Make a Meaningful Difference in Your Family’s Life By Being Prepared!
Make a meaningful difference this summer by taking the Summer of Service (SOS) Challenge. This week’s topic is all about being prepared. Here’s how you can participate:
- Commit to do one act of kindness/service based on the week’s challenge.
- Leave a comment with ideas relating to the week’s challenge as well as your experience(s) performing it.
- Grab the SOS button in the sidebar and put it on your blog or social networking site.
- Enter to win each week’s giveaway. Check out this week’s giveaway by clicking here.
- Join #gno this Tuesday here on Twitter to connect with other Mom It Forward moms about the challenge.
10 Ways to Make a Difference This Week
Here are 10 ideas to help you Be Prepared that will make a meaningful difference in your and your family’s life in the event of a disaster, emergency, or job loss! The wonderful thing about being prepared is that it puts you in a much better position to give back to others.
1. Data: Back up your computer data, including pictures, important documents, and e-mails. Ensure your anti-virus software is up to date. Click here to enter this week’s giveaway sponsored by Mozy to win online backup.
2. Food: Start building a food supply by adding a few storable items to your pantry, including water, that you typically eat. For example, if you see peanut butter on sale, instead of buying one tub, buy two.
3. Money: Live within your income and start or add to your savings account. Model this behavior to your children this week by helping them create the equivalent of three piggy banks entitled: “For Now,” “For Later,” and “For Others.”
4. 
Insurance: Prepare for the future by having sufficient medical, auto, homeowner’s, renter’s, and life insurance. This week, review your policies to ensure they cover your needs. Make changes where necessary.
5. Investments: Put aside some money for long-term needs, like education and retirement. If you are not in a position right now to invest, this week create an investment plan and contribute to it as soon as you are able.
6. Emergency Disaster Preparation: Stay up to date on current situations and plan ahead for potential disasters. Visit these websites this week to learn more and to prepare: http://www.ready.gov, http://www.fema.gov, http://www.redcross.org, http://osha.gov. And, since we cannot be assured that we will know where family members will be when a disaster strikes, take time this week to create a communication plan to prepare for this. Download, print, and make a plan by clicking here.
7. Health: Prevention is the best preparation. So, make sure your family is up to date on annual physicals, dental exams, immunizations, and other appointments. Also, make sure you have items on hand in case of emergency, such as a 72-hour kit for each family member and a first-aid kit.
8. Important Documents: Create a water-proof and if possible, fire-proof, place to contain your most important documents, such as marriage and birth certificates, social security cards, passports, copies of your drivers licenses and credit cards, etc.
9. Employment: Identify what you can do to this week to increase your marketability. Start small by reviewing and updating your resume. Identify areas in which you could improve and make a plan to gain skills or knowledge in those areas. Since the highest percentage of jobs are obtained through word of mouth, identify ways in which to increase your network. You never know when you will need to tap in to those resources.
10. Self-Sufficiency: One of the best ways to prepare for the future is to become self-reliant. The more we can do for ourselves, the more we are able to provide for our families as well as help others. Start small by choosing areas that are of interest to you. Some examples include: planting a garden, sewing your own clothes and crafts, canning your own food, etc.
How Will You Be Prepared This Week?
Please share with us:
- What other ideas do you have for being prepared?
- How being prepared has made a meaningful difference for you and your family this week?
This week’s SOS Challenge is sponsored by Mozy.
Comments
13 Responses to “Make a Meaningful Difference in Your Family’s Life By Being Prepared!”
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Preparedness Pro on June 15, 2009 9:09 am
Great preparedness advice! Getting your pantry filled is definitely as simple as buying one rather than two at the supermarket. As someone who works within the emergency preparedness realm, start with two weeks’ worth of food and gradually build it up to three months. Folks should have one gallon of water per person per day. This may sound like a lot, but don’t forget that is for drinking water, hygiene and cleaning. Moms can also collect rainwater with a barrel — this is great for cleaning and hygiene water. http://tinyurl.com/cesg3u What am I doing for preparedness this week? I have been better organizing the preparedness equipment we already have on hand so that there is better organization within our home.
melissa cullum on June 15, 2009 11:11 am
i love this week’s challenge…i am going to spend my free time backing up our files on our family pc and the laptops we use.
Maxsmom on June 16, 2009 6:06 am
Looking at #1 and #6 (and being from Florida), my recommendation is to get a solid hard drive for your family photos, those songs you love, and important documents. I use the ioSafe Solo (http://www.iosafe.com/4) and it’s waterproof and fireproof, so I feel pretty good knowing my data is safe.
Also, for #7, I keep a kit in my car with the usual first aid stuff, but also a copy of our medical records for when we’re traveling. Saves the stress!
Amber! on June 16, 2009 1:01 pm
Not something totally fun to do, but very important! There are many things on that list that I need to get working on. First of all: food storage. We gave most of ours to the Food Bank when we moved. Time to stockup! I also need to go through all my first aid kits to update and throw away expired/old items.
Featherwisp on June 16, 2009 5:05 pm
This is great advice! We try to keep current backups of our files in a couple of different places, and everyone knows where the important file box is kept. Our sons are learning the speed dial numbers for family members, and their own number and address in case they are separated from the adults.
We try to stock up on our most used food items whenever we can, too.
PatSki on June 16, 2009 7:07 pm
Looking at the section about investments. I completely agree, you never know when your going to need a little extra cash, especially for emergencies. I have money taken out of my paycheck and deposited into a special zecco.com investment account. Then I invest it to make sure my money is always growing. It’s great to know that you always have some money to fall back on if something unexpected happens. If, in the end, nothing unexpected happens you can always spend it on a child’s college education!
Patty Reiser on June 17, 2009 8:08 pm
Just something to add to #4 in regards to insurance. Especially homeowners ins. It is a good idea to photograph every room. For electronics, computers, televisions, etc. if you can take close up pictures of the stickers that manufacturers place on their products to identify the model, serial number. This way if you ever have to file a claim, you have proof of what you actually own and are more likely to get the full value out of your valuables.
And to add to preparing for emergencies. Its a good idea to have a few hundred dollars in cash stashed somewhere safe that you can manually get to in case of an emergency. Especially one where there is no electricity. In todays society we rely heavily on just sliding that plastic card through to pay for our purchases including gas.
Carissa on June 17, 2009 9:09 pm
Jyl you will help me with my resume yes? I think that’s a great one to work on. Since I’ve been out of the ‘working’ world for oh my heck.. 11 years!?? Geez I’m old.
Also last summer I thought i had lost all of my photos off my laptop. We were able to recover it, but we dashed right out and bought a back up hard drive. Guess how many times I’ve remembered to back up my computer since then? 2 TIMES. In nearly a year.
I REALLY would love to have a whole year of online backup service that I could set to run automatically.
Hollie on June 18, 2009 6:06 am
Just did a backup of the new computer and the old one too.Updated the 72 hr kit and my docu binder. All set here, great week.
Rick Galan on June 19, 2009 11:11 pm
I’m fully on board with #1. We have about 200GB of data that needs backed up in a major way. As a former computer tech, who had to do data recovery soooo many times, it’s sad how NOT backed up my data is. We are going through the process of organizing and burning our stuff to DVDs.
Piece of advice – backing up to another hard drive is better than nothing, but hard drives fail A LOT. Any magnetic storage device is not a great long-term solution. Put your data on an optical format like CDs or DVDs, or use an off-site backup solution like Mozy (or BOTH!).
ConnieFoggles on June 20, 2009 8:08 pm
Because I live in Florida and because of my health issues, we already have a food and water supply ready. We keep this on hand due to hurricanes and electrical outages. We also have a disaster plan ready. I am so bad with backing up my data though. I bought CD’s and have used just one. I know this is very bad not only just in general but again because of living in the lightning capital of the world.
ConnieFoggles on June 20, 2009 9:09 pm
The new thing I just did was to check on our insurance paperwork. I have them all in one file so it was easy to find. I looked through them to be sure that we are covered for emergencies. We are lacking for hurricane coverage, but there is not much we can do about it. We’ve decided to put aside an emergency fund for this. I just started putting aside a certain amount of money that will go into our savings account each week. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
Sarah on June 23, 2009 10:10 am
I backed up our data on an external hard drive but would love to use Mozy as well!