How to Start Prepping: The Questions to Ask Before You Buy Anything
- Homestead Mama
- Mar 8
- 6 min read
Every time I post about prepping, someone asks me some version of the same question: *"Just tell me what to buy."*
I get it. A list feels easy. You can put things in a cart, click purchase, and feel like you did something. But after more than 15 years of doing this - first as a suburban family, now on 5 acres with our two kids - I've learned that the list is actually the last thing you should start with.
Here's why: the 'right' list for me looks nothing like the right list for you. My family of four on rural acreage in the Pacific Northwest is prepping for very different scenarios than a single person in a Houston apartment or a young couple in a Chicago high-rise.
One size really, truly does not fit all.
So before you spend any money, I want to walk you through the three questions I think everyone should answer first. Then I'll give you a simple framework to build from - and a handful of things you can do today for free.
The 3 Questions to Ask Before You Start
1. What disaster are you actually preparing for?
Not the apocalypse; not some abstract, doomsday scenario. I want you to think about what might actually happen *tomorrow* - or next month.
Here in the U.S., a lot of people are dealing with job instability right now. Are you prepared if your household lost income? Could you eat out of your pantry for two weeks without a grocery run? That's a real, pressing possibility for a lot of families - and it's a completely valid thing to prep for.
What weather events are most likely in your region? If you're in the South, it's probably hurricanes or ice storms. If you're in the Midwest, tornadoes. Mountain West, wildfires. Coastal areas, flooding. Even if you're somewhere that feels 'safe', power outages can happen anywhere.
Grab a notebook (you'll use it throughout this process) and write down your one or two most likely scenarios.
That's it. That's the whole first step - and it's more valuable than buying anything, because it gives everything else direction.
2. Who are you prepping for?
This sounds obvious but it's easy to overlook the details, and the details matter.
Think through everyone in your household: adults, kids, elderly parents who might come to you in an emergency, roommates, friends you'd shelter. Then add your pets and, if applicable, any livestock.
As you think through each person, make a note of any special considerations:
Infants and toddlers: Are they breastfed, or do they need formula? Do they have comfort foods or comfort items that would help in a chaotic situation?
People with ongoing medical needs: What medications do they take? Are there alternatives if those medications became unavailable? Can you get a slightly early refill to build up a small backup supply?
Elderly family members: Do they have mobility challenges? Have you talked with them about their own plan?
Pets: Do you have the ability to transport them if you needed to leave? Do they have ID tags or microchips so they could be returned to you if you got separated?
This isn't meant to be overwhelming - it's meant to be honest. The more specifically you know who you're prepping for and what they need, the more precise, and therefore useful, your preps will be.
3. What do you already have?
Before you buy anything, take stock of what you already own. Most people are further along than they think.
Walk through your house with your notebook and look for:
Food: Canned goods, dry goods (pasta, rice, beans), condiments with long shelf lives. How long could you realistically eat without going to the store?
Water: Bottled water, reusable containers you could fill. (Side note: your water heater often holds a significant amount of water and is frequently forgotten in these inventories.)
Shelter supplies: Extra blankets, a tent in the garage, a tarp, sleeping bags. Even your car counts as shelter.
Light and power: Flashlights, candles, an external battery pack for your phone, a generator (and do you have fuel for it?).
First Aid: What's already in your medicine cabinet? Any first aid kit, even a basic one, is a starting point.
Write it down. Now you have a baseline - and you can start to see the gaps instead of buying duplicates of things you already own.
A Simple Framework to Build From
Once you've answered those three questions above, you have a direction. Now you need a structure.
I think about prepping in terms of five core categories. Not in any rigid order, but these are the areas that cover your most basic needs:
**Food → Water → Shelter → Energy → Security**
And then a second tier that matters more than people expect:
**First Aid → Hygiene → Communication → Entertainment**
(Yes, entertainment. A prolonged emergency with bored, anxious kids - or adults - makes everything harder. Board games and a deck of cards are legitimately useful prep items.)
The goal isn't to perfectly stock every category before you feel 'ready'. The goal is to know where your gaps are and to close them gradually, in priority order for *your* situation.
5 Things Worth Doing Right Now - For Free
None of these cost anything. All of them are genuinely useful.
1. Write down your important contacts on paper
Driver's license numbers, insurance policy numbers, your doctor's office, your utility companies, a few family members and close friends - including at least one person who lives outside your region. Cell networks get overwhelmed in disasters. Your phone might die. The cloud might be inaccessible. A physical list, tucked somewhere you'd grab in an emergency, can save you hours of scrambling.
2. Find a paper map of your area
GPS fails. Cell service goes down. Most of us don't know alternate routes through our own towns. A paper map (or two - one for home, one in your car) is a simple, cheap prep that gets overlooked constantly.
3. Locate all your utility shut-offs
Water main, natural gas, propane, electricity - do you know where they all are? More importantly, does everyone in your household? Write down basic instructions for how to shut each one off and keep that paper somewhere accessible. Knowing how to cut the gas in an emergency can save lives and property.
4. Scan your important documents and save them somewhere offline
Driver's license, passport, birth certificates, insurance cards, mortgage documents, tax records. Scan them (or photograph them with your phone), organize them into folders, and save them both to cloud storage *and* to a hard drive (external drive, flash drive, or computer). Having access to these documents after a disaster dramatically speeds up the recovery process.
5. Make a family evacuation plan - and practice it
Identify two ways out of every room in your home. Pick a meeting spot outside the house for something like a fire, and a second meeting spot further away for a larger evacuation. Make sure everyone knows the plan, including the kids. Knowing where to go and who to look for removes one layer of panic in an already stressful situation.
The Thing That Matters Most
I've been prepping long enough that it's honestly hard to separate my preps from my regular life at this point. And the biggest lesson I've taken away from 15 years of this is something I come back to constantly:
**How you think is more important than what you know. What you know is more important than what you have.**
The stuff matters. Having food and water and a way to stay warm matters. But the mental preparation - the thinking through scenarios before they happen, the knowing what you'd do, the conversations you've had with your family - that's what actually helps you act instead of react when something goes wrong.
Buying stuff is easy. Thinking it through first is what makes the stuff useful.
Ready to Keep Going?
If this resonated with you, I put together a free 30-day prepping guide that walks through one actionable step per day - all designed to be realistic, affordable, and actually doable for normal families.
**Download the free 30 Days of Prepping PDF → here**
It covers everything from building your first emergency bin, to water storage and filtration, to communication plans, to bug-out planning and beyond. Each day is short, practical, and builds on the last.
And if you have questions about your specific situation - your living setup, your family, your region - drop them in the comments. I genuinely love helping people figure out where to start. Every situation is different, and there's almost always a practical path forward, whatever your budget or space looks like.
You've got this.
*Sarah has been prepping for over 15 years, first in suburbia and now with her husband and two kids on 5 rural acres. Follow along on Instagram and Threads for daily prepping tips and real-life homestead updates.*