Prepper Princess is one of only a few female preppers who have taken their prepping public in the form of a website, YouTube channel, or some other social media site. The fact that there are so few public-facing female preppers (as compared to men) is one of the subject we cover in this interview, but first, if you’re not already familiar with her…
Who is Prepper Princess?
Prepper Princess, Amber Storck, is an online YouTube personality who speaks on prepping and has amassed a larger number subscribers. Many of her videos are centered around financial preparedness, digging your way out of debt, saving money, learning to live on less, etc.
On that subject, this is her most-viewed video:
I have long argued that financial security is an overlooked and underrated aspect of personal preparedness. It’s not as entertaining as imagining how to survive a zombie apocalypse, not as fun as going to the shooting range, and it often involves difficult decisions that people just don’t want to make.
However, taking steps toward financial freedom is something people can implement to improve their lives today, not just theoretical doomsday scenarios. So, for me, it’s refreshing to see someone else in the prepping community being real about the subject and educating people on it.
She is so passionate about financial security that she has even written a book on the subject:
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Storck, Amber (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 60 Pages - 04/12/2021 (Publication Date)
You can follow Prepper Princess on YouTube if you like her videos, and then make your way to her Patreon page if you want more.
Media Coverage
Prepper Princess has received media coverage from her shoestring-budget lifestyle. Birmingham Mail, a news outlet based in the UK, ran an article on her titled Woman lives below poverty line and refuses to buy toilet paper because she hates spending money. The clickbait title, highlight her refusal to buy toilet paper, is brief but it highlights her extreme saver lifestyle.
To be clear, her strategy for not buying toilet paper is to use a bidet.
Prepper Princess Q&A
Q: People come to prepping from many different directions, some from shooting sports, others from homesteading, etc. How did you find your way to prepping?
A: It was just a natural evolution of where my life was at the time. I had paid everything off and had a big empty house and a couple guns, but no way of living in a prolonged disaster if anything should have arose. So I studied for quite a while and started prepping through a lot of trial and error.
Q: You’ve amassed a healthy following on YouTube in a niche that is quite competitive. What do you attribute that success to?
A lot of luck. A lot of good guys out there looking out for me and guided me in the beginning. A lot of consistency pays off. Meaning you can’t say one thing in a video, then say something completely different in another. You have to remain consistent for your audience.
Q: A central theme in many of your videos is finance. That’s an area that I’ve found many preppers overlook, choosing to spend more money on preps than they probably should before they’ve even built up an emergency fund. Do you have advice for preppers on this subject, where to prioritize finance in personal preparedness?
That is difficult to answer. Prepping has turned into homesteading and living off grid and bugging out, things like that. If something were to happen, I do not want my life to change at all. So I conduct my life in such a way that doesn’t cost money.
Spending money on a garden is not a good idea. If you like to garden, great. But carrots and lettuce provide the least amount of calories for the most amount of effort. Plant once and forget it. Those are the biggest calorie producers. Trees. Apple trees, orange trees, almond trees, etc.
If you are not a gardener or don’t have space, it is best to learn to forage, which is where I shine. What grows in your area? Have you REALLY researched food? For instance, where I live in the desert, mesquite trees grow like weeds. People think mesquite is great for barbecues. Um, no. Well yes, but that is the last part of them. The wood is hardwood and can be used to make furniture. They grow pods that can be made into coffee, flour, honey. Yes… it can pretty much take care of your entire breakfast forever and nobody even knows about it.
Cactuses are not only “edible” (I hate that word), they are delicious. The pads can be eaten like green beans and the fruit (tunas) taste like watermelon or cucumber or honeydew melon. They grow like weeds and nobody eats them because they think they are just cactuses.
Many palm trees in the desert grow dates which are naturally sweet. They are like candy. But because they aren’t on the front lines of Safeway, nobody knows they are there. This is true for TONS of things growing in nature. If there were a breakdown of transportation, there is more than enough food to go around.
Unfortunately, most people wouldn’t know a weed from food. Electricity (power) is much more important than people realize. They think they can just light a candle and be happy. No, you won’t. If you could then why don’t you just have your electricity turned off completely? I would be driven mad without electricity. The technology for solar power has gotten so affordable over the last few years and new generators are popping up every couple of days.
My inbox is full of companies wanting solar reviews but I can only do so many. Instead of spending $5k on a bug out bag, consider spending $500 on a solar unit and $800 on an electric bicycle. Then learn how to fish and forage.
Q: You’ve moved some of your content to Patreon. How has that been working for you when compared to YouTube?
My Patreon account is very different from YouTube. It is much more personal. I get to interact with my subscribers on a personal level. On Patreon, my subscribers are 100% guaranteed to get a response on every comment or email. It is also much more personal than my videos on YouTube.
YouTube is meant to provide my knowledge and solutions to the problems we face on a very small scale, while Patreon is day to day stuff. At work this happened, or I got this crazy email from a viewer. Fun stuff like that.
Also on Patreon, they can request a video on any subject they want… and I will provide it. They pay for that privilege and I am happy to give them what they pay for.
Q: You’re a rare female face in a market that is – at least stereotypically dominated by bearded men with big guns. Why do you think there are so few women who are either prepping or not prepping publicly; i.e., no blog, YouTube channel, etc.?
I think women are scared and also men can belittle them or sexualize them. It happens to me on the daily. Men threaten me and tell me I don’t know what I am talking about. Meanwhile, I have been living it for 10 years.
Unfortunately, YouTube has changed things so we can no longer talk about guns, bows and arrows, slingshots, self-defense or even how to clean a fish without not only getting demonetized, but also being taken off of the trending feed. That is one of the reasons I had to change my genre. I can’t even talk about what I want to talk about anymore without getting slapped on the hand.
Q: Outside of financial security, what do you think the most underrated or underappreciated areas of personal preparedness are?
Community and working together. In personal preparedness, everyone acts as if they will be the lone wolf and do great on their own. They’ll bug out or whatever. The truth is that you need a community to survive. That can be family, friends or a small neighborhood.
If SHTF happens, I will be more than happy to share my solar power, bring in a deep freezer and keep everyone’s food cold for as long as I can in exchange for them guarding my solar. I also have so many solar units, I will be passing them out to people that have medical needs like keeping medication cold or having a CPAP machine. People need each other to survive and thrive. Not only companionship, but for a reason to live.
Q: How would you recommend someone that is new to prepping begin?
Start small. One can at a time, one 24-pack of water at a time. Buy only 1 survival food package and eat it to see if you like it. If you don’t like it, don’t buy more of it “just in case.” You will be miserable.
For solar, start out with a very very small unit. Maybe a 250 watt generator and see how you like it. Take it camping for a weekend and see if it meets your needs. If not, go bigger and pay only in cash. Do not go into debt to prepare.
Q: Transport yourself 50 years into the future. The world as we know it has collapsed entirely. What was the most likely cause?
Ecological destruction and lack of infrastructure. It is likely that people in forested areas would move to other areas due to climate change and forest fires. Areas that are not prepared for an influx of people. They would then run out of water because the rich refused to conserve and the poor could not afford the water.
Food would no longer be sufficient for the population. We destroyed ourselves when we had every opportunity to fix it, but we wanted our cheeseburgers and steak instead, while the rest of the world be damned.
Q: Who are a few of the people in the prepping community that you respect the most?
City Prepping, Canadian Prepper, Survival Lilly and Angry Prepper. A bunch of great guys that all gave me amazing shout outs in the beginning. I have emailed each of these preppers personally and every one of them responded answering all of my questions. Some of them I have built online friendships with and all of them have their heads on straight and are really great people.
- I used to be jealous of Survival Lilly and thought bad things about her. Then I got to know her and she is a wonderful amazing person that deserves a huge audience. I mean, she is really out there doing her thing.
- I love the honesty of Angry Prepper and how he curses in his videos. He is just being real.
- Canadian Prepper and City Prepping both bring relevant and logical viewpoints to the prepping community without going overboard.
I respect all of them.
Q: What are you most pessimistic about when it comes to our collective future? What are you most optimistic about?
The pessimism is strictly directed towards our willingness to consume without replenishment. Our willingness as a country to take take take when others have so little. To pride ourselves on opulence and using up all of our natural resources while there are people in other countries that are literally starving to death.
Optimism? When we have our backs up against a wall, we have the ability and aptitude to ban together and triumph. As horrible as 9/11 was, I saw what we were capable of. Beauty, patriotism, brotherhood and sacrifice without wanting anything in return. If only we could do these things every day, the world would be a utopia that I could not wait to wake up in the morning to go and see every day.
Q: Any parting words or tidbits of wisdom?
Learn to live with less, because soon you will be forced to live with less. Less electricity, less water, less money, less jobs, less gasoline, less meat. There is only so much to go around and it is going to happen in my lifetime.
For the younger generation, do not let the “old ways” die along with you. Learn to fish, learn to forage, learn food in your area and use it!
4 comments
Thanks for hosting Prepper Princess on your blog. As a female youtuber, her perspective is always down to earth and refreshing in it’s honesty. God bless.
Thanks for your channel. You are liked!
There are more women than you might think, quietly prepping, passing on the “old ways” to children, nieces and nephews, friends, and students. Thank you for your wisdom and inspiration. It is always good to know you are not alone.
PP is a mixed bag for me. I’ve been doing what she’s doing for over a decade in regards to being frugal. Some of her videos really rub me the wrong way though. One example: the one time she stole from a homeless encampment. She found some flip flops and clothing and decided to just take them because no one was around. How did she know they weren’t coming back only to find out someone stole their belongings? Second example is this new puppy she found on her property. She decided only after one day that no one was looking for it and it didn’t have a microchip. As a former pet owner, I never got my animals chipped. That doesn’t mean a thing as far as ownership. One day isn’t long enough to scour the pages and pages of missing animal posts online or go to all the shelters. I don’t think she looked hard enough for someone missing a cute puppy, but decided it was “hers” anyway. I’m sure she’ll give it a good life, but it could indeed be someone’s puppy.
PP is a good youtuber for people who are new to prepping and want to save some money. For those of us who are beyond that, Off-Grid with Doug and Stacy and Wild Wonderful Off-Grid are pretty amazing channels for those who are interested in DIY building off-grid, growing food, raising a farm, homesteading, etc.