Jan. 2012 Provident Living Challenges

January 2012 Provident Living Challenges

Do one of these by the February 2012 evening Relief Society meeting, and get a prize!

Challenge #1:  Buy Breakfast for 3 months:  Cold cereal.

Determine how many boxes of cold cereal your family goes through in a week, and what flavors they like.  Buy 13 weeks worth of cold cereal.  

Mark the date on the top so you can rotate the boxes.  Make a goal to never go below this amount of cold cereal in the future, so you will always have a three month’s supply.

(To make a complete breakfast, you would also need fresh milk or powdered milk.  However, that is not part of this month’s challenge.)

Challenge #2:

Safeguarding your important documents.  The challenge this month is to save at least three major documents (or categories of documents) safer than they were last month.  You be the judge.

Picture your house burned to the ground, with all your documents destroyed.  Which documents would be the most painful to lose?  This month we are going to try to protect our documents and find ways to store them safely or duplicate them and store the duplicates in different places. 

I will not attempt to list every document you might want to protect.  Some documents include confidential business/financial information, and these need to be protected from unfriendly eyes using encryption, locks and keys, or passwords.  Other documents, like recipes, can be open to the world, but you need to save them offsite because you would be heartbroken to lose them all in a fire or flood.

Think of all the ways documents could be lost:  theft, fire, flood, mold, chewed by mice or bugs, hurricane, left behind in an evacuation, etc.  Try to keep every document in at least two places OR MORE so that if one place has a disaster, you can get it from the other place.

Important paper documents:

Deeds to house, cars

Insurance documents

Birth certificates, adoption records

Passports

Marriage certificate

Wills

Life Stories

Genealogy

Financial records

Tax records

Etc.

Protect paper documents from fire by storing them in a fireproof safe ($33 at Target) or protect them from theft in a safety deposit box.  Also, make copies and store the copies elsewhere (either digitally or on paper)

Where to store digital photos and documents:

Your computer internal hard drive stores documents and photos automatically.  This does not count for our challenge.  You need to find an additional place to safeguard your information.

Here are some options:

Store on CDs, ask a friend to keep a copy at their house.

Store on external hard drive, keep it at work or at a relative’s house.

Email them to yourself (saved on Gmail)

Email them to someone else

Pay an online backup service, like Carbonite or Mozy

Keep a thumbdrive in your purse or at work. (These can be encrypted with a password.)

Copy all your recipes onto a blog or website.