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5 Ways to Save Your Papers in a Natural Disaster
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The last thing you want to worry about as you flee a fire or hurricane is finding your important papers. Here are tech-savvy ways to rescue them in advance.
By Liz Pulliam Weston
All of the natural disasters of recent years -- hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and more -- should have sensitized us all to the need for an evacuation plan.
So here's a spot quiz: What's the single most important document in your home, the one you should retrieve at all costs in a natural disaster? Is it your insurance policy? Your house deed? Your birth certificate? Your will?
It's a trick question, of course. There is no such document. No piece of paper is worth risking your life, especially when so much of the paperwork in our lives is easily recreated. Your priority in any natural disaster should be gathering your family members and getting the heck out.
Types of important documents
"Almost all (documents) are reproducible," said San Diego financial planner Larry Steckler, who should know: The home of his ex-wife, and those of two clients, burned down in the wildfires there in 2005. "You can go to the county courthouse or wherever. It's a pain, but it's not that big a deal."
Yet most articles about evacuation plans include a fairly long and detailed list of paperwork you're somehow supposed to remember to grab on your way out the door. In addition to the documents listed above, I've seen lists that included:
- Your last three years of tax returns
- Marriage, birth and death certificates, divorce decrees and adoption records
- Copies of all of your medical records
- Your retirement-account statements
- Warranties and receipts for all major purchases
- Your most recent pay stub
- Your unpaid bills
- Home-improvement records
- Estate-planning records
- Recent credit card statements
- Appraisals for all of your jewelry
- A complete household inventory
It's possible you'll have time to gather all of this in an emergency. Steckler and his wife did; they had three hours between the time he woke up smelling smoke at their Scripps Ranch home and the time they evacuated.
They stuffed 12 plastic packing crates, which happened to be in the garage, with photo albums, family memorabilia and important documents. Steckler's wife even had time to tour their home with a camcorder, recording their possessions. The video would have been helpful in filing an insurance claim, but it turned out not to be necessary: The Stecklers' home was spared.
Problems with 'grab and go' boxes
You shouldn't count on having the luxury of time, though, which is why many experts recommend creating an "evacuation box" in advance with copies of all your important documents. But for most of us, these evacuation boxes have some fatal flaws:
- Keeping such a box updated and current is a pain. It's more likely life will intervene, and you'll find yourself with documents for insurers, jobs and spouses you no longer have.
- You might not be able to retrieve the box. A press pass got me past the police barricades when the 1993 Laguna Beach fires threatened my home there. I had enough time to toss some photo albums, documents and a childhood teddy bear into my car before speeding off to cover the story. But hundreds of homeowners were prevented from reaching their houses in the fast-moving conflagration and lost everything. (A last-minute change in wind direction spared my house, thanks for asking, but the fire consumed nearly 400 homes before it was contained.)
- Accessible to you means accessible to a criminal. If you do compile this information in one place, you've just provided an identity thief with everything needed to ruin your financial life -- all in one handy carry-away tote. I was stunned recently when a professional organizer on an HGTV show presented her clients with a beribboned "grab and go" box with all of their important documents, including Social Security cards. The organizer placed the box carefully atop the television, so anyone who watched the show will know right where to go to swipe this family's financial life.
You can always lock this stuff away in a safe, of course, but that kind of negates the convenience that an evacuation box is supposed to offer. Small, portable fire-resistant safes can help, but they may not fully protect documents from intense flames. And, of course, they're easier to steal.
5 tech-savvy options
I won't discourage you from creating a "grab and go" box if you want to, but there are other practical ways to prepare for disaster. A little planning, and a little technology, can go a long way.
Here are five things you can do now:
Safeguard family photos. Ask victims of fires what they regret the most, and it's typically the loss of family photos and memorabilia.
There's probably no way to make a copy of Grandma's quilt, but you can make sure most of your photo memories survive. Take those old negatives you were planning to organize one day, stuff them in a box and mail it to your mother, or some other trusted person who lives out of your area. Then burn some CDs with your digital photos and do the same. Scan any iconic family photos that don't have negatives, and make CDs of those as well. (If you don't have a scanner, ask a friend who does, or have them professionally done.)
The key is to get your copies out of your immediate geographic area; the further away, the better.
Immortalize your stuff. A household inventory can be key in making an accurate insurance claim that will help you get your life on track.
If you do only one thing to prepare for disaster, make it a camcorder tour. (If you don't have a video camera, borrow from a friend or rent one from a camera shop for about $40.) Take an hour to slowly walk through your house, recording every nook and cranny and verbally adding any details you can remember, such as when you bought each item and how much it cost. Repeat this exercise once a year (it'll take you an hour or so).
If you use Money or Quicken, making notes of what you bought on transaction records makes it easy to create a record of what was bought, when and for how much. Just make sure to back up your file to a CD or floppy disks once or twice a year and send it along with your videotape to your trusted, out-of-area friend or relative.
Get your financial records online. People are understandably worried about security, as I discussed in "How safe is your financial information?" But the more of your financial life you have online, the easier it can be to recover from catastrophe. If you pay bills online, for example, you don't need your statements to figure out where to send payments. (If you've set most of your bills up for recurring payment or automatic debit, where the biller takes the money directly from your checking account, you won't even have to worry about figuring out what you owe.) Online access to your credit card accounts will allow you to get replacements without having all your account numbers handy.
If you use Money, take advantage of the online backup services. For a small fee, your records can be quickly updated and stored far beyond the reach of wildfires, floods and computer crashes. Similar services are available for those who use tax-preparation software to prepare their returns. Or, if you have an e-mail service with large storage capabilities (two gigabytes or more), you can back up your file just by sending it to yourself as an e-mail.
You also will want to take some protections against the wrong people getting their hands on your data.
Focus on copying tough-to-replace documents. Some documents that might seem irreplaceable really aren't. You can always get copies of recent tax returns from the IRS, for example, or from your tax professional, if you use one. Even documents like stock certificates can be recreated; you just have to contact the transfer agent who issued the original. (The hassle involved, though, is another reason not to have physical certificates, but to have them transferred electronically into a brokerage account.)
Harder to reproduce may be documents such as jewelry appraisals, receipts for major purchases and home-improvement records, which can be handy in reducing any taxable gain that you might otherwise owe when you sell your house. (If you used credit cards, you'll be able to retrieve proof of your more recent purchases, but your card issuer isn't required to keep your account records after seven years.)
If you have time to regularly make copies of your important documents, that's great. Otherwise, concentrate on photocopying the more problematic paperwork, and make sure duplicates are stored off-site.
Pinch-hit with an online fax service. What if you don't have anyone you can trust with your documents, or you just don't want to hassle with an annual mailing? Services such as eFax and Faxaway convert your faxes into e-mail documents, so you can fax yourself copies of important paperwork. As long as your e-mail service doesn't automatically delete old e-mails, you've got indefinite online storage for not much cost. eFax's basic service is free; eFax Plus, which allows you to send faxes directly from your computer, is $16.95 a month. Faxaway costs $1 a month.
Columns by Liz Pulliam Weston, the Web's most-read personal finance writer, appear every Monday and Thursday, exclusively on MSN Money.
Updated May 20, 2007
