Tums for upset stomach. They have a pretty wide variety of generic no-name brand medicine that you can buy. Now I recommend that you buy some anti-inflammatories. That's kind of my go-to pain reliever. But if you're willing to spend a couple of dollars on medicine there, you can pick up some anti-diarrhea medicine, some upset stomach medicine, some sleep aids, some anti-inflammatories. You can get quite a bit of medicine from these no-name generic brands relatively cheap at the dollar store. At a minimum, I'd say pick up some sort of anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen to include in your emergency kit. So another item that you can buy is going to be wet wipes. Hygiene is pretty important during most disaster situations or emergency situations. Assume that you and your family have to go an entire week without any running water. You are all going to be absolutely filthy and disgusting and incredibly gross and you're going to kill for a wet wipe like this. Now that's not actually a wet wipe, I think that's a brand, but a moist wipe. Hygiene is pretty important in a disaster situation or even when you're just out camping in the woods, having good hygiene is pretty important. Having proper hygiene can keep you from getting food poisoning and having diarrhea and throwing up. Focusing on your hygiene and having some wipes like this is a great addition to your home emergency kit. It's also a great addition to your bug out bag or your wilderness survival kit as well. Even when you're out in the woods, hygiene is something you really need to pay attention to and just taking this and cleaning off your hands before you eat a meal, right? That alone can make a big difference. Personally, I hate when I'm all grimy and gross and I have to crawl into a sleeping bag, right? I like to get cleaned up before I go to bed at night. And at the dollar store, there are also a lot of other hygiene products that you can purchase for only a dollar, including a travel toothpaste and toothbrush. I was very tempted to include that in this list, but I decided not to. You may wanna purchase one of those for each of your family members and stick it in your home emergency kit. You can also buy things like toilet paper and feminine products that you could include in your emergency kits as well. Hygiene's another one of those items that if you're willing to spend four or $5 at the dollar store, you could build a pretty nice hygiene kit to keep inside your emergency kit. The next item you can purchase at the dollar store is Ziploc bags. I like using Ziploc bags in my emergency kits, right? People may think that's kind of weird, but I like to be organized with my emergency kits and I like to build kits within my kits. So what I mean by that is that you could take one of these Ziploc bags, put all your first aid items in that Ziploc bag, put all your fire starter items in a separate Ziploc bag, put all your personal hygiene items in another Ziploc bag. So now you're more organized and you have everything labeled and in its own place within your kit. But you can also use these to transport water, to store food, to store tinder or fire starter material. There's just a lot of different scenarios where you can use a Ziploc bag in an emergency situation. From anything as simple as putting your dirty, wet socks inside a Ziploc bag to keep them separate from everything else in your bug out bag, to using this to create some sort of water filter to help you filter water before you purify it with the bleach. Ziploc bags are just a really useful item when you're out camping or you're building your emergency kit, in my opinion, and you can buy 16 of these for only $1, right? That's a pretty good deal, in my opinion. So by literally spending just $10 at the dollar store, you've now got your fire covered, you've got light and a heat source for the candles, you've got water and water purification with that bleach. So for just $10, you've now got the start of a pretty decent survival or emergency kit. So you can just set a goal of every month you're gonna spend another $10 building out your emergency kit. Buy another quart of water, buy some more candles, buy some more ramen noodles and food for your emergency kit. Prepping for emergencies does not have to be expensive. Most of the most important items, like food and water and candles and fire, are all relatively inexpensive. So you've really got no excuse for not prepping. So now that you know that prepping does not have to be expensive and can literally be done at the dollar store, check out this video I did right here, breaking down the 15 items that the Red Cross wants you to keep in your home at all times. Don't forget to subscribe for more prepping and survival videos. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you over in the next video.