Supplying yourself to survive need not be a very costly exercise. In reality taking 1 or 2 simple steps can massively improve your capability to survive a number of manmade and natural tragedies. Best of all, lots of the products that you will need to provide a simple emergency kit are simply found in the supermarket. You may even have quite a few of them at home. So here is where you must start:
A Home Emergency Preparedness Kit
The first thing you need to do at home is ensure you are able to survive for 1 or 2 days without external power, water or food. I'm not talking about building a shelter here, but just giving yourself and your folks a little bit of slack should something occur. What you need is water, food, light and heat.
For water, I just make absolutely certain that we always have one or two giant jugs of clean bottled water in the back of the pantry. There isn't anything fancy about these. They're ordinary bottles of water with a shelflife of two years. If they begin to get toward their use-by date I bring them out into the kitchen and replace them with a couple more. This give me and my family enough drinking water for roughly 4 days. Its not enough to survive a nuclear war, but suggests that we are excellent for most easy emergencies.
For food I've made sure we have some additional of what we eat usually. Once more this isn't fancy stuff. A few bags of rice, pasta some bottles of pasta sauce and a few cans of beans. Once again I am not chatting costly MREs or other things that are difficult to find. This is just a bit from our common shopping that is hidden away. For light we have candles, a few LED head lights with fresh batteries and two small generator flashlamps. I keep one near my bed, another down in the kitchen, a third next to the fusebox.
For heat I have 2 small camping stoves. One is a MSR Pocket Rocket, the other is a MSR DragonFly multifuel stove. I use these for camping anyway so have not spent a cent more than I might have. All I do is ensure that I have fuel for both. Ultimately I've got a camping water purification systemand bottle of iodine drops. If needed I'm able to hike down to the nearest lake or stream, top up with water and clean it when I get back. Briefly without going to any effort I have prepared my family to survive for a minimum of a week, and probably about three without any external help. And all this at virtually no charge.
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