Do you want to be better prepared for emergencies but aren’t sure where to start or if you’re doing it right? This “prepping for beginners” emergency preparedness checklist walks you through the basic steps with sane, expert-verified advice for modern people. When you’re done, you’ll be ready to handle the majority of what may come your way.
Last Updated: September 14, 2020Added more context and links to new guides for building up home supplies: the core concept of First In First Out and how to buy the right non-perishable food from the supermarket.
Whether you’re worried about a sudden layoff, home invasions, car accidents, the power going out for a week, natural disasters, or long term economic and societal decline, it’s critical that you start getting prepared now. By definition, if you wait until you need it, it’s already too late.
You’re not alone: Millions of rational people from all walks of life are taking preparedness seriously — and the movement is growing as more people realize they can’t depend on others to save them in our changing world.
It’s simple: depending on what happens, you’ll either stay in your home, leave your home, or be away from home. Making it needlessly complicated makes you less prepared.
But prepping can seem overwhelming. And to make matters worse, there’s a lot of crazy “loud minority” junk out there that pollutes rational preparedness with extremism, dangerous info, or silly internet debates that don’t actually matter.
The whole point of prepping is to reduce the chances of major life disruptions and to better recover from disruptions when they do happen. That’s it!
Even something as simple and common as a fire extinguisher in your kitchen counts — the vast majority of prepping has nothing to do with bunkers and bullets!
Don’t just look for a single checklist and skip the reading. You will save yourself a lot of wasted money and time, and be better prepared, if you take a little bit of time to learn from others instead of making the same mistakes most beginners make when they try to “skip the vegetables” — the real trick to prepping well is knowledge and following the right path, not putting a bucket of gear in your closet.
The basic steps to prepping:
We started The Prepared because we used to be in your shoes — typical people who wanted to get prepared in a way that meshed well with normal life — and we were frustrated by how unhelpful, untrustworthy, and irrational most online resources were.
So everything you see on this site, including this guide, is crafted by survival and preparedness experts with advice that applies to a wide range of people, places, budgets, and scenarios.
Some contributors, for example, teach military pilots how to survive if they eject behind enemy lines, advise the White House and US DOD on related issues, run major nonprofits that help victims after a disaster, are field medics patching up soldiers kicking down doors in the most violent places, and shelter administrators who were on the ground for major events like Hurricane Katrina or the California wildfires.
Be prepared. Don’t be a victim.
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Maybe you’re generally worried about politics, the economy, and natural disasters. Or maybe you or someone you love went through an emergency and you’ve decided not to be a victim anymore.
Whatever your reasons, you’re not alone: Millions of people are actively preparing, and their reasons are as diverse as they are.
Regardless of your politics, age, gender, location, and so on, you probably know people who are prepping. They just tend not to broadcast it. We’ve even had spouses each independently tell us they’re prepping, asking how they can bring it up to their partner “without it seeming weird,” only to find out they were both doing it already!
Many of these are fleshed out in the sane prepper rules. To highlight the most common:
It’s very common in social forums for people to respond to a beginner prepper’s plea for help by asking “well, what are you prepping for?” and then tailoring plans and supplies specifically to that event.
That isn’t horrible, and it has the benefit of keeping people grounded instead of being stuck in doomsday fantasies.
But, in practice, that mental model causes people to get tunnel vision — which then makes their preps less effective or efficient — or gives the false impression that there are huge differences in how to prepare.
The good news is that the prepping basics checklist is the same for 98% of people and scenarios.
It’s once you get past those essentials that things start to get customized or tricky — if you want to grow an indoor garden in your city studio, for example, or have unusual medical needs.
There are specifics you layer on top of the basics depending on your local risks. If you’re preparing for a hurricane, for example, you’d want to figure out your storm shutters plan sooner than later. But all the core stuff like two weeks of supplies and a go-bag are the same.
We talk a lot about the 80-20 rule (the “Pareto principle”) on The Prepared and how it should guide emergency preparedness.
The initial 20% (what this guide covers) of all the possible work you could do in prepping gets you 80% of the way there. To go from 80% to 100% prepared requires a lot more work and money.
That principle applies throughout prepping. For example, you should prepare for the 80% of likely scenarios, not the unlikely ones like fascist zombies arriving on a radioactive alien asteroid.
Maslow’s hierarchy is a popular psychology principle that explains what humans need to survive and thrive in order of importance:
The foundation is, obviously, essentials like air, water, and shelter. Many preppers refer to The Rule of 3’s: You can survive 3 minutes without air, 3 hours without shelter in bad conditions, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food.
Once you’ve got those covered you can then think about the next layer, and so on. At the top of the pyramid is self-actualization, which means things like enjoying hobbies and “finding yourself.”
Use these two critical frameworks to keep your preparations grounded and prioritized. For example, it’s much better to have four boring meals than two of your favorite meals.
Believe it or not, we see people making these mistakes all the time. “I’d rather have chocolate and the Game of Thrones books in my bug out bag, because what’s the point of surviving if I can’t have candy and fun!” No! #badprepper
Medical issues and financial difficulties are the most likely disruptions you’ll face in your lifetime, and since you’re a sane prepper, you prioritize the most likely emergencies first.
All of the statistics around personal financial health are shockingly bad — particularly in the US. For example, over 50% of Americans can’t handle an unexpected $500 emergency (eg. your expired-warranty home furnace suddenly fails) without using credit cards.
You should not spend any money on gear/supplies beyond the essentials (eg. two weeks of water in your home) without first having core financial preps such as a rainy day fund, debt-reduction plan, and retirement savings.
Similar story with personal health: We’re getting sicker and less capable of handling the physical demands that are inherent in an emergency. It’ll be hard to survive at all if you struggle to walk up stairs, have addictions, or can’t keep your mind clear while your body goes through extreme stress.
Don’t forget other “adulting” basics like insurance and estate planning. Do you have a will? Does your family know what to do if you’re in a bad accident and can’t talk? Do you want doctors to keep you alive in a vegetative coma? Have you added beneficiaries to your financial accounts so your family isn’t locked out from money while waiting for the probate court system?
Tip: Going for random walks around your home is a great way to exercise and check off a core 101 checklist item (know your surroundings!) at the same time.
Until recently, emergency preparedness guides, including The Department of Homeland Security’s Ready.gov site, typically recommended having 72 hours worth of supplies. But they are coming around and seeing that 72 hours worth of supplies just isn’t going to cut it. Most modern experts believe you should be prepared for at least two weeks in order to handle the majority of likely events.
Some groups, like the Red Cross, have updated their suggestions; their site now says, “3-day supply for evacuation, 2-week supply for home.”
Our emergency systems, first responders, and community supplies can be quickly overwhelmed. The system just isn’t designed to handle sudden and widespread disasters.
“There is an urgent need for residents to prepare for two weeks.” — Robert Ezelle, director of Washington’s Emergency Management Division
Recent events like Hurricane Harvey, the Japanese Tsunami, Haiti Earthquake, and the California Wildfires are all examples of localized disasters where people were displaced or without basic services for weeks, not days.
In 2016 the US Navy, Coast Guard, and Washington state’s National Guard did a full-scale, nine-day drill to test how well they could respond to a massive earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. That area covers Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland through northern California.
The 83-page report comes to a lot of scary conclusions. The authors admit the systems are not ready, infrastructure would collapse, and they’d have a full-blown humanitarian crisis in ten days.
We recently interviewed the Portland Water Bureau, and they had a similar message about an earthquake in that region: a million people in that 225-square-mile area will be without water for months, not days.
Politics and budgeting are making things worse over time, not better. It would take at least a week to properly coordinate outside resources brought in to help. For example, the American military reports they need an average of eight days to mobilize a response inside the US border — and that’s just for a relatively-localized crisis, such as an earthquake.
We start with the home because it’s where you spend most of your time and is usually the best place to make it through an emergency. Which is why governments give the standard “stay in your home!” advice during a crisis.
Your goal is to be able to survive in your home for at least two weeks without any outside help — whether from people or the grid. That means you can’t assume you’ll have electricity, water, cooking or heating gas, communication, internet, 911, ambulances, and so on.
Every beginner should understand the First In First Out model (“store what you use, use what you store”). It’s an easy way to build up your home supplies without extra cost or effort, and applies to water, food, and daily consumables like toilet paper and batteries.
Water is just too important to leave to chance. So don’t assume you’ll have time to fill the bathtub or run to the store, and don’t use inappropriate vessels such as milk jugs. Get proper water storage tanks instead.
Food isn’t as critical as water since most people can survive weeks without it. So, for your basic short-term emergency coverage, you don’t need to think about “creating” food via gardening, hunting, etc. The first line of defense is to just have some extra shelf-stable food on hand. People meet this goal one of two ways (or both):
The benefit of the supermarket route is that you don’t end up with stuff you might never use and, in an emergency, you’d keep eating the same stuff you’re used to. The downside is that you need more storage space than the survival food path, and if it’s not your normal habit to cook much at home, there’s a limit on how much you can store before risking any waste.
The food you wouldn’t crack open until an emergency is more expensive, but it takes less space for the same amount of calories, requires little-to-no cooking, and can last on a shelf for 20-30 years.
An emergency can strike at any time. You may only have seconds to leave your home. Or maybe you gain an advantage (eg. beating traffic) by evacuating while everyone else is still scrambling.
That’s why a core part of being prepared is having one bag that’s always packed and ready to use — no matter what happens, you’ll know you have the right core essentials to survive, comfortably handle the aftermath, and potentially help others around you.
So your bug out bag is essentially your emergency kit, since you’ll be okay if that’s the only thing you ever have/prepare.
Bonus: As a beginner prepper, building your go-bags is in many ways the same as building an emergency kit for your home. Since the bag is always kept at home, if something happens around the house or you shelter in place during a longer emergency, those go-bag supplies can be used if needed.
Since you can’t assume you’ll have vehicle transportation, these bags are designed to be foot portable. That means using a backpack and keeping things at a reasonable weight while considering your local environment.
Some folks think a bug out bag is exclusively for “bugging out” along a predetermined path to a pre-stocked “bug out location” (like a cabin in the woods). That might happen, but that’s an assumption that breaks the sane prepper rules.
Similarly, some people say “I can’t imagine a realistic scenario where I would need to bug out for more than a few days.” You can decide to skip building a packed-and-ready bag if you’d like, but that means you’re deciding to be less prepared. The whole point is that you don’t know what’s going to happen, so why not have a bag that’s always packed and can do double duty in your home? The only time we think it’s rational to skip this step is for elderly or disabled people who face steep challenges outside the home.
There are countless situations where having this one bag, ready to go, can make the difference between life or death — or at least the difference between smooth sailing or lots of pain and lost money. Some examples:
Your go-bag has what you need to survive, like water and shelter, while also including things to recover, like important documents for homeowner’s insurance or pictures of loved ones.
And that’s the tricky part: How do you put together the most well-rounded complement of stuff you need to survive and recover in one bag? How do you build that bag in a way that covers the widest range of practical scenarios as possible?
More accurately: a bug out bag for everyone around the house who can carry them. Many families build a separate bag for children once they hit 10-12 years old, modifying the contents as needed, for example.
See the complete bug out bag checklist — there’s too much to include on this page, including the reasons why experts prioritize the gear they do and how to prioritize gear across three levels.
For example, a basic 20-pound “go bag” should have:
What happens if an emergency strikes while you’re away from home?
You clearly can’t walk around with a heavy bag all of the time, so the key is to keep the right kinds of supplies where they naturally fit within your life pattern — most people’s daily patterns tend to be pretty consistent and predictable, so use that to your advantage.
For most people in modern societies, that means a combination of:
A Get Home Bag gets its name from the concept of “Shit just hit the fan, so I need to get home because that’s my primary spot!”
But a GHB also serves as your only source of supplies if the nature of the emergency means you can’t (or shouldn’t) try to get home. For sake of an extreme example, imagine a bioweapon is released between your job and home, meaning you need to evac in the opposite direction. A more common example is spending a night in your car during a snowstorm.
So a GHB is similar to a BOB in many ways, just kept outside of the home. You should use and modify the bug out bag checklist.
Common loadout differences between a GHB and BOB:
Since most Americans drive everywhere, the car trunk is the most common storage spot. Some people go as far as to bury their GHB near their job or on the route between work and home.
If you don’t drive or just don’t have the ability to store a whole backpack somewhere, do your best to integrate the most important supplies (eg. a water filter) into your daily-use packs or purses.
Since EDC items are physically carried everywhere you go, you’re much more limited by space and weight. Over 95% of EDC items you see in the wild are made from all or part of this list:
These items can be spread around in whatever way makes sense for you. For example, some people keep the phone and lighter in their pocket, the flashlight on their keychain, the multitool and CCW pistol on their belt, the paracord in the form of a wrist bracelet, and the medical supplies, respirator, USB battery, notepad, pen, and ICE info in their bag/purse.
We don’t recommend using bulletproof body armor, backpacks, or similar protective gear for EDC. The fear around active shooters is overblown — you’re more likely to die from winter ice — and the gear, although effective in a vacuum, just isn’t practical for everyday use (yet).
If you have a vehicle, you should keep basic gear on hand for road-related emergencies. These items don’t need to be kept in a backpack since it’s very unlikely you’ll need to carry them on foot over distance.
Popular gear kept in the car:
More: Check out the winterizing your car checklist if you live in an area with harsh winters.
Having gear is one thing, but survival experts know that a great prep is a mix of gear, skills, planning, and practice.
Which means you are not actually prepared if you simply buy some gear, throw it in storage, then pat yourself on the back! Again, #badprepper!
You do not want to rely on a product in an emergency that you’ve never used before. Even if something seems simple now, your brain can turn into a bowl of mush when faced with chaos.
For example: Think a car window breaker would be simple?
And there are too many crappy “survival” products that fall apart in the field when you need them most. Or maybe that lifeboat food you bought doesn’t sit well with your stomach, which you don’t realize until dealing with diarrhea at the worst time.
Once you’ve got some of the basic gear in place across your home and go-bags, it’s time to start learning critical skills.
Do this in parallel as you continue building your supplies past the basics and fine-tuning your disaster preparedness plan.
Although you can find hidden gems for free on YouTube, it’s hard to know which ones are legit and which ones are some random guy telling you debunked survival advice passed down from his granpappy. We’ve lost count of the number of random lessons around the web that teach debunked survival myths, such as using tampons to plug bullet holes.
Some great places to start:
As you learn more about preparedness, don’t forget to practice your skills the same way you would practice with gear.
It’s also time to get into the habit of an annual or semi-annual prep review, where you check your supplies, update anything expired, swap out winter and summer clothes in your go-bags, check contact info, etc.
Your annual review is also a great time to do practice runs with your family.
Prepping is more effective — and more fun! — when you share the responsibility with your friends, family, and neighbors.
It’s like a multi-level-marketing scheme, except everyone wins!
Some old-school preppers followed too much of a Lone Wolf mentality, where they kept everything secret and assumed they’ll traverse the wastelands alone with their shotgun and trusty dog while everything else collapses around them.
Things just don’t work that way. During the Great Depression, for example, studies show that areas with higher “community mindsets” fared much better than areas where people tended to go it alone.
You clearly don’t want to broadcast your prepping to people you don’t know, whether in the form of public social media posts or obvious “flags” around your home. Don’t paint targets on yourself or your stuff when an emergency hits.
But family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers are all potential recruits. Not only will you feel good about helping others see the light, you’ll be better prepared the more of a “buffer” you have around you.
Tip: Use our free kit builder to send links of pre-populated gear to your network. For example, you could send the URL to this first aid kit to your neighbors as a non-threatening or non-weird way to help someone ease their way into preparedness.
A great way to meet other like-minded folks in your community is through local training — which may even lead to creating or joining a “resilience circle” or prepper mutual-aid group.
Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) courses are a free and popular example. You can just go for the class or sign up to be a community volunteer that’s activated during a crisis.
You’re no longer a beginner at this point. Well done! Take a breather and stop thinking about bad scenarios for a while.
How you progress from here starts to greatly depend on your goals and circumstances. Roughly speaking, people tend to:
Be sure to participate in communities like The Prepared’s blog and forum. We also like the /preppers subreddit. Prepping is a never-ending lifestyle, so try to check in with the community from time to time.
You can submit private feedback to editor@theprepared.com
