After several long years and 100s of revisions, the Your Military Family’s Confidently Prepared™ Life Binder is finally available for purchase! This great tool will make your life more organized and provide a guide to help others help you if this is a situation.
What Is This Binder?
The Confidently Prepared™ Life Binder is a 126-page PDF. It has sections for every aspect of your life EXCEPT deployment and PCS moves – there are already great products for this out there! You print out the pages you need, and fill them out. When you’re done, you’ll have a roadmap for someone taking care of your life during an emergency, a useful tool for taking care of the activities of your daily life, and a single place to store important documents and records.
Here’s the main Table of Contents:
Why I Built This Tool
Our family moved in September 2001. You may remember that month. Our household goods were delivered on the 10th. My husband hadn’t even checked into his new command and bam – 9/11 happened. Suddenly he was checked-in, packed, and gone. The details are fuzzy. What isn’t fuzzy is that before that ship had even hit the Atlantic Ocean, we had an emergency.
As happens.
Our five-month-old daughter fell, hard, onto concrete. Here I was, alone, in a new neighborhood, with three kids 3 and under and now I’m clearly going in an ambulance with one of them.
As the ambulance wailed into the neighborhood, I stood on my neighbor’s front porch holding my unconscious infant. When she opened the door, I simply said, “My baby is unconscious and I have two other kids in the house.” I left that poor woman alone with two strange kids, in a strange house, with no instructions and no idea who to call or what to do.
Thankfully, the baby was fine and my neighbor was a great person. But the feeling of leaving her ill-equipped was upsetting. And so I started to get a little organized. Just a little.
Our Military Life Can Look Different
Eventually, I bought a popular In Case of Emergency binder online. It’s a great product, but it didn’t fill the needs of our military life. There was no place for a family care plan, information on how to send a Red Cross message, or instructions on accessing military benefits if there was a death. So I decided that we needed a similar product, but designed for military families.
Along the way, this became a little more than an In Case of Emergency tool. That’s still its primary focus, but it’s also super-handy for day-to-day life. It will help you find your car title when you need it, or remember the address that you had three moves ago. It’s also an excellent prompt to take a look at your overall financial, insurance, and investment situation.
Three Years In The Making
Y’all, I can not tell you how many revisions this thing has gone through. This was like pregnancy and childbirth, but lasting a LOT longer. At first, it was just a Google doc. I had many kind friends read, comment, and review. I bought software and templates and hired graphic designers.
I made it beautiful, with graphics and fancy formatting, and color features. And it was nearly 200 pages long and took an entire batch of ink to print. So that clearly wasn’t going to be good for you.
And so I kept revising. And sending it to more friends. My dear friend Ashley acted as my midwife, holding my hand and taking many deep breaths with me. And finally, all the possible content was added and margins were straight and the formatting was consistent.
The next step will be to make it a fillable PDF, but I don’t want to keep this to myself any longer. It’s that useful. The fillable version is next, and if you buy now, you’ll get it for free when it is available.
Who Will This Product Help?
While this product was designed with military families in mind, they’re not the only group who will benefit from it.
Veteran families will find it useful, especially if they are receiving any benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The kids of veterans or veteran spouses may want to ensure they know how to help mom and/or dad as they age.
Single service members will find it useful to corral their information, because they don’t have a spouse to know things if they are unavailable.
Non-military families can skip the military-specific pages and still have a valuable tool.
Features of The Binder
The binder is 126 printable pages – but don’t panic, you only need to print the pages that apply to your situation. For example, if you don’t have pets, you don’t have to print the pet page. Or if you have multiple kids, you might need to print multiple pages of the school information. It’s completely custom to you.
There are fill-in-the-blank pages, checklists, telephone numbers, and links to websites and military regulations.
The format and prompts help ensure you don’t forget any important details. It also provides great talking points between the adults in a household!
Military-specific pages capture crucial information for our crazy lifestyle!
It’s all black and white, and no graphics, so it doesn’t use a lot of ink.
The sections are divided so that you can keep day-to-day information in a public place, and more sensitive information in a more secure location.
What This Binder Does Not Include
This binder specifically does not include PCS or deployment-specific information. There are already great tools available for these two situations, and no one needs me to recreate the wheel. However, everything you could need for a deployment is included – so it sort of IS a deployment binder.
A Freebie for You
Even if you don’t want to buy the whole binder right now, I want you to have this page. Please fill it out and share it with anyone who might need to send a Red Cross message if there was a family emergency. They will thank you if they need to use it.
You can click on the picture and print, or get the file here.
How To Purchase
It’s easy to purchase. Just click on the link below, and it will take you to the ordering page. You get instant access to the download.
The Confidently Prepared™ Life Binder comes with a one-year money-back guarantee. If you aren’t completely satisfied, let me know and I’ll cheerfully give you a prompt refund.
As with everything I do, I welcome your comments, suggestions, and thoughts! Hit me up at Kate at KateHorrell dot com. And I appreciate you!!
I have been trying for two days to buy and download the Binder. After entering all data and trying to buy, a note tells me the price may have changed. Please advise.
Hi Frank! I am so sorry that you are having trouble. I got your Facebook message yesterday and replied that I thought I had trouble-shot the issue and it should be working now. Are you still having issues today?