Prep Tip #1: Every Day Carry

One of my resolutions for this year is to pay more attention to this blog.  I intend to give you a "to do" topic daily which revolves around survival/prepping stuff, of course interspersed with other posts depending on what is happening in the world.

First, a wish for you and your family to have a truly stellar 2013.  Yes, you should be prepared for anything, but it is also a good idea to enjoy yourself and look forward to good things happening (aka 'hope for the best but plan for the worst').

With that in mind, one of the best ways to head off small problems is to have your everyday carry (EDC) stuff be as useful as possible.  We all carry stuff with us every day, from the minimal (wallet and cell phone) to the extreme (some people's EDC gear, as well as some women's purses, look like they plan to head out and never return!).

In the last post, I suggested a range of items that people may consider carrying for their EDC.  By no means should you carry all of that stuff (for that we will talk about BOBs later), but you do want to carry things that will be useful in multiple situations.  So your task for today is to lay out all of your EDC stuff and review it.  Consider the following questions when you look at each item:

• Is this item truly useful or do I just carry it because it looks cool?
• Is there another item that can be had that would replace two or more of the items I usually carry?
• Does the potential usefulness of certain not-often-used items override the fact that they would only be useful in very specific situations?
• Is this item the best quality that I can afford?  A folding knife from the $1 Store is fine if that is all you can afford but as soon as you can afford better, you will want to buy a better quality knife.
• Which other items do I find myself needing often yet haven't included with my current EDC? 
• Which items are dead weight? Get ride of these items.
• Are my EDC items, collectively, the most minimal that I can make do with? Again, you don't want to drag along a full backpack of stuff if you don't absolutely need each and every item in the pack on a fairly regular basis.

Since you will rely on your EDC stuff much more than most other survival/prep items, you want to make sure that the things you carry on a daily basis are the best and most useful that you can find.