4 Weeks of Preparedness

This morning I was thinking that I would like to do one thing each week this month to help our family be better prepared. So, here is the list:

1) Update our financial binder.

We keep all our financial documents together in a binder in our safe. It gives me a great peace of mind that they are easily accessible and portable in the case of emergency or evacuation.

We first put the binder together about 3 years ago. We've moved a few times since then and had a baby (who is now 2 1/2!), so it is in sore need of being updated.
Along with the updates, we need to put some protocol in place with both my husband's and my parents in case something should happen to us so that they can know the location of and how to access our documents. It's not something that anyone likes to think about, but it's all part of being prepared for emergencies.

2) Fill out our wills.

Erik and I purchased some state-specific wills online through Dave Ramsey's website for a great deal. Now the next step is to fill them out which is a time-intensive project. However, the wills are no good if they're not filled out! So, this is definitely on the list of things to do to be better prepared.

3) Participate in the 7 Day Challenge sponsored by Food Storage Made Easy.

I got the e-mails for it, but I didn't participate last year. This year I want to see exactly how prepared (or not!) we are.

4) Finish the other half of our storage/food storage shelves.

My husband built these awesome food storage shelves in the side room of our new house. He made a partition to section off the end of the room for a food storage "room", which is more like a food storage "hall". One side has floor-to-ceiling wooden shelving, while the other has our old, recycled university bookstore metal shelves. These shelves are heavy duty and great for storing cans, but there's a lot of wasted high wall space above them, so we'd like to take them out and replace them with wooden shelving. This will be a great project when we have some family in town visiting for a week. :-)

Do you have any projects planned or things you'd like to do for National Preparedness Month?

For fun, check out this article from National Geographic in this month's issue about extreme weather. Very cool! (I used to want to be an earth scientist, but I'm horrible at math and biology eludes me. Hooray for History degrees!)