35 Home-Defense Tricks Retired Cops Teach Seniors Living Alone That Cost Pennies

35 Home-Defense Tricks Retired Cops Teach Seniors Living Alone That Cost Pennies

There’s a retired detective named Raymond Ossey up in Beloit, Wisconsin, who spent 29 years working break-ins. When his own mother turned 80 and started living alone, you’d think a man like that would wire her house up like a bank. He spent $41. That was the whole budget. And in the 6 years before she passed, nobody ever got past her front door, though two houses on her block got hit.

The house across the street had the cameras, the doorbell that talks, the little sign in the yard. They got cleaned out on a Tuesday afternoon while the owners were at work. Here’s the part that ought to bother you. Raymond’s mother had a worse lock than they did, older door, older everything.

 What she had was a handful of cheap fixes her son knew from the job, the kind of thing that never shows up in a sales brochure because there’s no money in it. The stuff that actually stops a man at the door costs almost nothing. And that’s exactly why nobody’s selling it to you. I spent 35 years as a locksmith, and I’ve sat at a lot of kitchen tables with widows and widowers who paid good money for a system that did nothing the day it mattered.

 So, let me show you a few things first. At number 26, a $5 stick of wood that makes your sliding door harder to open than your front one. And every cop in America keeps one in his own house. At number four, a $2 habit that takes 9 seconds a day and does the one job you actually bought that expensive doorbell to do, except it never needs charging and never sends you a bill.

 35 of them, every one cheap, every one legal, and not one requires you to own a gun or lift anything heavy. We’re counting down from 35 to 1. From the little tricks that just make a burglar pick another house all the way to the one fix that stops the door itself from coming in. Number one is the most important thing on this whole list and it’s the one almost nobody does.

If there’s somebody you love living alone tonight, subscribe. Here we go. One honest word before I get into it. If it goes bad at your door, it’s over before help gets there. So, I put everything I know about protecting a home into three plain books. How they pick your house and how to make them skip it. It’s called skip my house.

Scan the code on your screen or grab the link in the pinned comment. $47. I won’t mention it again. All right, back to it. Number 35. Bring your mail and packages in the same day they come. A pile of newspapers on the porch or a box sitting out front is a burglar telling you nobody’s home. To a man watching the street, an untouched porch is an open invitation.

Bring it in every day. And when you travel, don’t stop there. Have the post office hold your mail or ask a neighbor to grab it. This costs you nothing but a walk to the box. The alternative is advertising your absence to every car that rolls by. Number 34. Never confirm to a stranger at the door that you live alone.

This one’s free and it’s the most important cheap thing on the whole list after the fixes. Somebody knocks, somebody on the phone asks if your husband’s home. The answer is never, it’s just me. It’s he’s in the back or they’re asleep. A person casing a house for someone living alone is listening for exactly one word and that word is alone.

Don’t give it to them. Ever. Number 33. Set your lamps on a timer plug. You can buy a little plug timer for four or five dollars that turns a lamp on and off on a schedule. Better ones do it on a random pattern so it doesn’t click on at 7:00 sharp every single night. A dark house at 9:00 at night says empty. A lamp that comes on in the living room, then goes off in the bedroom an hour later says somebody’s home and moving around.

$4 against a monthly monitoring bill that does none of this. Number 32. Leave a talk radio station or a TV playing near the front door when you’re out. Sound carries to the porch. A burglar’s whole game is figuring out if the house is empty before he commits. And the easiest way he does that is by listening. Voices inside stop most of them cold at the doorstep.

Doesn’t have to be loud. Just has to be there. Cost you a few pennies of electricity and it works on the oldest instinct a thief has, which is the fear of another person being in the room. Number 31. Stage a pair of men’s work boots and a coat by the door. I know how this sounds. But I’ve had more than one retired officer tell me they set this up for their own widowed mothers.

A big pair of boots and a heavy coat visible through the front window or right inside the door tells a story before anyone knocks. It says a large person lives here. It’s a costume and it costs you whatever a thrift store coat runs. Small thing, but burglars read a house in seconds and you want the story that house tells to be the wrong one for them.

Number 30. Put out a beware of dog sign, a water bowl, and a chewed up bone. No dog required. Burglars don’t want to meet a dog. Most of them told researchers a dog inside was one of the top things that sent them looking elsewhere. Now, a sign alone they’ve learned to doubt, but a sign plus a big water bowl by the back step plus an old bone chewed halfway to nothing in the yard, that’s a scene. That’s evidence.

A dollar store sign and a bowl you already own can do the work of an animal you don’t have to feed. Lipstick on a pig some folks would call it, but it’s the right lipstick. Let me step off the list for a second because if you don’t understand this next part, half these tricks won’t make sense. A burglar is not a mastermind.

He is a lazy man looking for an easy afternoon. The vast majority live within a couple miles of the house they hit and most of them are in and out in 8 to 12 minutes because that’s how long they figure they’ve got before somebody notices. Everything he fears comes down to two things, time and noise. If getting into your house takes too long, he quits and moves on.

If getting in makes too much racket, he quits and moves on. He is not going to fight your house. He is going to abandon it the second it costs him more than the house three doors down. So, when I tell you a $5 fix beats a $4,000 system, this is why. The cheap fix buys you time or it buys you noise. And those are the only two currencies that man actually spends.

>> [snorts] >> A camera two states away wired to a call center buys you neither at the moment he’s standing at your door. Keep time and noise in your head for the rest of this. Time and noise. Now, let’s keep going. Number 29. Hang bells or wind chimes on your doors and gate. The oldest alarm there is. My grandmother had a little string of bells on her back screen door, and you could not open that door quiet, no matter how you tried.

A burglar wants silence. A bright jingle the second a door or gate moves is the last thing he wants. Because noise is half of what he’s afraid of. A few dollars of bells from any hardware store, that’s the whole cost. Number 28. Put a rubber wedge door stop alarm under each entry door. This is a little rubber wedge, same as any door stop, except it’s got a battery and a screamer inside.

Shove it under the door from the inside at night. Anybody pushes that door open, the wedge jams tight and lets out a shriek loud enough to wake the street. Eight, maybe $10 each. At night, it turns every door in your house into a noise maker without a single wire. Time and noise, remember? This one’s pure noise.

Number 27. Stick cheap magnetic alarms on your doors and windows. Two little pieces, one on the frame, one on the door or sash. Break the connection by opening it and the thing squeals. A pack of them runs you a couple dollars a piece. No monthly fee, no app, no company. >> [snorts] >> Is it as fancy as the wired system? No, but it does the one thing that matters at the moment of entry.

Which is make a horrible racket at the exact second a thief wants quiet. Number 26. Drop a wooden dowel or a cut broomstick into every sliding door track. Here’s the $5 stick I promised you at the start. A sliding glass door is one of the weakest points in most houses. Because the latch on them is a joke. But lay a length of broomstick or a wooden dowel in the bottom track and that door cannot slide open no matter what the latch does.

A burglar shoves it, it doesn’t budge. He’s got no idea why and he’s gone. Every officer I’ve known keeps one in his own slider at home. >> [snorts] >> Cost you a broomstick you already own. Number 25. Put anti-lift screws in the top of the sliding door frame. Even with the stick in the track, a determined man can sometimes lift the whole panel up and off its rail.

 So you run a couple of screws into the top track and back them out just far enough that the door can still slide but can no longer be lifted clear. Pennies and screws, 10 minutes with a screwdriver. Now the slider can’t be jimmied out of its frame, which is how most of them actually get beaten. Number 24. Add pin locks or aftermarket latches to your double hung windows.

Those little thumb latches that come on a window from the factory are there to keep the wind out, not a person. For a couple dollars, you can add a pin lock, which is a simple pin you push through a hole to stop the window sliding up past a few inches. Lets you crack it for air without letting it open enough for a body.

A small drill hole and a pin. That’s it. Number 23. Lay a dowel in your double hung window tracks, too. Same idea as the slider. A cut length of wood set in the track of a slide-up window stops it from being raised more than you want. Free if you’ve got a scrap of wood in the garage. Between the pin lock and the dowel, a ground floor window that used to be a 2-second entry becomes something a thief won’t bother wrestling with when the house next door has none of it.

Number 22. Put security film on your ground floor glass. This is a clear, tough film you stick onto the inside of a window. It won’t stop a hammer forever, but here’s what it does. When the glass breaks, the film holds the pieces together in the frame instead of letting the whole pane fall away clean. The thief has to keep hitting it, and hitting it makes noise.

 And now he’s spent time and noise both on one window while the neighbors start looking. A roll runs you 30 or 40 dollars for several windows. Cheaper than 1 month of the systems they’ll try to sell your parents. Number 21. Lay a gravel bed under your ground floor windows. You cannot walk on loose gravel quietly. It’s impossible.

A strip of pea gravel under the windows a burglar would use, turns his silent approach into a crunch with every step. It’s landscaping. It’s cheap by the bag, and it works on that second currency, noise, before the man even gets his hands on the glass. Old folks knew this. There’s a reason so many farmhouses had gravel right up against the walls.

Number 20. Plant something thorny under those same windows. A rose bush, a barberry, a holly, anything with teeth. Nobody wants to climb through thorns to reach a window, and nobody wants to stand in them working a latch. It’s beautiful, it’s cheap from any garden center, and it quietly makes your most vulnerable windows a miserable place to work.

Your house looks nicer, and it defends itself. That’s the kind of trade the old-timers loved. Number 19. Cut your hedges and shrubs down low. This is the flip side of the thorns, and it’s free. Tall bushes right by the house feel like privacy, but privacy cuts both ways. A big shrub gives a burglar a place to crouch and work on your door or window without a soul on the street seeing him.

Trim everything near your doors and windows down below the sill line. Take away his cover. A man who can be seen from the road working your lock is a man who won’t work your lock. Let me stop the clock again, because we’re about to move up into the lights and the doors, and there’s something you deserve to hear plain.

 The security industry figured out a long time ago that the easiest customer in the world is a frightened person living alone. Fear sells better than anything, and there is no one easier to frighten than somebody’s mother sitting in a quiet house at night thinking about every noise. So, they sell her the monthly plan. The one that costs more every year and calls a stranger in an office part two states away when the alarm trips.

By the time that stranger dials the local police, the man who kicked her door is already gone. Because remember, he only needed a handful of minutes. I’m not telling you every alarm is worthless. I’m telling you the expensive part, the part with the monthly bill, is the part that helps you least at the moment it counts.

What actually stops the man is the door holding, the noise going off, the light coming on, and him deciding your house isn’t worth it. All of that you can buy once, cheap, and own forever. Your grandparents protected their homes for a lifetime without a single subscription. You can, too. Now we get to the eyes and ears.

 Number 18, put solar motion lights at every entry. These stick up with no wiring at all, charge themselves off the sun, and snap on bright the second something moves. A burglar’s whole plan depends on the dark and on not being seen. A light that suddenly floods the porch tells him he’s visible, and he has no idea who’s watching.

A pack of them runs 10 or 15 dollars, and you install them with the peel of a sticker or a couple of screws. No electrician, no bill. Number 17, add one bright motion floodlight over the main door. If you can manage one wired fixture, or even a bright battery one, put it over the front door where most of them go to work.

 Front doors are the single most common way a burglar gets in, more than windows, more than the back. So, that’s the spot that earns the best light you’ve got. Sudden brightness on a man who wanted the dark is a powerful shove toward the house next door. $20, $30 for the fixture. Number 16, stick alarm company and camera decals in your windows.

 You don’t need the system to use the sticker. When researchers actually sat down with convicted burglars, most said any real sign of an alarm would send them looking for another target. The sticker plants the doubt. Now, don’t lean on this alone because a smart one will test it. But as one cheap layer on top of everything else, a $2 decal that makes a thief hesitate is money well spent.

 Number 15, put up a dummy camera with a blinking light. For $10, you can buy a camera that isn’t a camera. It’s an empty shell with a little red light that blinks. From the sidewalk, a man can’t tell it from the real thing and he is not going to walk up and inspect it. He’s going to assume he’s on tape and pick an easier house.

Is it as good as a real camera? No, but it costs a tenth as much and it works on same fear. Number 14, get a cheap wireless driveway alarm or motion chime. This is a little motion sensor you set out by the driveway or the front walk and it chimes a receiver inside the house when someone approaches. For a person living alone, this is worth its weight in gold.

 It gives you warning. It means nobody gets to your door as a surprise. You hear the chime, you look, you decide, all before there’s a knock. 20, 30 dollars, no wiring, no monthly anything. Number 13, upgrade to a video doorbell or at least a real door viewer. Now, I’m not against every gadget. A doorbell you can see and talk through is a genuinely useful thing for somebody living alone because it means the door never has to open to a stranger to find out who’s there.

 But if the monthly fee gives you pause, even a good old wide-angle peephole does the core job, which is letting you see out without opening up. The point isn’t the camera. The point is you never open a solid door to a face you don’t know. Number 12, keep a locked storm or screen door as a second barrier. A lot of houses already have a storm door and folks never lock it.

Lock it. Now a stranger at your door has two doors between him and you and he has to get through the outer one in plain view before he’s even started on the real one. It’s a layer you may already own sitting there unused. Every layer costs him time. Time is half the battle. Number 11, rip out the flimsy factory door chain and put in a real guard.

That little chain slide that came with the door will pop off with one good shove. It gives people a false sense of safety, which is worse than nothing. For 10 or 15 dollars, you can put in a heavy hinged door guard, the kind that lets you open the door a crack to talk or take a package without letting it be forced.

For a senior who has to deal with people at the door, that’s the difference between cracking the door safely and opening it wide. Throw the toy chain away. One more step off the list, and this one’s from the heart, because we’re about to get to the top 10, and these are the ones that matter most. Everything we’ve talked about so far makes a burglar choose a different house.

That’s the whole game with the low numbers, and it’s a good game to win. But, I want you to think for a second about the person you’re really doing this for. Maybe it’s your mother. Maybe it’s you, and you’re a little embarrassed to be sitting here worried about it. Don’t be. There is nothing weak about wanting to be safe in your own home.

My own wife, in her last years, felt better every single night just knowing the door would hold. That peace was worth more to her than the lock ever was. Because here’s the truth the industry will never put on a brochure. Safety isn’t a thing you buy. It’s a thing you do ahead of time, on a quiet afternoon when nothing’s wrong.

So that on the night something is wrong, the work is already done. The top 10 are the doing. This is where a burglar stops choosing another house and starts finding out he physically can’t get into yours. Now, let’s make it count. Number 10. Never hide a key outside. Use a lock box or a neighbor. Under the mat, over the door frame, in the fake rock.

Burglars know every one of those spots, and a hidden key turns a break-in into a simple unlock. If you need a key available, get a real lockbox, the kind with a code that bolts to the wall, or leave a spare with a trusted neighbor. The fake rock costs you your whole house. The lockbox costs about $20 and actually works.

Number nine. Lock the door between your garage and your house every time. People treat the garage to house door like an interior door and leave it wide open. But if a thief gets in the garage, that unlocked door is a private hidden entrance where nobody on the street can see him work. Treat it like an exterior door because that’s what it is.

Put a real deadbolt on it and use it. Costs you a lock and the habit of turning it. It closes a door most people forget they even have. Number eight. Defend the garage door itself and shield the emergency release. Here’s one almost nobody knows. On many garage doors, a thief can slip a coat hanger through the top gap, hook the emergency release cord, and pop the door open in seconds.

No noise, no tools. You can buy a little garage door defender or simply zip tie and shield that release so the hanger can’t catch it for just a few dollars. This is number nine’s cousin. The other half of locking down the biggest opening on your whole house. Pennies against your largest door. Number seven. Keep a charged phone in the bedroom and a landline backup if you can.

For a person alone, your lifeline at night is the ability to call for help. Keep your cell phone charged and on the nightstand, not out in the kitchen. And if you’ve still got a landline, don’t be in a hurry to cut it because a hardwired phone works when the power’s out and when the cell towers are jammed. A charging cable by the bed costs a few dollars.

 Being able to reach the outside world at 3:00 in the morning is priceless. Number six, set up a check-in signal with a trusted neighbor. This one’s free and it’s pure old-fashioned neighborliness. Agree with somebody nearby on a simple signal. Blinds up by 9:00 in the morning means all’s well. A porch light on at an odd hour means come check on me.

A quick daily text. It means if something’s wrong, someone knows fast. And it means you’ve got eyes on your house that no camera can match because a neighbor can actually walk over. The old folks called it looking out for each other. It still works better than anything with a battery. Number five, turn your bedroom into a simple safe room at night.

You don’t need a concrete bunker. You need one room, your bedroom, that locks and can be braced. A chair wedged under the knob or a portable bar turns that door into a wall for the few minutes it takes for help to come. Put your phone in there. Put a light in there. If the worst happens and someone’s in the house, you don’t confront them.

 You get behind one good door and you call for help and you let them take the television. Things are things. A braced bedroom door and a phone is a plan and a plan costs almost nothing. Number four, every single time you leave, do the 9-second walk. Here’s the $2 habit I promised you, except it’s not even $2, it’s free. Before you walk out the door, take 9 seconds and physically check every lock.

Front door, back door, slider, the windows you cracked for air. That’s it. This is the one job you thought that expensive doorbell was doing, except the doorbell only watches the front, and it never once locked a thing for you. Remember, a huge share of break-ins are simply a thief walking through a door or window that was never locked at all.

 No force, no skill, just an unlocked door. 9 seconds beats every gadget ever sold at the one job that matters most, which is not leaving the door open for him. Number three, put a solid-core door on every exterior entry. Go knock on your front door, on the door itself. If it sounds hollow, like a drum, that’s a hollow-core door, and a grown man can put his foot or his shoulder through the panel of one of those in about two kicks.

 It’s cardboard and air behind a thin skin. A solid-core or metal exterior door doesn’t cave like that. This one costs more than the pennies. A solid door runs you in the low hundreds, but it is the wall itself, and every lock you own is only as good as the door it’s bolted into. If the door is hollow, the best lock in the world is guarding a piece of paper.

Number two, add a second lock and set screws in the hinges. Two things here, both cheap, both huge. First, a burglar picks locks in the movies. In real life, he kicks. So, the answer isn’t a fancier lock, it’s a second point that has to fail. Add a second deadbolt higher up or a one-sided deadbolt with no keyhole outside.

 And now his one kick has to be two locks at once, which it won’t. Second, look at your hinges. On most doors, the hinge screws are little half-inch things biting nothing but the door frame. Back one out of each hinge and drive in a 3-in screw that reaches the wall stud behind, and you’ve anchored the hinge side into the actual building.

 A box of long screws is a few dollars. Now, both sides of your door are fighting him, not just the knob. And number one, the thing every one of these has been building toward, fix the strike plate, the part of the door nobody ever looks at. Here’s what I need you to understand, and it’s the whole reason Raymond’s 80-year-old mother never got touched while the camera house across the street got cleaned out.

 When a burglar kicks a door, the door doesn’t break. The lock doesn’t break. What breaks is the little metal plate on the frame that the deadbolt shoots into because from the factory, that plate is held on by two screws barely half an inch long biting into a thin strip of soft pine. Two little screws. That’s all that’s standing between a kick and your living room.

 That is the weak point in almost every house in America, and it’s invisible, and it’s why the shiny box on the wall does nothing when the frame lets go. The fix costs under $10 and takes 20 minutes with a screwdriver you already own. You put in a heavy reinforced strike plate or a full door reinforcement kit that wraps the whole area.

 And you anchor it with long screws that reach past the soft trim and bite the solid framing behind the wall. Do that and when a man throws his whole weight at your door, the door holds. He bounces off. He tries once, maybe twice, and then he remembers the only two things he was ever afraid of. Time and noise. And he gives up and he leaves. Not because you outspent him, because you spent $10 on the exact spot he was counting on you to ignore.

 That’s the whole secret. Every lock, every deadbolt, every dollar you’ll ever spend on a door is bolted into that frame. And if the frame gives, all of it gives at once. Reinforce the strike plate and the frame around it and you fix the one thing that fails in nearly every break-in there is. It is the cheapest, most important thing on this entire list and it’s the one almost nobody does.

 So, here’s the whole thing in one breath. A burglar fears time and noise, nothing else. And everything worth doing either steals his time, makes his noise, or takes away the dark and quiet he needs. You don’t beat him with a subscription, you beat him with a screwdriver on a calm afternoon. So, this week do one thing, just one.

 Go buy a $10 reinforced strike plate and a box of 3-in screws and spend 20 minutes putting them on your most used door. That’s it. That’s the single highest value 20 minutes you will ever spend on your house, and it costs less than lunch. Now, I want to hear from you. Of all 35, which one are you doing first? And did I leave one off the list that saved your bacon? Tell me down below.

 I read them, and I learn from you folks every time. And if this was worth your while, there’s another one already waiting for you right there on the screen. Go on and take a look.