A Family Emergency Plan You Can Finish in 20 Minutes

Every September, the same advice makes the rounds: build a family emergency plan, know your shut-offs, keep a list of contacts somewhere everyone can find it. It's correct advice. It's also the kind of task that survives on nobody's actual to-do list — it's too big, too vague, and there's no clear point where you get to call it done.

The problem isn't the advice. It's that "get organized for an emergency" starts from a blank page, and a blank page is where good intentions go to die.

Why the usual advice never gets done

Search "family emergency plan" and you'll find the same checklist everywhere: know your meeting places, write down your contacts, learn your utility shut-offs. All correct. None of it tells you where to write it down, what to do with it once it's written, or how a babysitter would use it at 9pm on a Tuesday. It's a list of facts to gather, not a finished thing to hand someone.

The 20-minute version

The Family Emergency & ICE Card Kit is built around a different idea: you answer questions about your own household once, through a guided wizard, and it hands you back a finished, print-ready kit — not a checklist to interpret, an actual set of documents.

You get a wallet ICE (In Case of Emergency) card for every person in the house, a glovebox card for the car, a fridge quick-card, and a full household operating manual. Fill it in once, print it, and it's done — no design decisions, no blank pages.

What takes 20 minutes

• Household members — name, blood type, allergies, medications, a note for a first responder. This is the only required section.
• Emergency contacts — including one who lives out of the area, so a local disaster jamming the phone lines doesn't cut everyone off from each other.
• Home shut-offs — where the water, gas, and electrical panel are, in your own words, not a diagram of someone else's house.
• Meeting places — right outside the house, outside the neighborhood, and out of town.

That's the fast path. Everything else in the kit — insurance and utility numbers, a caregiver sheet, a go-bag list, pets, vehicles — is there when you're ready for it, but skipping it doesn't stop you from finishing the part that matters most today.

Built from your own information, not a stranger's checklist

It's country-aware. Pick your country and the kit prints the right number to call — 911, 112, 999, 000, 111 — plus your national poison line, instead of assuming everyone reading it lives where you do.

It's yours, not generic. A printable "emergency binder" template is still a blank page with better formatting. This one is filled in with your actual information through the wizard, not typed in by hand afterward.

It stays private. Everything you enter stays in your browser and your own saved copy — never uploaded anywhere else. The kit never asks for passwords, alarm codes, or safe combinations, and the documents log only records where an original is kept, never what it says.

How to make one

1. Open the Family Emergency & ICE Card Kit builder.
2. Fill in your household members, contacts, shut-offs, and meeting places — about 20 minutes.
3. Preview the finished kit, then download the print-ready PDF.
4. Print the wallet cards on cardstock and cut them out — a Cricut / Silhouette cut file is included — or skip the cutting with a local print shop.

Put a card in every wallet, the glovebox card in each car, and the fridge card on the fridge. Twenty minutes, and the "get prepared" advice you've been meaning to get to all September is finished.