Emergency Preparedness in 15 Minutes a Day
Author: Dan Camacho
Food storage. 72-hour kits. Financial reserve.
Feeling overwhelmed yet?
Sometimes the thought of emergency freezes us in our tracks. So much to do, so little time - and sometimes, so little money!
How can we work on emergency preparedness, on top of everything else we have to do? What do you do when you feel completely overwhelmed?
Simple. Just set aside 15 minutes a day to work on emergency preparedness consistently. You may think you can't get anything done in 15 minutes, but you can. Even small amounts of time add up quickly when you're consistent.
You'll be amazed how much you can get done in 15 minutes a day. Maybe you can't do everything, especially all at once. But spending your energy doing something is a lot better than spending your energy feeling guilty because you're not doing anything.
Where to start? Start with food storage. Why? Because you have to eat anyway, every day, three times a day. And because getting even a little food storage and using it consistently will free up money very quickly. You can then use that money to get more food storage, build a financial reserve, and acquire emergency supplies.
First get a good food storage cookbook. Then spend your allotted 15 minutes browsing through it for a few days. Choose some things you think your family would eat - perhaps a breakfast, lunch, dinner, or snack.
The next time you go to the grocery store, purchase the needed ingredients. You can start small, perhaps with a $1.50 bag of beans. Or perhaps you'll choose to buy a 25-lb bag of rolled oats. It all depends on your circumstances. But just start.
As you buy and use traditional food storage foods, you'll find that they free up money very quickly. Here's an example.
Let's say you decide to feed your family rice and beans once a week on Monday. So you buy a 25-lb bag of pinto beans for $20, and a 25-lb bag of rice for $13. Voila! Now you have some food storage.
A pound of rice or beans yields about 8 servings. So a 25-lb bag will provide 200 servings of food! That means the beans cost 10 cents a serving and the rice costs 6.5 cents per serving - a total of 16.5 cents a serving for your basic dinner of rice and beans.
The savings really add up over time. If you went to Taco Bell for 200 meals, at even $2.00 per meal, you would spend $400. If you fed your family 200 servings of home-cooked rice and beans, at 16.5 cents a serving, you would spend $33! That's a price differential of $367.
$367 is a tidy amount of money to add to your financial reserve. It will buy a lot of flashlights, MREs, and emergency blankets. But perhaps most impressive, $367 is enough to buy 11 more bags of rice, and 11 more bags of beans!
"By small and simple things, are great things brought to pass." This was never more true than in the area of emergency preparedness. Set aside 15 minutes to begin working on emergency preparedness today. In a year you will have accomplished more than you can imagine
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/home-and-family-articles/emergency-preparedness-in-15-minutes-a-day-3155555.html
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