It’s the end of the year, a good time to evaluate how prepared your family is for emergencies.
Evaluate your priorities
There are several facets to being prepared: preparing for emergencies, protecting your finances, weathering a long-term crisis, developing skills that lead to self reliance and so on. It can get pretty overwhelming when you start looking at the whole picture. You can’t do it all, nor should you try.
Don’t let the enormity of being prepared paralyze you and keep you from doing what you can do. Start by deciding what your priorities are. What is the most important thing you want to prepare for? How ready are you for that one thing?
Record your progress
Once you’ve started to get a handle on one area of preparedness, it’s time to look at other areas. Let’s say you are ready (or as ready as you can be) for something like a house fire. That’s a crisis that strikes far too many households, but one that you can be relatively ready for. That’s a great start.
But now is there something else that concerns you? Perhaps this pandemic
has made you more aware of how important health is and what you should be doing to weather a pandemic. Or maybe you’re worried about your job. Could you be facing a cut in pay? Or a lay-off? What can you do to prepare for those secondary concerns?
Baby Steps
Remember, preparedness is an attitude, not an end goal. Just be aware of where you want to be and set small goals for yourself. If you’ve taken a few baby steps in this last year, chances are good that you are much farther along than you might suppose.
That’s where periodic evaluation is helpful. Use this Self-Evaluation Quiz as a starting point, a checklist that helps you focus and
prioritize.
Set reasonable goals for yourself for the coming year and when you evaluate yourself at the end of next year, there’s no doubt that you will be firmly on the path towards family preparedness.
Take the Quiz
Download this Self-Evaluation Quiz today. It’s free and it will help you see how prepared you are, point out areas that need work and perhaps give you suggestions you’ve never thought about. Take the quiz today and then again at the end of the year to see how far you’ve come.
