Threat assessments are a fairly common practice nowadays. In the line of work I’m in, threat assessments are done on a regular basis.

If countless businesses and government agencies feel the need to plan out mitigating the harm done to them by forseeable disasters, why aren’t you doing the same? When is the last time you conducted a threat assessment, on yourself? It’s a pretty good idea that just about everyone sits down at some point and does this so as to give everyone a more realistic idea of where we need to be at regarding disaster preparedness planning.

Here’s how you can go about it:

You should start by listing any and every threat you can think of. A threat is anything – natural or unnatural – that can substantially change your lifestyle. Common threats include: job loss, hurricanes, street crime, fire, winter storms, socio-economic collapse, illness/injury/death of the family breadwinner, earthquakes, home invasion, pandemic flu, chemical/biological/radiological/nuclear disaster and zombie apocolypse.

Think the threats out for yourself and don’t pay attention to the news while you do it. If every television news channel and newspaper in your area is reporting on the horrible economy but you are debt free, own your own home, have plenty of savings, are self employed in a stable industry, and can pretty much take care of yourself financially, then unlike most of the population, financial calamity probably won’t be at the top of your list. Likewise, if you’re mentally, inventorily and physically prepared for a horde of zombies staggering through your neighborhood, you could put that threat a little lower on the list.

Next look at each risk and make three categories: least likely to happen, most likely to happen, and everything in between. Here in Omaha, we just don’t have much in the way of hurricanes. So despite the fact that hurricanes seriously make life suck, it isn’t a risk for me and my family. So hurricanes get put into the ‘least likely to happen’ list. Zombie attacks, however, can happen anytime – so this will go on the ‘most likely to happen’ list.

Take your ‘most likely to happen’ list and logically prioritize them. Don’t let the media or emotions take over when putting this list together. The news of the day can often impact our thinking and cause us to give more priority to categories that really are less likely to happen then the regular boring stuff like job loss.

Now look at your prioritized ‘most likely to happen’ list and start planning. What are ten steps you can take now or in the near future that would help mitigate each disaster?

For example, if you are the family breadwinner and you have a spouse and three kids at home like I do, at the top of your list of disasters would be the possibility of your long term illness, disability or death. Especially death, because that’s really long-term. Unless you die during a zombie attack, in which case your death will be alarmingly short-term.

Regardless of the above, without you and your income around, job loss would be a real, live disaster for your family. And unfortunately, such a scenario is a little more likely to happen than something like a zombie uprising or nuclear warfare. So, looking at the spectre of the loss of the primary breadwinner’s income-generating ability, your ten steps for dealing with that particular disaster could include: getting life insurance, writing or updating your will, looking into short or long-term disability insurance and getting an emergency fund in place as soon as possible.

With a tiny bit of work on your part, your disaster preparedness tasks should now be laid out fairly clearly. If you have five ‘most likely to happen’ disasters with ten steps each to complete in order to be better prepared for if those disasters actually happen, then you now have 50 tasks to take care of. Some of these tasks will take a few minutes. Others will be on-going activities.

Does this mean you shouldn’t prepare for things such as social collapse or bugging out for an indeterminate amount of time? No. You should always develop your skills, think through every “what if” scenario you could think of, practice camping out in the woods, grow a garden for the exercise and health benefits, etc, however the majority of your time, attention, and money should go towards preparing for the disasters that are most likely to happen to you.

So what about the rest of the threats you listed, those that were least likely and less likely to happen? Well, fortunately, disaster planning in general will help mitigate a wide range of disasters, not just the things you plan for. For example, an earthquake may be high on your list and a flood may be very low on your list, but the steps you take to prepare for the earthquake (getting a bug-out-bag ready, checking your insurance, planning to bug out if necessary, gathering clean up supplies, etc) will work for both situations.

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