My family living rurally up north are a lot more self-reliant than my friends living down south in metropolitan cities.
The weather in the south is a lot warmer and the job market is more stable than the countryside of the northern midwest.
My family is made up of a number of blue collar heroes with an excellent work ethic as well. My dad taught me not just how to save money, but also how to grow food out of a plot of dirt in the backyard. He also taught me about maintenance and repair regarding tools, machines, and appliances so I wouldn’t always be forced to rely on expensive professionals to help me out of every tough bind. I’ll never forget the amount of self-satisfaction I felt when I fixed the family car for the first time. It needed new brake pads and my dad showed me how to do everything ahead of time. Now I do everything from my own oil changes all the way up to general repairs and maintenance. But another feature of my family’s self-reliance was surviving in extremely cold conditions every single year despite temperatures getting down to 20 degrees below zero. We always had a working furnace, but the cost to rely on a furnace as your sole source of winter heat is astronomically expensive. That’s why we always had at least two wood stoves running in the house to get the heating process started and stop us from needing the furnace on at all times during the cold winter season. I was taught how to chop my own wood at the age of 12 and soon started helping my father stockpile every year.