Whether you live in an area prone to natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods or an area not normally subject to these occurrences you need to be prepared for the unexpected as disaster can strike at any time, natural or not.If you are the victim of a disaster, you will need access to your insurance information as well as your other financial and tax records. Therefore, to be prepared, you should have another means to access your important documents before disaster strikes and you lose access to the original physical documents.
One of the best methods to protect your records to ensure you have access is to back up any important documents electronically. There are numerous methods to scan documents onto an external hard drive, a CD, store online or even easier, a flash drive. USB flash drives are relatively inexpensive and have the capacity to store all your records in a small easily transportable device. You can then duplicate the backups as necessary and store them in a safe location such as a lockbox or safety deposit box. Additionally, once you have scanned the documents into your preferred technology you can email the files to yourself for future retrieval or store them online in another manner so you may access them any time you desire. Either of these methods will enable you to retrieve the information but make sure you have strong passwords so it would be difficult for a hacker to get to your information.
Valuable antiques, jewelry, paintings or other physical assets should be photographed and the images stored along with any documentation verifying the item’s value, proof of ownership, or if applicable certificates of authenticity.
Additionally, recording all account numbers, company names and addresses along with the telephone numbers is invaluable if you need this information in an emergency and do not have access to the physical documents for whatever reason.
There are other means to acquire these documents such as contacting the various companies or even the IRS for copies of your tax returns but not only is this time consuming but most companies will not release information if you do not have account numbers or at least some of the basic information concerning your accounts. Besides, how can you call the various companies if you have not recorded nor have easy access to the telephone numbers or other numbers associated with your various accounts?!
Submitted by Kathryn Shrader
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