Where to Start?

So you've decided you want to be a little more self reliant. Where do you start?

There's no real single answer for that one, but it might make sense to start with some basic life sustaining measures like a few days worth of food and water for your household and a decent first aid kit. If you've got particular threats in your area like the power goes out frequently or road closures are frequent, maybe you'd want to think about a generator or a solid plan for alternative travel. 

What Can Go Wrong?

It's best to go about this in two ways. First is paying attention to, evaluating, and putting in place measures from organizations and authorities that put together comprehensive lists of ways to be ready for emergencies, such as in the U.S. reviewing the  FEMA guidelines and putting together their recommended kit.  The other angle is to think through identifying what can go wrong, and what you want to do about it. For example you may have a medical condition requiring medication. If you live in a snowy climate, do you have an extra few doses in you and your vehicle in case your vehicle ends up in a snowy ditch overnight? It's up to you to decide what all you want to be ready for, but my suggestion is to use both of these methods in tandem. Pay attention to the recommended lists of preparations, but also work to develop your skill of thinking through reasonable hazards and coming up with mitigating plans for the ones that you feel are appropriate. There's probably one more angle to think about which would be if you actually have any requirements to be prepared for something, for example if your insurance requires your home to have a working sump pump in your basement, you may be at financial risk if a storm comes through, floods the basement while you had the sump temporarily removed to do some renovations. Or maybe you get a break on insurance if you have an excess flow preventor on your water system but its batteries are dead. Definitely good to keep up with these times.  

Risk=Probability*Consquence

You might talk about this in regard to risk and risk management.  Risk is usually defined as Probability X Consequence. Probability is what is the likelihood the event will occur. For example how often might my car blow a tire. Consequence is what might happen when the event occurs. In this case, maybe it's almost nothing, maybe the tire blows as the technician sets it on the ground after removing it from the car as it's being replaced. 10 minutes later a new tire is on with no issues. OR it might happen when you're doing 80 mph passing someone on a 4 lane freeway in 110 degree heat causing you to fly off the road into oncoming traffic and whammo instant fire. Some people have a tendancey to have bias towards the minimum consequences and some have a tendency to believe in the more serious consequence. How you evaluate things is up to you. 

An example. I'm thinking about my home and heating. I live in Northern WI, temps get well below freezing in the winter. What happens if the heat goes out? My furnace runs on electricity and natural gas. In my experience, we have winter storms that knock out power from time to time maybe once every 5 years or so. Then I have some sort of malfunction with my furnace maybe every 5 years. Lastly I might have natural gas supply outage once every 10 years. So I've got power issues 2 out of 10 years, malfunctions 2 out of 10 years and gas outages 1 out of every 10 years for a total of 5 events in 10 years or loosely one event every other year. 

There's plenty of ways to bucketize consequence, whether it's financial impacts, comfort impacts, safety impacts, loss of property impacts, loss of life. Bucketizing the consequence will be up to you. Generally though having 4 or 5 buckets for consequence level is more than adequate to analyse risk. If using 4 maybe you have Minimal, Moderate, High, Major. Each of those buckets might have several dimensions of consequence assigned to it. For example you might define a Minimal consequence in Financial terms as anything that costs you less than $100. While you might say from a safety perspective a Minimal consequence might mean a small cut that only needs a bandaid. A Major consequence might mean bankruptsy in the financial dimension, but might mean a loved one dying in the safety dimension. 

This system can be as informal or formal as you'd like. Maybe you want to sit there on a saturday night developing risk matrices for your life. OOOOR maybe you want to do just get to a point of thinking "how often is this going to happen, and whats the worst I want to be prepared for" up to you. 

Safety vs Comfort

Some folks look at their preparations in terms of what do I need to stay alive when SHTF. A rather binary view. How do I simply not die during this event. While this is probably the most basic way to look at it, probably the next cushiest way to look at it is "How much discomfort do I want to tolerate at any time". While the staying alive part is very important and valuable, I'd say the comfort question is probably more of a likely question, as theres a lot of grey area between being fully comefortable and needing to survive.  So I see it important to cover both when you're thinking about what preparations to make. How much discomfort can I tolerate, and what at the end of that do I need to do to stay alive. 

On the question of how much discomfort do I want to tolerate at any time, on one end of the spectrum is "Everything in my life must operate without any discomfort". While this sounds nice, it's probably impossible and if it was would be so expensive, the richest folks around couldn't afford it. On the other end is "I'll endure pain just short of death before I give a shit about that.". In the middle might be "I want to stay warm in my home", or "I can go a few days without using the computer". Every area of getting your life covered has spectrums we all get to make choices on. 

This whole thing can be applied to any area of life. For example, I personally have a little tick about "why are we ever, ever, ever out of butter" It freezes, it's not too expensive for me, why would my life be set up such that I never have the inconvenience of not having butter? There are probably many simple areas of stocking the house shelves that are like this. I say this to illustrate the notion that I personally have decided I will ensure we have more butter in the freezer before we run out. Just so I "Never" have to make a run for butter. One aspect of my life I've decided the risk is that I may not have butter. The solution is to ensure we always have butter in the freezer (barring discussion on long term power outage or sourcing issues). 

Another example of a small area I'm always ready for is batteries. Have you ever needed 2 AA batteries and not had them on hand? Why? They cost $3 and keep for a year or more. I have a little plano assortment box I keep in my truck, it probably has 20 AA batteries, 10 AA batteries,  a couple 9v batteries, and maybe some others although using C and D batteries is so infrequent these days, I may let that stock run out. Beside a mag light I cant think of anything I own that still runs on C or D batteries. I also keep some CR2025 and CR2032 batteries in there. It's amazing how frequently these are used in electronics. Why do I do this? I don't like not having batteries when I want them, and I keep them in my truck so I have them wherever I am. In this case the risk is that I may be inconvenienced and have to run to the store if I need batteries. The solution is to keep some batteries in the truck. Each one of these considerations has forks and nuances that need to be evaluated by each person. Do you have hearing aid? you probably have a bit more critical need to ensure your stockpile is full and appropriately placed. Do you have an insulin pump that runs on batteries? Keep stocked. 

So the point is to evaluate your life on a threat by threat basis (I use the word in a context meaning anything could be a threat such as the inconvenience of needing to go to the store), risk by risk basis, thinking through the scenarios on occurance, deciding what level you want to be prepared for and taking action to get that area of your life prepared to that level. 



Some Cheat Sheets: Obviously depending on your living situation these may or may not apply to you. If you live in an appartment, your preparations will be different than a homeowner, and a suburban homeowner will be vastly different than a 30 mile from no where cabin. 

Early on:

Mid

Advanced:

Maintenance: