How to Incrementally Build Your Emergency Supply Kit

When you’re first starting to consider doing a bit of emergency preparedness for your home and family, it can be very tempting to jump in feet first. While that may seem like the best idea, in reality, it’s a bad one. Instead, starting small and within your budget and building your preparedness supplies incrementally is best.

How to Incrementally Build Your Emergency Supply Kit

When you first identify your reason for preparing, you’ll want to include your preps as a part of your budget. To keep your expenses from jumping in a huge way, it is best to start with a small amount, $10.00 or $15.00 per week for example, as part of your budget. This will allow you to purchase the items that you need to get started without having to worry about cutting into your other expenses. I realize that $10.00 per week might not sound like enough to prepare on, but for the items you would want to start with, it will be plenty. If you’re still unsure though, $20.00 per week is also doable for most budgets as a second option.

Once you have it worked into your budget, it’s time to sit down and make a list or spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are great for tracking your preparedness goals and inventory, but a pen and a few pieces of paper can work just as well. Here you’ll want to make a list of the items that you want to stock up on or purchase. It is also helpful if you prioritize them by what you feel is most important. Remember, you’re starting small so keep the items at the top of your list to the ones that are budget friendly and can easily be bought within your weekly or monthly preparedness budget.

A good place to start your list is food and water. Water can be picked up for around $1.00 per gallon and can be stored in containers you already have for even less than that. If your family drinks soda, 2-L bottles can be repurposed to hold water storage. Just be sure to rinse them out very well to be sure you’ve gotten rid of any sugar that may be lingering in the bottle. Milk jugs can be used as well in a pinch.

Make sure that you include how much of each item you want to stock up on as well and any different varieties that you may want to buy as well. Food is generally cheap and if you’re careful, $10.00 per week can buy quite a bit. Rice is usually less than $1.00 per pound, soups are typically less than $1.00 per can and so on. Even flour and sugar can be purchased in bulk (usually 10lb bags or less) for less than $10.00 per week.

The main reason that I recommend that you start with food and water, aside from their affordability is a pretty simple one. All of your other preps will not matter if you don’t have food or water. That one simple statement holds true no matter what emergency you are preparing for. Be it winter weather, loss of a job, or some other emergency, if you can’t eat and keep hydrated you won’t survive. You can survive only 3 days without water and only 3 weeks without food. Plain and simple.

Make sure that you include every food that your family eats on your list, but a quick word of warning. Don’t include foods that your family does not eat. There’s no sense in stockpiling things that your family won’t eat. If they won’t eat it now, they won’t eat it when you need it most. You’ll also want to include any emergency power supplies, camping gear and even the high dollar items you may be drooling over. Just be sure to put those high dollar items at the bottom of your list like I mentioned earlier.

Incrementally Building Your Supplies

Once you have your list made, it’s time to get started! In the beginning of this post, I mentioned incrementally increasing your preparations. It took us a bit to get there, but now, let’s talk about how to do that.

The first week, you’ll want to focus on the first two or three items on your list. Obviously, if your budget is only ten or twenty dollars, you won’t be able to buy your entire supply all at once. Split your budget between the items and buy what you can.

The next week you will move down your list to the next few items and repeat the process. Do this for 4 total times so that you’ve worked on 12 total items. When you’ve gotten through the cycle of 4, start with the first week again. This time though you will spend your entire budget on only the first item. For week 2, you’ll stock up on the second item and so on. Once you get through those initial 12, you’ll have a fairly decent stockpile of those items built up.

The next step is to move onto your next 12 items and repeat the same cycle. You will continue to do 12 items on your list and move on until you have all of the food and beverages on your list stockpiled. Once that category is completed, move onto your next category.

Here’s where you will have to take time to really plan your next steps. A lot of the time, your second category is more expensive than food and drink. To stay within your budget, cut your shopping down to twice a month instead of four times. This will allow you to have double the budget each time you do shop if you need. However, if the items on this category of your list are around the same costs as your food and drink, you don’t necessarily have to change your shopping schedule. It is entirely up to you which you use.

As you move through your list, you’ll want to continue to keep on the same schedule and same budget that you have been using. Keeping on the same schedule will make sure that you always know what is next on your list as well as things like how long you may need to save for a specific item. In other words, if you start out with a $10.00 a week preparing budget, make sure you continue to save $10.00 each week even after you’ve gotten through the cheaper items. Doing so will allow you to purchase those bigger items that are farther down on your list.

Bigger items will require that you actually stop spending your prep budget for a while so that you are able to save that money. This is the reason that you should prepare the smaller items first. Doing your preparations in increments will make sure that your family has food, water, blankets, lights and any other items that you may need to rely on while you save for that much larger and much more expensive item.

When it is all said and done, you will have likely spend a year or more on building up your preps. Taking your time to do it on a budget, however, will always leave you in a much better place financially as opposed to just going out and spending money on whatever may come. Take your time, rotate the preps you have to prevent waste and incrementally build your emergency preparation supplies slow and steady so that when whatever may come happens? Your family will be ready.