When planning for the safety and security of your family, keeping your personal, social and financial data safe and secure should be one of your most important priorities. You want to protect the contents of your home with renter’s insurance, but some items are irreplaceable – like birth certificates, passports, marriage and divorce paperwork, home deeds and many other documents.
One of the best practices you can put into place for document storage is to scan and virtually (but securely) store copies of all your vital personal documents – including but not limited to your driver’s license, social security card, birth certificate, college diplomas, marriage certificate, any immigration or legal residency paperwork, passport, home deed or lease, automobile paperwork, loan documents, wills and trusts, and any other important papers – and store them on a secure hard drive that only you have access to or a private cloud with a password protected firewall. Better yet, stash that hard drive in your home safe – and keep those original documents in your bank’s safety deposit box.
Online services offering secure document storage are starting to pop up, and you might want consider them as another option for your vital documents. Focusing on health, myMediConnect’s Safety Deposit Box offers unlimited access to your own secure and centralized repository for digital copies of all your important life documents. You can upload, print and view digital copies of your original life documents like your personal health record (PHR), living wills, advanced directives and more.
Another important thing to secure and save in a safe place is copies of all of your credit cards. In the event of a lost or stolen wallet or purse, you’ll want to have these all in one easy-to-access place so you can quickly call your credit card companies to report the loss and have the cards cancelled and replaced. I make photocopies of all my cards, with the cancellation numbers on the document, to prepare for just such an event. They’ve come in handy more times than I’d like to admit.
