UK Prepping For Beginners, Step 1: How To Make A Preparedness Audit

This article is part of an in-depth series on the getting prepared, and is tailored to absolute beginners. Each one is a deep dive into its specific topic, so for a more general overview on how to get started, check out the Beginner’s Guide To Prepping In The UK page on this site.

Disorganised preparedness can be as bad as no preparedness. If you don’t know what you need, what you have, or where you’ve got it, it’s no good to you – so a vital first step of getting prepared is auditing where you stand right now.

As I write this, it’s January. New Year’s Resolutions are on everyone’s mind, and common ones like “get more organised”, “be tidier”, “map out my goals and work towards them” are all covered by a preparedness audit like the one we’re about to do, so if you’ve got a resolution like that, congratulations! You can get ready to scratch it off your bingo card.

Plus, the two biggest obstacles to preparing can be eliminated with a proper audit and plan: lack of money and lack of space. By cleaning house and organising the space you have available, you’ll find that you’ve almost certainly got more space than you thought, and by assessing what you already have, what you really need, and how to get it, you’ll avoid wasting money and be able to bargain hunt more successfully.

Making A Preparedness Audit: The Categories We’re Looking At

I’ve split everything up into manageable chunks, so it’s easier to get a good grasp on each. Trying to work out every facet of your preparedness at once is like trying to do every dance move at once – it’d be cool if you could do it, but trust me, no-one can. So, we’ll take them one at a time, make notes of where we currently stand, and then figure out how to improve them. Let’s start with:

FOOD – how much have you got? How long will it last? Is it actually usable (can you prepare it and make meals with it)? Can you get more? Can you supplement it with growing or foraging? In short: Can you stay fed?

WATER – how much do you have stored? Can you get more? Do you have the ability to purify it and make it safe? Do you have a secondary way of doing this if you lose your first one? In short: Can you avoid dehydration?

WARMTH – can you heat your home, or all the people in it? Can you patch and repair that home to stay warm and dry? Do you know how to drain your pipes or switch off gas, electricity and water to protect that home in a crisis? If you had to leave that home, do you have alternative shelter? In short: Can you stay warm?

MEDICINE – do you have a first aid kit? How well-stocked is it? Do you know how to use it? Do you have adequate supplies of essential medication? Do you have any lingering health problems that will need special care? Do you have a health concern that you have not yet addressed? In short: Can you meet your medical needs?

LIGHT/POWER – do you have alternative light and power sources? Spare batteries, power banks? The ability to run your essential devices or cope without them if the power grid wasn’t on? In short: Can you meet or adjust your power needs?

SANITATION – can you dispose of rubbish if the bin men stopped emptying the bins? Can you keep your home clean and safe with no access to shops or running water? How would you wash and get rid of waste without running water? It seems frivolous but it’s one of the most important things for fending off disease and keeping rats and cockroaches out of your home. In short: Can you keep yourself and your environment clean?

EVACUATION – what would you do if your building was on fire? Or you were given 5 minutes to get out of your home and evacuate the city? Do you have your documents together? How about an overnight bag or going-away bag? Could you rough it off-road for a few days? In short: Could you evacuate your home at short notice and survive a few days’ journey?

FITNESS – what sort of shape are you in? How easily can you navigate the world and complete physical work? If you are able-bodied, could you run a mile? Carry a bag of logs or an injured child for a few miles? If you have a mobility issue or other disability, could you improve your ability to move through and influence the world? In short: How fit are you?

SECURITY – is your current home situation safe? If not, how can you make it safe? How would you defend yourself against a human aggressor attempting to gain access to your home? Multiple aggressors? How about a cyberstalker? Or a phishing criminal attempting to defraud you? In short: How secure are you to attacks – from any direction?

COMMUNICATIONS – if you woke up tomorrow, the lights were off, and your mobile phone had no bars, how would you find out what had happened? Would you have any way of getting information about the outage? Could you communicate with the people you might need to reach out to? In short: Do you have communications channels?

COMMUNITY – who can you turn to in a crisis? Where in your local area can you go to find help if you need it? Is there anything that you can do ahead of time in your community to lessen your risk of winding up in crisis in the first place? In short: Who can you call on?

This list is not designed to panic or overwhelm you. It is designed to give you a roadmap.

When I go through it myself, I always feel WOEFULLY underprepared – and finding those weaknesses is the point. Once you know exactly how prepared – or unprepared – you actually are, you can make a plan to address it. Don’t try to do it all at once. Go down the list one section at a time, note down your results, and then plan to address the shortcomings you find one by one. NOT all at once. That is a one-way ticket to severe anxiety and burnout.

This list is for general problems – not any specific disaster, but all of them. If you have covered the angles listed, you’re much, MUCH more likely to ride out trouble, no matter where it comes from. It doesn’t matter if the shops are closed because of a lorry driver strike or a meteorite strike: the problem is the shops are closed.

What You’ll Need

• A notebook and pen
• Some time
• That’s it

Step 1: Find Out What You’re Working With

Right, get the notebook. I’m sorry to say it, but the time for writing things down has come.

We’ll start with food, because no matter what happens, you’ll always need food. So, off we go to the kitchen.

First, write down the breakfasts, lunches and dinners that you regularly eat, plus, if you’re a snacker, the usual snack of choice. Then take a look at what’s in your cupboards (or, if you’re really organised, take a look at shopping receipts from the last few times you went to the shops). This should give you an immediate idea of what shelf-stable food your family actually eats, as well as letting you know what you’ve currently got in your stores.

Do the same for the freezer, and then the fridge (there may be jars or opened packets in there that would be shelf-stable if unopened). This is also a great time to clear out those spaces and get rid of anything that has gone bad, bin any rubbish clogging up the space, and get things organised in a way that makes sense to you.

While the cupboards are empty, you’ve got a chance to rethink how you organise them – is this the best space for its current use? Would it be better to devote this cupboard to canned beans and pulses, and consolidate all the dry carbs in that cupboard over there?

I find that making notes of everything as I go helps me to focus and get my head in the game, but you do you, here. Whatever works best to help you catalogue and organise the space.

Next, go back to that note about the meals your family regularly eats – breakfast, lunch, dinner, and any other snacks.

Once it’s written down in front of you, it can be easy to see patterns. What sort of meals or cuisines does your family like? Are there any store-cupboard meals on there already? Which ones could be modified to use only shelf-stable ingredients? Where could you introduce new meals which use long-life ingredients?

This process of modifying your existing diet to use more long-life, shelf-stable foods shouldn’t happen overnight, and will probably require a lot of trial and error, but you should aim to have 5-7 different dinners that you can make from your stocks, plus three or so breakfasts and the same with lunches. This is my bare minimum for variety to avoid going insane from the repetition (and believe me, it can get repetitive FAST). Your threshold for food variety to avoid giving yourself cabin fever may vary, so actually try to live off store-cupboard meals for a few days and see how you like it.

I know it’s extremely tempting to go off the rails when you’re getting started, go for broke, and buy a load of super-long-life freeze-dried food, and if you really want to do that, go right ahead… but I think you should start much smaller than that. Building a good food stockpile is completely unique to your household, but it’s incredibly rewarding – and achieving something like that takes time.

Start with the things that you and your family already eat, and buy them a bit at a time. If you do this, you’ll be continuously eating through your stock and replenishing it, meaning nothing should go bad in the back of a cupboard, forgotten. You’ll be able to slowly increase the amount of your diet that can come from long-life foods, experiment and find things you like to eat, and, best of all, you won’t have spent a fortune on a decade’s supply of military rations that you hate and won’t eat.

That’s important because…

IF YOU CAN’T USE YOUR PREPS, THEN YOU MIGHT AS WELL NOT HAVE THEM

Food you hate and won’t ever eat is just dead space and wasted money, apocalypse or not – so when you’re thinking about your shopping list, include stuff you actually like eating. For inspiration or reference, check out my UK Prepper’s Starting Stockpile Shopping List or the Vegetarian Starting Stockpile Shopping List. If you take the time to work out what you like, it’s easy to build up a well-stocked larder of things you actually love!

Food is the most difficult one of the categories listed above to audit in this way, because it’s so variable, but once you’ve got a handle on it, the hard part will be behind you. It’s smoother sailing from here, as they say.

Keep The Ball Rolling

I usually take a look at our water supply next, as food and water go hand-in-hand, at least in my brain. You might want to do the same – taking a look at bottled water you may have, any water tanks on the property (including the hot water tank by the boiler), any sources of water nearby, and any means you may have to purify that water.

Next, medication – note down any medications that you or your family need to take, or any special equipment that you need – mobility aids, hearing aids, joint support, even glasses are counted here. If you need it to survive or function normally, and you can’t make it yourself, then you’ll need to make sure your supply is secure in the event of a disruption – and the first step of this is simply gathering knowledge of what your needs are. Use this time to check your first aid kit, too – if you have one. What’s in there? What is it for? Do you know how to use it all? What’s missing?

Then, move on to dry household goods like washing powder, toilet roll, cleaning supplies, tissue, whatever. You can see where I’m going with this, and it would feel like labouring the point to make you read directions on how to catalogue all of the things you use to keep your home running.

You can go down the entire list above in that way, making notes as you go – what do you have? How long would that last you? Where are you falling short?

Plan For The Short Term First

Think about things that will be immediately accessible to start with – in the short term, things like food storage will win out over something like a victory garden – so let’s focus on that for now, and get the long-term solutions going once we’ve got our immediate bases covered.

Consider How You Organise Your Household For Day-To-Day Tasks

Next, think about how you organise yourself and your home – not in terms of storage or anything but in terms of a to-do list, or sorting out the shopping list. How do you coordinate getting the things you need? Having a good way to organise your information, what you’re planning, and what you need – and one that you’ll actually use, is going to make things a lot easier going forward.

Something as simple as a magnetic notepad stuck to the fridge will do – that’s what we use in my house, and it works like a charm.

Consider The Skills, Interests And Passions Of The People Around You

Finally, think about (or, even better, talk to) your family or the people you’re living with. What skills do they already have? What are they interested in? Do they have any hobbies that they’d like to improve at that have a preparedness application?

For the entire lifetime of our species, people have always been the greatest resource anyone could ask for. What are your people good at? What knowledge do they have, or want to have? How can you nurture that?

One person can’t be excellent at everything. You can be a jack of all trades, sure – maybe even a Leonardo-Da-Vinci-style polymath genius –

– but at the end of the day, there is just too much to do, too much knowledge to be had, too many skills to master for one person to hold it all in their head. Cooperating with others is how we will survive and thrive, no matter what happens. So go talk to your friends.

SPECIAL NOTE: FINANCES

Your finances are absolutely vital to your ability to prepare and your ability to weather crisis. In fact, in today’s UK, with its ludicrously high cost of living, depressed wages, skyrocketing inflation, debt crises and housing cost rises… well, with all that, finances may actually be the crisis that you are most likely to face.

While you’re auditing what you have and where you currently stand, don’t neglect your bank account. Do you have a budget in place? Or a rainy-day fund? What are your outgoings, and where can they be trimmed? It’s uncomfortable to look at – somehow both boring and horrifying at once – but it’s important to see the true state of your bank accounts, credit score, any debts, and any other things that are sucking away your money. Only then will you be able to plan how to stop any bleeding you find, figure out how much budget you have for preparedness expenses, and plan how to start increasing the amount in that rainy-day account.

EXTRA FINANCIAL NOTE: DO NOT GO INTO DEBT TO PREP

This is something I see on forums fairly often from people who are just starting out: the question of whether it’s worth going into debt or taking out credit cards to afford “to prepare”. The answer is always the same, but I’m going to shout it at you anyway:

NO

It’s rational, when you get started, to feel like time is running out and you have too much to do and too much to buy, and you have to do it all NOW. I know because I’ve seen it a million times, and because, 15 years or so ago, it happened to me, too. I didn’t take out a credit card because I was more afraid of the debt than I was of the apocalypse, and you should be too.

You have time. The world hasn’t ended yet, and, to quote a particularly talented and particularly famous prepper:

You won’t hear this from many prepper websites because it kills your incentive to buy things from them, but the world is not going to end today, but that debt will definitely come due. If you can only afford a pocket knife and a backpack water filter in the next three months, that’s ok. You’ll be one pocket knife and one portable water filter better prepared than you were before, and in a few more months, you can boost that again with another small purchase, like a packet of lighters or a camping kettle or something.

But because the world isn’t going to end soon, that means any debts you incur will need to be paid off. A meteorite strike will not destroy the loan company’s offices. You’ll have your fancy gear and your mountain of canned beans and your hefty credit card debt, and if the world doesn’t end, you’ll still be sat on top of all that fancy gear when the bailiffs kick the door in. Prep as slowly as you need to, but do NOT go into debt to prepare.

Step 2: Assess Your Group’s Needs

How many people do you need to take care of? At the very least, you should be planning for the people who live with you – I assume you won’t be leaving your flatmate out to dry.

You’ve already got a leg up here because you’ve already considered what your household eats and drinks, what cleaning supplies and dry goods it needs, and what the people you’re with have skills in and like doing.

Benchmark what you’ll need for a few days against the list above. As a quick starting point, an adult needs between 2,000-2,500 calories per day, and 3-ish litres of water. You’ll need to think about the sort of temperatures you’re likely to face, from the most scorching summer heatwaves to the coldest, bitterest winter storms, and think about how you and your family would stay comfortable in those conditions if there was no power.

You’ll need to think about any special medical, physical or dietary needs, any pets you need to provide for, and the special needs of any other people – like neighbours, family members or friends – who you think you’d wind up looking out for in the event of a crisis. This extends even to simple preferences – if your kids don’t think a meal is a meal without some sort of potatoes, then you’ll need to take that into account or they’ll be unhappy and hungry during what is already going to be a pretty stressful time for you. By factoring in that preference, you can keep them happy and keep a semblance of normality and comfort for them, which will improve the situation for everybody.

I can’t make a more detailed map than that for your individual circumstances, because everyone’s household has radically different needs. The exact same family living in a flat in London or a countryside house in the Scottish highlands would have different needs, too. So many factors enter into it that it’s an assessment that’s totally unique to you.

Step 3: Make A Realistic Threat Model

I know I just said “prepare generally, for the needs you’ll need to meet no matter the disaster”, but now I’m going to say “tailor your plan a bit to fit the most likely threats you’ll face”.

When people start reading up on preparedness and the various threats that might impact their lives, they sometimes become unmoored from probability and blow away like dandelion seeds to a faraway land where they’re at risk of things like “coronal mass ejection”, “supervolcano eruption”, “terrorist EMP” and “all my political enemies are coming to steal my beans”.

I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade, but those things are gigantic, spectacular, civilisation-annihilating events, that probably aren’t going to happen. It’s not impossible – the last few years are proof that ridiculous things can and do happen. But they probably aren’t going to happen. At least not today.

I prefer to see the phrase “prepping for Tuesday, not doomsday.” In my experience, researching the sort of things that are most likely where you live, getting ready for the sorts of disruptions you usually see, and then covering your material needs as well as you can for general disruptions/shortages/crises is the best way to get started.

Once you’re comfortable that you’ve got the most likely threats covered, you can start thinking about how you’d survive The Day After Tomorrow.

Step 4: Assess Your Space (And Channel Marie Kondo)

Mess and disorganisation are terrible for prepping – they hide what we’ve got, make it impossible to use and rotate our stocks, and make it hard to find anything when we need it (and for some of this stuff, when you need it, you REALLY need it).

Clearing out your space isn’t just therapeutic, it also lets you really see what sort of storage space you’ve got, and gets your mind working on how it could be organised.

Case Study: Under The Stairs At Start Prepping HQ

We have a cupboard under our stairs that became a sort of “throw it in here if you need it out of the way” space, which made it completely unusable – until my wife pulled everything out of it, moved an old shelving unit and storage trunk in, put up a light, and repacked everything into the new shelves. Now it’s accessible, everything in it is easy to find, and, somehow, it seems much bigger. We were even able to mount a first aid cabinet on the wall and fix hooks for bags and gear onto the back of the door, where there was seemingly no space before.

You Have More Than You Think

Go through your home systematically, focusing on the kitchen first. Are you ever going to use that automatic bread maker? Maybe you could sell it on FB Marketplace and use the money to buy something you will use?

You can free up storage space all over the place once you start to get into it – but I’d be slightly wary of storing food supplies away from the kitchen, in case it becomes a sort of “out of sight, out of mind” thing. If that’s the only space you’ve got, by all means, store your larder wherever you can – I did for years in an upstairs wardrobe – but it’s more inconvenient and harder to keep track of.

Ideally, you’ll be storing food in or near the kitchen, freeing up bedroom cupboards and under-bed storage for clothing, gear, dry goods, machetes, etc.

A room with fluctuating temperature, like a garage or that horrendous back room we had in our last student house, is better suited to dry goods like toilet paper or non-food materials like washing powder, as these won’t be ruined by the changing temperature and humidity the way food would.

Step 5: Assess Your Home Systems

If you own your own property, then you have control over your home systems – if you rent, you may have to find a way around it if one of them fails and your landlord is unable to fix it. In either case, you should be able to switch them all off and completely disconnect your home from the grid if you need to – killing the power, the water pressure, or the gas flow can be a vital way to save your home from damage or destruction.

What I mean by home systems is the functions that make normal life in your home possible – gas, electricity, lights, running water, hot water and central heating, ventilation, drainage, internet connection/phone line, washing machine and dryer (if you have them) and all the other things that you rely on to live like a modern human being and not a cave man.

Some of these systems can be circumvented entirely if they fail – think using a wood stove to heat your living room if the heating failed – but others are harder to do without, like functioning drains.

However, they can all be protected, maintained, and made more reliable. It’s not even necessarily a preparedness thing! Being able to maintain your own home and keep the drains clear and the lights on is an extremely useful skill, even if you never have to do so for survival reasons.

Spare lightbulbs for your big lights and lamps are always a good thing to have, as well as fuses for your devices, spare batteries, and a robust toolbox with a range of screwdrivers and wrenches. A plunger and toilet plunger (they’re different things) are vital, and an extendable drain snake has saved me from drainage nightmare situations on more than one occasion.

If you don’t know where your water, gas and electricity shut-off points are, this audit phase is a very good time to find them and figure out how to operate them.

Step 6: Map Out Where You Want To Be

Now you’ve got an idea of what you’ve got, what you are lacking, what space and resources you’re working with, and and what your likely threat models are. Next, we’re setting a goal. Where do you want to be? What does being prepared look like to you?

Is it a box of instant noodles and a first aid kit? Not where I would stop personally, but you do you.

Is it a self-sustaining mountain compound? Bit pricey, but I’ve got to give you points for ambition.

Most likely it will be somewhere in between – the way I always recommend people start is this:

Prepare for 3 days with no power, water, heat, or access to the shops.

Once you’ve done that, expand that to a week.

Then two weeks.

Then three. Now we’re getting somewhere!

At this point, you’ll probably start wanting to garden, or learn to fish, or take a first aid course. Chase that! This is an amazing hobby and there’s an unlimited amount of fun that you can have exploring new skills.

Right now, my notebook of goals is brimming over – I want to expand every part of my readiness, and having a roadmap to get there turns an otherwise impossible task into a straightforward journey.

Step 7: Make A Shopping List

You probably already have one by now, but I have to include it here anyway: write down everything you want. This will probably be best as “immediate shopping list”, “things to save up for” and “things to save up for (big)”.

It’s a good way to keep track of what you need, but it also helps with taking advantage of opportunities when they come up. See someone selling a food dehydrator for £10 on FB Marketplace? Just check the prepping shopping list, yep, you need a dehydrator, and now you’ve just bagged one for £10.

The same goes for food – supermarket deals come and go all the time, so knowing that you want 40kg of oats (or whatever) means that when you see an incredible deal, you’ve got free rein to take advantage of it and grow your supplies at the barest possible cost.

Like everything in this article, this step is about knowledge, organisation, and efficiency – get organised about what you need, and you’ll find your money goes a lot further than it might otherwise have done. In this economy, that can be the difference between success and failure.

Step 8: Make a Reading List

Once we’ve got a plan in place for acquiring supplies and equipment, the next step is to level up our skills and knowledge to match. Think about what skills you want to cultivate, what you need and want, and what reference information you want to have on hand. You’re already collecting supplies: now it’s time to collect skills and knowledge.

Do you have good first aid training? What about paediatric first aid? Or a stop-the-bleed style course which is focused on shootings or other violent injuries?

Do you want to learn to preserve your own food? Or grow it? How about keeping backyard chickens? Do you know how to unblock a drain? Can you rehang a door?

You can learn any of these skills from courses and classes (there’ll be some in your local area), or from video tutorials, or from reading. There are even a huge number of excellent skills-based and preparedness-based social media accounts you can follow, particularly on Instagram and TikTok, which are great for getting bite-sized bits of knowledge, neat skills, or fun ideas in an easy, scrollable way. Check out the Start Prepping UK Instagram account to find some of them – I’ll be boosting them regularly over there.

Reading is fun and cool. All the cool kids are doing it. All the still-alive-after-disaster kids are doing it too.

Step 9: (Finally, The Final Step): Get Organised and Stay Organised

I am a serial victim of getting excited about something, putting in tons of organisation and effort, getting an incredible system in place, and then letting it break down almost immediately.

However, I can’t afford to do this with preparedness, and neither can you. Things are going to break down, supply chains are going to be disrupted (with increasing frequency), extreme weather events will happen, and we will see “freak” disasters like this month’s catastrophic Ohio train derailment, which has saturated the area around it for many miles with highly toxic chemicals.

We need to be ready, and that means getting organised, and STAYING organised.

I don’t know what this looks like for you, but for me, it looked like this:

1. Preparedness audit. Where am I now? What have I got? Who do I have that I can rely on, and what can they do?
2. Short-term planning. How can I prepare for three days, or a week, or three weeks, stuck in my home? No power, no heating, nothing – just the things I’ve got stored – what do I need to do to get there?
3. Long-term planning. What skills, knowledge, capabilities and equipment will it take a long time to acquire, and how do I get there? The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today: so how do I get into fighting shape? How do I run a marathon? How do I get specialist trauma first aid knowledge? How do I become a spectacular shot with a bow and arrows? How do I master growing and preserving my own food? How do I learn how to maintain and protect my home and all its systems? These sorts of things take a long, LONG time to perfect, but every single step of the journey makes you better and more prepared. You just need to stick at it.
   I wrote the long-term goals down and stuck them to my office wall, and I check them regularly to keep myself accountable and keep myself on track. This is tricky enough without losing track of what I’m supposed to be working towards.

And that’s it. It really is as simple, and as difficult, as that.

Once you’re finished with the steps outlined here, you’ll have a solid grasp of what your starting position is, what supplies your household needs, how to get them, where to best store them, what your finances are like, what you need to learn or get to maintain your home and its systems, what your likely threats are and the skills and supplies you need to get in order to meet those threats.

Most importantly, you’ll have a clear path forward. This is just step one: every step after this will make us more prepared for an increasingly uncertain, increasingly dangerous world.

Let’s see how far we can get.

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