Certainly Food , gasoline, and your financial obligations for housing and committed payments take priority. Just recently it has been mentioned that the United States only has a five week supply of diesel fuel. Diesel Fuel is necessary for the whole trucking industry and many other industrial uses. At a press conference John Brennan, a spokesman for the State Department was ask “Is there a plan to deal with the fact that we will be out of diesel fuel in five weeks?” His response was “There is no current plan to deal with the diesel fuel shortage, but we will be working on it. Well, this is a week later still no announced plan has been disclosed to deal with the shortage of diesel fuel.
What can we anticipate will happen if the United States runs out of diesel fuel? First and foremost all the trucking transportation system would come to a halt. No more Safeway, Prime, Walmart, and other supply trucks on the highway system, as we drive them. Grocery stores will not get their shipments and the shelves will again be bare in many places throughout the store. Transportation of gasoline to the filling stations would cease we would not have fuel to get to work.
Probably people would still have water in their homes, but staple food items would be in short supply or not available. Jessie Kelly on “The First TV network on Pluto TV” is advertising food packages for survival in the event of a food shortage. Several talk show hosts on TV have mentioned the diesel fuel shortage and encourage people to stock up on staple food items in the event our transportation system comes to a halt.
Responding to the warnings and apparent lack of a plan to deal with the diesel fuel shortage, we have stocked up on flour, sugar, beans, and a number of canned food items. It is costly to stock up with the increase in current inflationary financial climate. Many people are having to try to find supplementary sources of income to deal with the high prices for everything.
One thing I stumbled onto was buying and selling golf carts. A neighbor was moving and had an older golf cart for sale for $1500. I ask my wife if she would like a golf cart, she emphatically said “No we don not need one.” Just about everyone in our 55 and over housing area and the RV park less than a mile from us has a golf cart. A week later the neighbor dropped the price of the golf cart to $1,000, I again approached my wife and the answer was the same, “No”. The day my neighbor was moving to Florida I went by to see him and he said he was going to have a neighbor try to sell the golf cart for $1,000 and was going to pay them a commission. I casually said, “I will pay you $750 for the cart.” He said , “Cash?” I said I will go home and get the cash and be back in a few minutes. I got the cash took it to the neighbor and drove home in the golf cart. My wife still did not want to have a golf cart, so I advertised it on Craigslist and Offerup for $1150 and sold it the next day. I realized at that point there is a big demand for used golf carts in the area of Arizona where we live. I started looking at golf carts on Craigslist and decided to buy a cart for $1800 that looked like a good deal. I did not have a way to haul carts, so I called a cart hauler advertised on Craigslist to pick up the cart. The hauler charged $120, I now had $1920 invested in the cart.
It was a Hyundai golf cart, I placed it on Craigslist and Offerup for $2500 and sold it for $2400, a $480 profit. Since that time only three months ago , I have had 14 golf carts and have sold eleven of them. I have a large garage that will hold four carts, so I keep them concealed. It is against the rules of the HOA to have a business within the Wildhorse community. To get around the no business rule, there is a desert area next to a busy highway near us, I take my cart with a for sale sign, that includes tabs with my phone number, lookers can pull the tab off and call me. Several carts were sold from roadside lookers. I physically go the location of the cart and handle the transaction there. There is also a large RV park, with 557 spaces, only 3/4 of a mile from my home. They have a bulletin board for items for sale, I put a flyer about my carts on the bulletin board and have sold three from that source. The other sales came from ads on Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, and Offerup. I have lost money on two carts that I did not personally go see. I sent the money with the hauler on those carts and took the word of the seller that they were in excellent shape and they were not when I got them. I plan to continue to try to sell a couple of carts a month to supplement my income. The demand will decrease when most of the “Snowbirds” have arrived for the winter here in Arizona from all over the United States and Canada.
I am sure there are other businesses that you can explore by buying things on Craigslist and reselling them using free ads.