Everyone is working hard to get prepared, but it's easy to fall victim to the biggest prepping mistakes out there. Our consensus of the biggest prepping mistakes is based on the results of a poll that was provided to over 1000 members of the Mind4Survival Facebook group. With its broad base of input, this provides a very realistic accounting of the five biggest prepping mistakes people make. 

And, of course, the best way to avoid these prepping mistakes is to know what they are!

In This Episode on the Prepping Mistakes to Avoid

So what are the top five prepping mistakes?

Dunning-Kruger Effect

All Talk, No Action

Mono Focus

All Buy & No Fly

Bugged About Bugging Out

Let's look at each of these a little more closely.

1.) The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when someone thinks they are better at something than they are. For example, in spite of being old, broken, inexperienced, some folks think they are better than most at a certain skill. Think about the guy who was the star of the high school football team - 35 years ago. He no longer works out and hasn't in years, but he still thinks of himself as that elite athlete. He has an evacuation plan that requires a high level of fitness, and he's confident he'll have no problem enacting it. If it was go-time and he needed to bug out on foot across 25 miles of rough terrain, rucking that heavy pack with 80 pounds of his "necessities," he'd get a reality check FAST.

It can also be mental - when clueless people are convinced they know more about a topic than they really do.  You often see this with people who are heavy on theory - they've read all the post-apocalyptic fiction books out there - but light on experience. Yet they try to argue with people who have actually been through an SHTF event, telling them, "That's not how it's going to happen."

Their misjudgment of the situation can be one of the most deadly prepping mistakes you can make.

2.) All Talk, No Action

This applies to the person who talks about preparedness and considers himself a prepper but doesn't take any actions.  They know what should go in their bug-out bag, but they haven't packed one. They don't complete family emergency plans with their loved ones. Their bug-out plans are too general to even be called plans, and they haven't properly inventoried and created workable bug-in plans, etc.

Often these people who make these prepping mistakes will be the first to advise others on precisely what steps to take, yet they don't take those steps themselves.

3.) Mono Focus

This happens when a person hyper-focuses on only one aspect of preparedness.

For example, maybe they have a huge arsenal but no food. Or, they have a ton of food but no water or medical supplies. They haven't balanced their pillars of preparedness and could discover to their dismay that they are woefully underprepared in some vital area.

Monofocus can also apply to people who consider only one possible scenario happening. Instead of basing their preparedness broadly, they're certain that a specific event is the one that they need to prepare for, and they don't consider the other possibilities. One person may be convinced that an EMP is going to take down civilization, while another person may think that a financial collapse will be the ruin of the world. Meanwhile, they haven't really stopped to consider the disasters that are far more likely, such as a tornado, a blizzard, a job loss, or an earthquake.

They have single-mindedly focused all their preparations on only one possible disaster and will be very likely to find themselves underprepared for other scenarios.

4.) All Buy & No Fly

We all know preppers who have tons of gear still sitting neatly in the box that it's shipping box? Buying gear and equipment and never using it is another of those pre...