Nosy neighbors are never a good thing. Especially if you’re a prepper and they take a casual attitude to being prepared themselves. The last thing you need is for them to start gossiping around the neighborhood about what you’ve got or completely relying on your supplies when a disaster eventually strikes.
If you can’t discretely convince that nosy neighbor to be serious about some basic preparedness supplies, you have to be cautious about letting them know just what you’ve got. This includes some simple strategies for stockpiling supplies without alerting your nosy neighbors.
Shop When They’re Not Home
Bringing stockpiles of prep supplies home without alerting your neighbor is much easier if you simply do your shopping when you know they’re away. Most people keep predictable schedules during the weekdays.
If you need to bring home something large that might draw your neighbor’s attention, it’s best to schedule the delivery when they’re at work. Especially if the thing in question requires some installation or other people to help you bring it in.
Related: 7 Stores Where You Can Buy Cheap Survival Food
Another option is to bring home bulk stockpile items in the wee hours of the morning. If your neighbor is the kind of person who likes to sleep in on Saturday, bringing home your stockpile in the pale light of dawn is an easy way to keep from alerting them.
Bring Stocks Home at Night
Another way to bring a stockpile home without alerting your neighbors is to do it under the cover of darkness. However, this requires a little more planning and forethought than it might sound on screen.
Consider any external lights or lighting around your home or garage. Make sure motion lights and such are turned off.
Otherwise, the lights coming on, are more likely to draw your nosy neighbor’s attention than if you brought it in during broad daylight!
Ideally, you want to be able to pull your vehicle into your garage to offload directly into the house. If you have to unload in the driveway to bring things in, try to plan for sightlines or make accommodations to keep your neighbor from seeing what you’re bringing in.
Hide Your Garbage
If your stockpile comes with a lot of packing material, an overflowing garbage can, or recycling bin could alert your neighbors that you have something going on. Anything sticking out of your bins also gives clues to them on what you might have hidden in your home.
Take the time to break down cardboard boxes and remove all shipping labels. If you can’t easily remove printing on a cardboard box, black it out with a permanent marker.
Styrofoam, box supports, and other structural packing materials should also be broken down into small pieces. You should then put them inside black opaque garbage bags to keep the lightweight stuff from flying out when the garbage truck picks it up.
Related: Are You a Bad Neighbor?
If you think your neighbor is nosy enough to go into your garbage, you can place some biohazard stickers on the bags. Then only bring your garbage cans to the curb on pickup day.
Order and Buy Discretely
If you live in a small town, word of your stockpile can spread quickly if one of your neighbors is a clerk at a local store. If they see you constantly stocking up on cases of canned food one week, bulk toilet paper the next week, and ammo the week after that, it will draw their attention. Especially, if you have a small family!
Do your best to purchase your stockpile from different stores. If you simply can’t, then try to shop when you know your closest neighbors aren’t working.
You should also get some of your supplies delivered. Online retailers these days offer a full spectrum of bulk supplies that can be delivered straight to your door.
Just do your best to be home in the delivery window. The last thing you need is a perfect storm of porch pirates and nosy neighbors tempted by boxes sitting by your back door.
Conceal Your Stockpiles Inside Your Home
Even if your nosy neighbor isn’t a peeping Tom, you still need to make an effort to keep your stockpile of supplies out of plain sight. This goes beyond shelves with open cupboards and racks visible through basement windows.
All it takes is one neighbor coming over for a cookout and noticing your bathroom cupboard is packed to the brim with toilet paper and medical supplies for the word to get out.
It’s usually a banal slip-up like this that gets nosy neighbors curious about just how big your supplies are.
Long-term stockpiles can be hidden in plain sight using this method throughout your home. This includes things like sealed under-the-stairs shelves, inside heavy pieces of furniture, or even in a secret floor vault under a disused closet.
Even if you don’t want to do all that engineering and home construction, the bulk of your stockpile needs to be out of plain sight. This could be as simple as keeping it in the basement in a locked room, or perhaps locking a spare bedroom storeroom anytime you have guests over.
How to Talk About Prepping Without Mentioning Your Stockpile
When there’s a neighborhood event like a block party, or you’re just chatting up your neighbor over the back fence, don’t advertise your supplies. It’s one thing to boast a little bit to your other prepper buddies when you add something new to your stockpile. Yet you don’t want that information getting out to the general public via your nosy neighbor’s big mouth.
If there’s something of concern going on in the world, and your neighbor brings prepping up, be careful about how you address the topic. It’s best to promote the idea of having some basic supplies and extra canned food on hand. Get their wheels spinning on what they can do to start their stockpile. This reduces the chances that they’ll come knocking on your door if something goes wrong.
If they ask about what you have stocked up in case of an emergency, give them a standard response.
You could even quote FEMA saying that you’ve got a gallon of water for each person, and enough food for each person for three days. Along with some batteries, flashlights, and first-aid stuff.
Be sure to include words like “Per Person” in your reply to your neighbor. This gives them the impression that you’re only basically prepared for each member of your family, and you don’t have any major excess to go around. You could even drop the line that “FEMA says you should also have a whistle.”
You want to send the message that being prepared is important. Yet you don’t want to come off as having a deep knowledge base until something happens. This maximizes their chances of researching for themselves and investing in their own stockpile of supplies. In the grand scheme of things, it can even reduce the chances that they’ll come knocking on your door when something serious goes wrong in the world.
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This advice might work for some folks but not for me. Most of the people in my neighborhood are unemployed by choice. There is always some one of them at home, nosing and snooping. They seem to know more about what I have in my yard than I do. Many of them are related, and that makes things even more difficult for me and the two or three others around here who aren’t related.
MOVE
It’s not that easy.
Not that easy when some of us are retired fixed income seniors.
I had a MIL like this. She was always snooping into my stuff. I put a platform on the garage truss ties/ceiling joists and placed about six mousetraps cocked for action around the edges, maybe 3″ off. I then put my stuff up there and felt well protected after I called her over and said ” Kelly, I’m concerned about mice and I want to show you something”. I then whacked the side of the plywood board and all six snapped and jumped off…. My God, she ran off screaming in terror. To my shame, it was one of my more satisfying moments with her-felt great, lol. I may not go to Heaven….
Thar’s me. I’m retire (SS), and it takes all my small pension just to live.
MOVE…
* Befriend them, and get a feel for how snoopy they really are.
* Act a little sickly/obnoxious/uppity . . ., so as to deter them from wanting to visit too often.
* Bring home smaller amounts of supplies in regular shopping vags, so they don’t know what’s in them.
* follow as many other suggestion, in this article, as you can.
This me. When I just get my normal stuff from the store, I carry it in and don’t worry about it. If I am canning or other stuff, I will drive to another town about 12 miles away. I have a tub in my vehicle I put my grandkids stuff in. I have carried that in enough times now I don’t think anyone takes note. I put jars and such in that and carry that in. I have for years made knives and woodworked in my garage so people don’t bother to look anymore. In truth though, there is no way to really hide anything anymore. People will have to be dealt with at some point.
Including the government if you’re paying with a CC or check. Most people don’t realize that they are already pegged, Same goes with firearms and ammo. They want ID’s. Shop online and they’ve got you. Folks, stay vigilant and safe. Thank you, Claude.
Ever since the debit card replaced carrying cash and those loyalty store programs. We are softly programmed to accept the coming Chinese social credit system in the works, probably with Harris-Walz stealing the election.
Or you could move out into the country where your neighbors can’t see what you’re doing! You can also have a big garden and livestock. You can also stock up on fuel.
I don’t worry about my neighbors because a lot of them are doing the same as I am!
Yeah it is so easy to move, in these tumultuous period before the November 5th presidential election. If we get a stable government fine, if it goes the other way we might all be bugging out regardless under a Marxist rule with illegals voting.
The lucky ones have moved, but older folks don’t always have that option right now.
Average price of a house in the USA is $400K.
With at least 20% down, that is about $80K.
Who has that kind of money just waiting to be spent lying around?
$80K is three times what I make in a year.
You don’t have to have anywhere near that amount of money to get into a house.
thats exactly what I did, 2 yrs ago…
I appreciate the thought behind this article, and it does have some good advice, especially about how to talk about prepping to normies without letting them know you’re a serious prepper, and storing your stuff out of sight. However, the sad reality is that someone is always watching. You, me, all of us are under constant surveillance. Check out this website to see what I mean: AmericanStasi.com
Social media, smart phones and plain nosy jerks not working who are on social welfare, illegals too.
Decent suggestions here, and something I haven’t put a lot of thought into.
Preparing and stockpiling is a marathon, not a sprint. I know of some people that for them prepping is a lifestyle not just a flash in the pan. They’ve been doing it all their lives. For them it’s a normal part of living. Good advice to get your goods when the others are at work. If you can manage to do it like that. Don’t have a semi pull up in front of your house and unload 50.000 lbs. of food and water. Get a little at a time and mix it up. Go shopping on different days. Same with your bank branch. Never go there on the same day two times in a row.
Some good suggestions here. I’d add if you’re concerned about packaging giving you away, bag it up and take it to the dump yourself. Or burn it if you’re allowed. Breaking down cardboard to small pieces and using it as fire starter in your firepit or chimera won’t cause lots of attention.
If you have a big event coming up, like a birthday party or wedding, seeing more packages delivered or more shopping bags than usual won’t necessarily draw attention. It’s for the event. Ditto more packages or deliveries around holidays. Many people since the pandemic have found getting home delivery of things more convenient, and if many in your neighborhood still do this, you won’t be attracting loads of attention if you do it, too.
In the warmer weather, I have an ice chest in my vehicle to keep cold things cold and frozen things frozen as I transport them home from the store. I could just as easily fill that ice chest with canned goods or other sundries. To a nosy neighbor, it would be me once again coming home with a shopping bag and some cold or frozen items because that ice chest is being taken out of the vehicle and carried into the house. And, as usual, after I have put the items away, nosy neighbor will see me carry the ice chest and reusable shopping bag from the house back to my vehicle where it’s ready to go for next time.
In these times of rising prices, if I’m buying a number of sales items, such as the 10 items for 10 dollars that some stores have, it’s easy enough to agree with other shoppers to pick up a few extra at that sales price. More than once I’ve had other shoppers tell me if I want more of that product, there’s an end cap display, or telling me why they like that brand, too.
Having a child returning to college? Plenty of reason to get more of X. Child needs to have extra nourishment or is living off-campus and needs to do more cooking and cleaning on her own. Nosy neighbor will likely already know about your college kid. They might also regale you with some stories about their own kids.
If you live in a place prone to weather events, picking up a few extra items just in case shouldn’t raise many eyebrows. Some of those “just in case” items may have been used up or absconded by the returning to college child.
If you live in a small community, people will notice things. They tend to notice things out of the ordinary moreso than just your usual comings and goings.
Just do it, don’t worry about all this crap.
The Best Advice :
Love your neighbor as yourself
plan with the neighborhood in mind
learn to play well with other s
learn to forgive other s
learn to give to the needy
build the network of trust around you
Stand on Truth, Stand Firm on principle , and learn to show compassion
Say Hi , Wave , Give a hand of Friendship , Give Support for thier work