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Nov 18, 2009: On a quiet evening, a couple of years ago, we returned from our work to find our apartment complex in flames. In front of our eyes we saw one apartment after another being consumed by a monstrous fire while we helplessly looked on. By God's grace the brave fire fighters put out the flames just a couple of apartments from ours. Though our block was charred our belongings were unharmed. But our hearts reached out to our neighbors who had lost everything. We tried to help to the best of our abilities and in the process we learnt a lot.

Since most of the residents of the apartment complex had never thought about the consequences of a fire on their personal finances and identities, they had to undergo some hardships. Documents related to finance like checkbooks, certificates of deposits, shareholders' certificates, important files on the computers, backups and other important stuff like passports, social security cards, medical records, etc were burnt to ashes. The lucky ones who were out working had their wallets on them, for the rest that was out of reach too. Consequently quite a few of them were identity less, had no credit and ATM cards, no cash or extra set of clothes on them. Pretty scary! However with the help of friends, employers, the city officials and tonnes of paper work they got back their identities. The recovery was a slow process spanning over weeks.

We immediately reflected on what we can do to save ourselves from such hardships. Two options became evident. One was to purchase a fire safe and put all our important documents in it. Not that fire safes are totally safe from fire but they can resist it for a few hours. We have chosen a couple of fire safes from Sentry to protect our personal documents.

The other was to keep a copy of the originals in a safe deposit box in a bank away from the apartment. Both these techniques are not fool proof but they provide some resilience in such a situation. Another neat idea is to keep a back-up file of all our online accounts and passwords in a different place (i.e. not in the apartment). We have to take care to keep it in a safe place else we will lose our monies and investments to an identity thief. The safe deposit box/locker in a bank is a good place to store a back-up of our e-personal finance state.

On hindsight we feel that it is a nice idea to keep our important stuff in such a way that we can grab hold of it and go in a moment's notice. In the case where we are not there to grab them and go, it would be great to have a back-up in a safe place where we can access it in case of natural calamities or unforeseen disasters like fire, flash floods, thefts or unknown surprises.

We hope that our experience about safe keeping our important documents is useful to you. Please share your views and ideas about how to fire proof our crucial documents.

Image Source(s): Adrian