How To Put Together A Home Emergency Binder

As a follow up to my post last week about how to build your in-home emergency kit, I want to share with you my emergency binder. This binder is something that took me an afternoon to put together but can be so important in an emergency. There are many ways to set up your binder, and I am going to share what worked for me.

Personal

I have a tab in the binder for each of us. The first page has some basic information with a place to put a current photo. The page has name, date of birth, hair color, eye color, medical allergies, medication, and emergency contacts. For the boys, I plan to update the photo once per quarter since they change quickly. The photos of Justin and I will be updated as we need to, probably once a year or so. Behind that are copies of all the personal information for each of us:

• Birth certificate
• Social security card
• Drivers license
• Passport
• Marriage license
• Will
• Medical insurance

Bank Accounts

Under the bank accounts tab, I have all the information we need to get in contact with our bank accounts. If we lose the cards, we have what we need to call the banks and get them canceled. I either copied or printed all of the following:

• Credit cards (copies of the fronts with numbers)
• Bank statements for all accounts
• IRA/Retirement plan information

Insurance Info

I put all of our insurance information together, except medical insurance. Our medical insurance cards went with the individual tabs because we don’t all have the same insurance. Since the insurance applies to all of us, it needed its own place rather than the individual tabs.

• Homeowners/Renters Insurance
• Life Insurance
• Photos of home for insurance purposes

Vehicle Information

We have the information for our two vehicles altogether. I thought about putting the vehicle insurance information with the other insurance, but we have other paperwork.

• Vehicle insurance
• Registration
• Title/Loan
• VIN numbers
• Lender information

Other

There are a few bits of information that I wanted to be copied in my emergency binder that didn’t really fit in any other categories. So I have the last section with my random paperwork:

• Microchip info for our cat
• Emergency phone list (local emergency and friends/family)
• Serial numbers for major appliances
• Utility phone numbers

The last thing I have in the binder are these emergency cards that I found from the American Red Cross. I filled them out and have them in our binder to be able to give in case of an emergency. It’s especially important that the boys have these since they are too young to be able to know this information.