How to Start Prepping

So you’re ready to start prepping? It can be as easy as three steps and less than $100, or an entire lifestyle change- how you approach prepping is up to you.

I’ll help you on your preparedness journey, whether it is thorough, fast, or budget-friendly. It all starts with a risk analysis- a step many skip to get off on the wrong foot. After we look at what people need to prepare for, I’ll walk you through the basic plan and a variety of strategies where you can pick your best fit.

By intending to prepare, you’ve already hurdled the biggest barrier: taking action to better your preparedness.

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Contents (Jump to a Section)

• You’ve Already Begun Prepping
• Prioritize Your Risks
  1. Know Your Threats
  2. Personal Risks
  3. Financial Preparedness
• Make a Plan
• Build Your Kits
• Fast, Frugal, or Thorough
  1. Fast + Frugal Prepping
  2. Fast + Thorough Prepping
  3. Frugal + Thorough Prepping
• Continue To Improve
• The Next Step

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You’ve Already Begun Prepping

You have already started prepping.

Don’t believe us? Consider this:

• Do you have a savings account?
• Do you have first aid supplies?
• Do you have a smoke detector?
• Do you have any insurance?
• Do you keep gas in your car?

All of these are preparations to avoid or mitigate disasters and emergencies. You don’t need Band-Aids often, but you keep some on hand anyway. Buying the box before you get a cut is being prepared. Applying this principle to your life in a broad sense is prepping.

Now is the Time to Start

70% of people who aren’t prepared intend to be (Source).

Now, you’ve officially passed them all by making it just this far- seeking out an information source about preparedness. Not only that, but you’ve managed to find the best free prepping resource available.

I’m Sean Gold, the founder of TruePrepper, and I’m here to share my decades of prepping experience with an advanced Emergency Management degree. It’s our mission to help as many individuals become prepared as possible, including you.

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Prioritize Your Risks

What could possibly go wrong?

At this point in your life, you’ve had a few things go wrong already. Experience is the greatest teacher, but you haven’t encountered it all yet. There are so many things that can go wrong in life that we can’t successfully list them all.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There is a whole section of science dedicated to figuring this all out, called risk analysis.

History and statistics combine to provide us with a pretty good idea of what could happen. Insurance companies use these extensively- their actuaries regularly calculate and quantify risks to create insurance policies. Their profitability is a testament to the calculations working.

Another big user of risk analysis is the US military. Scenarios and probabilities are not just developed for attacks- emergency management also covers the bases for emergencies and disasters. Planning, kits, and training are important to deal with all of these, just like it is for individual preparedness.

Both of these are a little different than meteorologists, who use prediction models. Risk analysis is about the probability and impact of what can happen: not about predicting specific events. Sometimes, even seasoned preppers can get this part confused: you may see some that are preparing for specific events, such as an EMP. By limiting their preparedness to a specific predicted event, they are not fully prepared for real-world possibilities. Unlike predicting weather events a week out, predicting mass-scale disasters years out is about as worthless as reading tea leaves.

That’s why I’m here to steer you down the correct path.

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Know Your Threats

We’ve developed a Threat List to help you prioritize your prepping in a practical way. This is a general risk analysis to help you prioritize the highest-risk scenarios. Questions the Threat List can help answer include:

• With limited resources, should I prepare for a CMP or an earthquake?
• Should I prepare for an EMP first?
• Is a nuclear accident impossible?
• Do I need a gas mask or a bug-out bag?

Once you’ve figured out your risks with our Threat List, be sure to come back because we aren’t done yet with risks.

TLDR – Home invasions, house fires, and regional national disaster threats should be noted and planned for in your emergency plan before you address less-probable risks.

Now that you’ve identified the macro risks, we need to look at the personal risks that are just as important. These risks are not large-scale, but can be even more impactful on your life.

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Personal Risks

When you think of preppers in the media, you may not picture a fit and healthy person. This is a common misconception since poor health and a low level of fitness can have an even greater impact during a disaster or emergency.

Poor health affects a wide range of people, ranging from permanent disabilities to obesity. Eventually, health deteriorates for us all, since we cannot live forever.

Although we cannot totally control our health situations, science says that a responsible diet and occasional exercise as part of your lifestyle can improve and lengthen your lifespan.

Heart conditions, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic diseases can be brought about by lifestyle choices. We know these are difficult to tackle during everyday life, but all of these make survival in emergency and disaster situations even more difficult.

If you have the opportunity to avoid these hardships, taking care of your body should be your first priority for prepping.

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Financial Preparedness

There are many things that can go wrong in life, but financial issues can be some of the more difficult situations for a family. Everyone should have a financial plan and stick to it. We have a simple guide along with a list of resources to help you evaluate your financial preparedness:

TLDR – Start an emergency fund with a target to build one month’s worth of expenses.

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Make a Plan

Your plan can be written or verbal, small or large, a single plan or multiple plans, but it has to be shared and practiced. You have identified the threats and decided which you need to address and in what priority. Start with the high-priority threats and plan accordingly.

Your plan should include, at the very least, communication information, safe locations depending on the threat, and ways to avoid threats and be safer. Talk with your family about your plans for various disasters, emergencies, and survival scenarios. Share with trusted friends and ask for critiques to identify weak points in your planning.

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Build Your Kits

Your prepper kit can be generic, such as a simple disaster/survival kit, or it can be custom-tuned to all threats you anticipate using specialized kits. The survival kit guides on TruePrepper are meant to get you started on developing different kits based on your needs.

Our gear reviews are here to flesh out your prepper arsenal based on our collective knowledge and experience with the gear we share. Be wary of some items targeted to preppers online and in stores, as it is not always “you get what you pay for.”

Here are the main survival kits to create as a prepper:

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Fast, Frugal, or Thorough

Fast, frugal, or thorough: You can only pick two.

It’s just how it works. If you have time, you can save money and be thorough. If you have money, you can cover all of your bases quickly. If you just want the bare bones of preparedness, you can get it done in less than an hour for less than $100.

Fast + Frugal Prepping

The fastest and cheapest route to basic preparedness is to focus solely on a broad, in-place survival kit. Putting one together is extremely easy and accessible to most people. Here are three easy steps:

1. Canned Food – Get canned foods at the grocery store to put in the back of your pantry. Target 2000 calories per person, for three days. This is typically between 25-35 cans, depending on the mix you pick out, and should cost no more than $50.
2. Water Jugs – Emergency water storage can be complex, but just buying gallon jugs of water at the grocery store is easy. Three gallons per person is less than $5 each.
3. Emergency Weather Radio – An emergency weather radio does so much that it can be a dependable lifeline in an emergency. Even the budget pick from our emergency weather radio review has an integrated flashlight, charges phones with an integrated crank and solar panel, plays FM radio for entertainment, and most importantly keeps you informed through disasters.

Even for fast and cheap, these simple items stashed for emergencies are a solid foundation to build more preparedness on top of down the road.

Fast + Thorough Prepping

If you’re looking to get prepared fast and cover more bases than some food, water, and a radio, you’re going to be spending more money. You can still create custom survival kits relatively fast using one of our many survival kit checklists, but many people opt to get fire-and-forget premade survival kits. Premade kits’ thoroughness and effectiveness scale quickly with cost, but many working professionals with less time on their hands find them useful.

Frugal + Thorough Prepping

Prepping isn’t a race, and this is where I find my own preparedness (and most other preppers I talk to) getting prepared for a wide range of threats comfortably. Taking time to intentionally prepare for specific external threats and to shore up your potential weaknesses makes you a better prepper in the long run.

It also gives you time to get familiar with your gear, rather than packing a closet full of preparedness supplies to forget about.

Bargain hunting for supplies (by using our deals page) can save you a significant amount of money in the long run. Avoiding frivolous purchases and impulse-buying can also cut the costs of prepping. We’ve also reviewed thousands of prepping supplies to keep you from wasting money on junk and useless gear.

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Continue To Improve

Set a schedule to practice, evaluate, and revise your emergency plans- at least annually. How do you prepare for the threats besides practicing your plan? You can mitigate them before they happen.

If you live in a flood plain, look into flood insurance. Stay fit. You will be surprised at how much that helps all aspects of your life- not just during emergencies. Be resourceful. Keep learning new things- never stop learning. Survival skills are not only a huge help in making yourself self-sufficient, but they are also pretty fun to learn.

Last of all, although it is serious business to prepare for what life brings your way, try to have fun with it. If you find you enjoy prepping, you are more likely to stick with it and transfer the importance of being prepared to people you interact with.

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The Next Step

Now that we’ve covered the basics of prepping, we’re going to dig deeper into the specific kits preppers use to improve their chances of survival.

The first kit we discuss is the foundation of all survival kits: the in-place home survival kit.

See more of our expert-written guides, resources, and reviews in your search results – add TruePrepper as a preferred source.

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Prepping Your Way

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