With rising fraud and identity theft cases, keeping your financial details safe and secure is daunting. Information about your credit cards, wills, tax returns, and bank accounts is quite sensitive and personal. Losing your personal finance information can be very upsetting since you can’t tell who will use your details to rip you off your hard-earned money.
Therefore, you must store your personal information safely and securely. Fortunately, storing personal information isn’t as problematic as you might think. You can keep your information safe by choosing the right option for keeping your details secure. Check these steps you can take to keep your personal finance information safe and available whenever you need it.
How to Store your Personal Finance Information
If you are interested to become a personal financial advisor then you must read about it. Protecting your personal financial information is preferable than dealing with the consequences of its theft or loss. You may take steps to store your personal financial information.
Try Using Online Digital Storage
Thanks to today’s technological advancements, online digital storage offers tremendous convenience for the average consumer. Take Google Drive, for instance. This free data storage service allows users to keep and access their financial documents from internet-enabled devices. Alternatively, you may store your personal finance information with a subscription-based service that automatically backs up personal documents on your PC or other devices.
Most subscription-based services keep personal finance data as unstructured or structured data. Some of the best subscription-based digital storage services to store your financial information include Carbonite, NovaStor, and Backblaze. These services are secure since they provide subscribers with additional layers of encryption to protect subscribers’ financial data. Some financial institutions also offer online data storage services for storing sensitive financial details.
Use a Safe Deposit Box
Not everyone is conversant with digital data storage, and neither is everybody comfortable keeping their financial documents online because they fear scammers. If you don’t like storing your financial data online, you can try keeping your financial data in the traditional way. An excellent example of an old-fashioned way of keeping financial information includes using safe deposit boxes.
These boxes have been there for decades, and they are helpful today. Most financial institutions that allow clients to keep their financial information in safe deposit boxes adhere to strict measures to keep the contents in their safe boxes safe and secure.
Consider talking to your financial institution to know whether the institution allows clients to keep their financial documents in safe deposit boxes. If they do, you can keep your financial documents such as wills, cards, income tax returns, and insurance paperwork inside their safe deposit boxes.
Financial institutions, such as banks will charge a fee to allow their customers to keep their financial documents in their safe deposit boxes. Furthermore, most banks insure the contents if they lose their clients’ financial documents. Combining encrypted cloud storage with hard-copy storage helps ensure your financial documents are secure irrespective of what happens.
Store your Financial Information in a Lockbox
A lockbox offers another traditional way of keeping financial documents safe and secure. A lockbox works as a home-based safe deposit box for keeping financial records and other sensitive files. Even after storing your financial documents on a digital storage service or in a banks’ safe deposit box, you still need to keep copies of your documents in a lockbox.
However, it would help if you got a fireproof lockbox that utilizes a combination lock instead of a key. A combination lock ensures that only you, who has the combination, can open the lockbox and access the contents. A fireproof lockbox protects your financial documents in a fire accident.
Which Financial Documents should you Store Forever?
You must also read tips on how to manage personal finances for informative purpose. While certain documents can be discarded after a specified period of time, there are many others that should be retained indefinitely. The following are some examples of vital papers to maintain for the remainder of your life:
- Birth certificates.
- Social security identification cards.
- Adoption papers.
- Court documents.
- Death certificates.
- Passports.
- Attorney-in-fact.
- Records about inheritance.
- Tax returns and financial documents.
- Structures that Aid Individuals.
- For Married proof, you must get a marriage certificate.
- When individuals die, they create wills and testaments.
- Dossiers on how the Military Performs its Duties.
Keep any documentation associated with the item you purchased or insured for at least as long as you own it or until the warranty expires. However, it won’t harm to have them around for safety’s sake, allowing them to remain for an extended period of time. Numerous these records are referred to as “deeds,” “titles,” “insurance,” or “warranty.”
Additionally, it is critical to have long-term health insurance and the documentation to prove it. Keep these records for the duration of your health insurance’s validity. You should discard any documentation that you know you will not need if your insurance coverage expires or if your insurance provider changes. As long as you get unemployment or disability payments, you will face the same situation. Maintain records until they are no longer required.
Be cautious if you have bank records or other papers that you believe you will never need. It is preferable to retain all documents until you are certain it is no longer required.
Final Words
You have many options for storing your personal financial information. Whatever option you choose, consider how safe your personal finance information is with that particular option. Furthermore, think about how accessible your data is with any option you pick for storing your financial data.