Starting Preparedness Goals

Here are some of the goals my husband and I have discussed for working towards becoming prepared in as many ways as we can.

• Spiritual Preparedness - I plan to increase my scripture study.  We are going to be making sure we attend church weekly as much as our health allows.  We plan to increase our temple attendance, and to work towards generally increasing our obedience and fortifying our lives and our family.  We plan to make this a family oriented plan so it's not just adults participating.  We also plan to finish the Book of Mormon study with our family, and to shield our family with family prayer and family home evening.  Hubby and I plan to study all the prophesies of the last days as well.
• 72 Hour Kits - Also commonly called "bug out bags".  We just want to have these emergency bags put together for our family so if we need to grab them and survive off of what is in them for 3 days we could do that.  We have a good jump start on that, and just need to complete it.  It might take a little time, but at least in the beginning we now have an inventory, and the next step is to create a list of what else we need.
• Water Supply - We would like a 2 week water supply for our family.  Since that is about 1 gallon per person per day, that comes out to 84 gallons of water.  This can be accomplished in a few ways but we decided a 55 gallon bulk barrel and then some smaller storage containers would be good.  We also want to have ways to purify water and to keep what we have good while rotating it out yearly.
• Eliminate Consumer Debt - This one may take a small amount of time as in a couple years.  We have not a lot of consumer type debt, but not as much leeway in our budget, and as some preparedness stuff is our priority, we'll get it paid off as quickly as we can, but it needs to be determined as to a debt elimination schedule yet.  We probably have around $7,000 in consumer related debt.  That is manageable to pay off since it's in three chunks.
• 3 Month Food Supply - The first step in this one is to inventory what we currently have and to put it all in one location making sure it's labeled properly.  The next step in this category would be to create a 7 day meal plan with ingredients measured and calculated per week, and then work on acquiring items to total up to the 3 months rotatable food supply.
• Emergency Plans - We need to first learn about how to cope with earthquakes and floods as natural disasters for this area.  Our home sits right on the fault line area of a major fault in Utah.  We also need a communication contact plan, and a house fire plan - then we need to teach this to our children so they know what to do.
• Medication & Vitamins & Toiletries - This needs to be added to our over all 3 month or more preparedness amounts.  We have a little bit of a start with the first aid kit, and my dad donated some anti-biotics to our supply as well.
• Digitizing Documents - Our important documents, and photos, and journals need to all be digitized and saved on the flash drives we've purchased for that very thing.  We also need to make sure our real documents are easily grab-able if we need to up and leave quickly.  This will need to be updated every so often, perhaps monthly with additional photos, documents, and journal entries as we go.  Thankfully, my journal is the one that contains the most and it's already digital, just needs to be downloaded and saved.  The photos need organized, and the other documents need to be scanned.  We also intend to take gedcom files of our family history as well.
• 1 Year Food Supply - This is less of a priority than some of the others, but we can always work to acquire items here and there to build this as much as we can.  This is a lot of bulk items like flour, wheat, sugar, rice, beans, honey, powdered milk, dried fruit, and so on.  The church has some amazing resources for this as well as some of the other resources in this area for non-GMO wheat as well as some raw, local honey.
• Additional Items - If we do have time and resources to do so, we plan to work toward some other things like cold weather sleeping bags, waterproof boots for all, and thermal underwear, all the sorts of things that would help in very cold weather if we were not in our home.