Making an Emergency Binder

With all of the tornadoes, fires, floods and other natural disasters occurring lately, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about how you can prepare your family documents in the case that you have to evacuate quickly.

Dan and I have created an emergency binder for the "just in case."

In this binder, we've included birth certificates and social security cards for all the members of our family. Passports. Account numbers for our mortgages, utilities, bank accounts, credit cards, etc. Titles for our vehicles. Information on our insurance: medical, vehicle, and homeowners. A copy of our will. Basically any piece of important information is stored in clear plastic sheet protectors in the binder.

If an emergency happened, we would simply grab the binder and go, and we would have all the important documents that we might need in the aftermath.  This also makes it easier to keep your important documents in a safe, if you have one.

Kerry has a box instead of a binder, so if you have jewelry or other keepsakes, that's a great way to include them.  If you have other items in a safe or other place, just make sure you have a bag near them, so if you needed to go quickly you could simply push everything into the bag and run. You wouldn't want to be running around the house looking for things at a time like that!

Making a binder served another purpose for us. As we compiled our binder, we talked about different accounts and our finances. Because I am the one who takes care of paying bills, transferring money, and such, I wanted to make sure that if something happened to me, Dan would know what he needed to do, and where to find the documents he might need.  I feel like he now has a much better idea of what accounts we have, and the fact that he knows where all the information is if he needs it makes me feel better.

Another thing I do to prepare for emergencies is make a back up file of pictures and documents every 6 months. I actually burn 2 dvds at that time, and those go in the binder as well. When it comes down to it, if my house were to burn, the pictures would probably be the thing I would be most sad to lose.

Do you have a way of storing important information and keepsakes in case of emergency? What are some items you feel are very important to include?

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