Are you prepared?

In our current world today I feel like my family needs to be prepared more and more for anything! Not only are we in tornado alley and we need to be prepared to take shelter in less than 10 minutes sometimes, but I also want to be able to be prepared for job loss, financial trouble, or even spikes in food cost. So right now for my family I am focus on 72 hour kits and food storage (canning, gardening, etc.) Eventually I really would like to be a partial "homesteader" I would love to have an extensive garden, water collection system, some chickens, etc. Will we ever get there I have no clue... is it fun to dream... YES!
Here in the past 2 months my parents have started having a few people gathering just so we can learn more about canning, gardening, rain water collection, etc. It has been really fun to learn what others know so much about since I know so little. It is quite the motivation to know that it can happen and with not much money out of our budget to do somethings to just get started.
This month I focusing on 72 hour kits for the three of us and an extra for the car; just in case James is at works if anything does occur. Then next hopefully our focus will be on our garden and then be able to preserve our produce from that garden (canning). I am really excited to get started on these things and be able to keep up with it on Wednesdays. Now understand I am not looking to be a "doomsday prepper", but I DO want to be PREPARED. My philosophy is be prepared for IT. We have made a list of our top five ITS.
1. Tornados
2. Financial trouble/decline
3. Job loss
4. Food Price increasing
5. Anything Else: at this point there isnt a five other than the product of possibly 2-4 together.

My goal by the end of this year is to have our 72 hr kits completed, at least 3 months food supply, gardening, having a compost, and an emergency fund of at $1000 and hopefully a few months of living expenses. I hope that these will be interesting posts for anyone who checks out the blog.