Practical home hardening: doors, locks, windows, lighting, cameras, and safes. Home security and self-defense.
Most break-ins are opportunistic and go through a door. Reinforce the frame, upgrade the deadbolt, and light the outside, and you’ve addressed most realistic risk for the price of a nice dinner.
Self-defense courses to teach you what you need to know to defend yourself.
A free first aid for martial arts course: assessing and treating training injuries, the AMPLE method, spotting emergencies, and preventing injury.
This free resilience training course from Alison teaches the six pillars of resilience and how to bounce back from setbacks. Beginner level, about 3 to 4 hours.
This free self-defense course from Alison teaches defensive techniques, escaping holds, and protecting against a larger attacker. Intermediate, 1.5 to 3 hours.
The equipment in a home security system is a one-time purchase. The monitoring plan is rent. That second number is what quietly eats a household budget month after month, and it is the reason so ...
A camera that stops recording the moment the power or the internet drops is not much help during a storm outage. That gap is the one most buyers ignore until the week they actually need footage. For ...
Door and window hardening walkthroughs, lock grade explainers, camera and alarm comparisons including subscription costs, safe selection and anchoring, and neighborhood-level approaches that work better than any gadget. We deliberately don’t publish firearms or ammunition content — that’s a considered editorial position, and it isn’t changing.
• Three-inch screws. Long enough to reach the stud behind the frame, which is where a standard strike plate fails.
• ANSI Grade 1 and Grade 2. The published durability standard for deadbolts, and a better guide than brand.
• Local versus cloud storage. Decides whether your camera keeps working when the internet or the subscription stops.
• Fire rating in minutes. What a safe’s rating actually promises, and it’s usually shorter than buyers assume.
Walk your own property at night and note where someone could approach unseen. Fix the lighting, then the door hardware, then the windows. Add cameras afterwards, they document, they rarely prevent.
Know your neighbors. It remains the most effective and least expensive security measure available, and no product on any page competes with it. Current prices are on our security deals page.
Sign up for our best daily picks
These guides are general information. Follow manufacturer instructions and local codes for any product you buy. Some links earn Prepping Bargains a commission at no extra cost to you — it never affects what we recommend.
