Preparedness Lifestyle Self-Assessment

By James Talmage Stevens

For just a moment, make these assumptions:

Your Primary Goal: to be able to live in a near-normal manner from your personal resources for at least 1 year—regardless of external or personal conditions. To achieve this, you will accomplish the following:

• You will "bloom where you’re planted" by creating a "safe haven" with an adequate supply of food, clothing, and shelter for any situation.
• Your home will become your personal convenience store—a veritable mini-grocery store, stocked with the things you like to eat, set up where you have unique access to it as needed!
• You will be able to camp out within the walls of your home. When required in a disaster or emergency, you will be able to evacuate your family and your daily necessities easily to a pre-selected destination.

Begin your preparedness lifestyle efforts by considering these questions:

1. To what potential natural, man-caused, or personal disasters are you vulnerable? How can you eliminate them or mitigate their negative impact on your family members’ lives and lifestyle?
2. What if there were no water available from your faucets, what would you do to have adequate water?
   • How much drinking water is "hidden" inside and outside your house—what are those sources?
   • Could you treat unsafe water to make it safe for drinking and cooking?
3. Inventory your refrigerator, freezer, pantry, kitchen cabinets, cupboards, closets, or wherever you keep your food. What do you have on hand in these categories:
   • Canned & bottled foods?
   • Packaged foods?
   • Dehydrated, dried, & freeze-dried foods?
   • What’s stored there that’s nutritious and normally consumed by family members?
   • How long could your family eat if the foods in your pantry, refrigerator and freezer were the only food available?
     • 1 Day
     • 1 Week
     • 1 Month
     • Longer
4. If you needed life-preserving medication, how long would your current supply last if it were no longer available? Which over-the-counter medications, vitamin, mineral and herbal supplements do you have on hand?
   • In what way do they or would they support your health?
   • How long would they last if not replenished?
     • 1 Day
     • 1 Week
     • 1 Month
5. Do you know which foods and non-foods to buy, in what priority, how much of each, and where to buy them?
6. Could you prepare your stored foods, maximizing their shelf life and nutritional qualities?
7. Do you know where to get ready-to-eat foods that are easily stored?
8. Given your current situation, if you could no longer obtain water, food, medication, and money in a routine manner, how long could you sustain yourself and your family?
9. What type of job(s) could you qualify for if your current employment terminated? What education or training do you need to acquire to be a viable candidate for future jobs?
10. Could you live/survive for a month on your current savings?
11. Do you have the faith, skills, and diligence to prepare for the unknown future–now?
12. Will you commit to accomplish the following:
    1. Take the time to learn how to accomplish a preparedness lifestyle;
    2. Expend the required energy to accomplish it; and
    3. Make the required investment to assure your family’s future well-being and security?

If these questions—or rather, the answers to them—make you uncomfortable, then this is an opportunity for you to start to work on the answers. Resolve these questions, and many others you may have about being prepared by reading, studying, and using the information available.

Now is certainly the most appropriate time to begin your family’s in-home preparedness program! If you’ve prepared for your family’s security with both short-term emergency and long-term provisions, you can turn what might have been a life-threatening situation into a manageable problem!

There are no emergencies for those who are truly prepared!

©2005 James Talmage Stevens, Making the Best of Basics–Family Preparedness Handbook. Used with author’s permission.