Protect your important documents like tax, insurance, and personal records.
Have you ever spent hours watching new reports of unfolding natural disasters? It’s heartbreaking when you see a family picking through rubble and looking for precious family heirlooms and important personal documents.
Watching weather and fire in action fascinates most viewers, and it’s surreal when you’re watching from the safety of your own home. Even so, watching live news reports of natural disasters often makes people think about what they would do if disaster came to their area. Would you be ready? And, are you aware of how to store important documents, so they’re safe in case of a fire, flood, or other natural disasters?
Read through the suggestions below that will help keep your personal documents safe—before disaster strikes.
Most of us keep a combination of the following personal documents in our homes:
- Medical Records
- Homeowner’s Insurance
- Auto Insurance
- Real Estate Documents
- Vehicle Registration and Titles
- Financial Records – Pay Stubs, Tax Documents, and Bank Statements
- Legal Documents – Wills, Funeral Instructions, Powers of Attorney
- Birth Certificates, Passports, and Travel Documents
First of all, make sure you have copied or scanned everything important. You can put it all in a safe or safety deposit box, but in many cases even that will not be sufficient. Fire, earthquakes, and floods are all likely to destroy everything in your area. The best solution is to upload your documents into an online secured storage site. This way, your vital documents, photos, videos and memories will be safe, and you’ll be able to access them from anywhere.
Use the cloud to keep your documents safe.
Cloud technology used to be more complicated. In recent years, third-party services like Google Cloud Platform, Dropbox, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Drive, and others make it easy for you to keep all your important documents secure off-site. Most come with a small amount of free storage, so you can test the waters before allocating any funds to moving all your important documents onto their services.
Use moveable storage like USB sticks and external hard drives.
Don’t have the capacity to upload your documents to the cloud? No problem. Things like external hard drives and USB sticks can work great as well. One major added benefit of external storage is that you can quickly grab it in case of an evacuation. Without having to move an entire computer or dig into the computer hardware and remove hard drives, external storage is easy to carry and relatively secure.
Duplicate physical copies, and store them off-site.
What about if you can’t digitize all your documents? Businesses that require hard copies of their files, like law offices or medical and dental offices, among others, keep cabinets full of important documents and can’t simply upload everything into the cloud for legal and privacy reasons.
These files are particularly at risk in the event of a natural disaster. Floods and fires can quickly destroy decades of documents. There are companies that offer off-site storage. This can be a great option for storing original files, but it also makes sense to use physical storage services to keep backup copies in case of emergencies.
Make sure your physical storage is fire and waterproof.
One of the simplest ways you can protect your important, physical documents is proper storage equipment. While quite a bit more expensive than less-protective equipment, file cabinets that carry a guarantee of fire and water protection can ensure small disasters don’t ruin your important documents.
Save duplicate, physical copies of any and all financial reports, tax documents, legal contracts, lease agreements, and so on.
Pick the approach (or approaches) that work best for you!
You’ll want to use some combination of the above for your files to maximize (and balance) security, protection, and ease of access. Above all, it’s imperative that you take care of this in a prompt fashion, so in the unlikely event of an emergency, you’ll have easy access to your important info.
Think about what storage and security methods work for your lifestyle, and get organized. You owe it to yourself to make sure your important documents are both safe and easy to find when the time comes. Oh, and don’t forget your password(s) and lock combination.