Fires can gut a home or business and cause immense damage. It can cause you to lose everything, from money to equipment and furniture. It is one of the worst things a person can go through in their life, but something that is often forgotten in the loss are documents. What are best practices to safeguard confidential documents?
Each year, there are roughly 1.2 million fires in the United States. That amounts to 3,287 fires every single day. The danger is very real. Those fires cause an estimated $14.8 billion in damages. Losing your possessions or your business can be terrible but losing those documents can make the process of rebuilding that much worse.
Protecting Documents from a Fire
It is important that you keep your documents in a safe place to protect them not only from theft, but also from a fire. A fire can result in you losing your passport, birth certificate and social security number, as well as other important banking papers, stock certificates and much more. For a business, there is a great deal of danger in losing documents that are vital including papers relating to employees, taxes, sales, client lists and much more.
Thankfully, there are ways you can protect yourself from fire, or at least the documents so that it is easier to start up again once the smoke has cleared.
This is why you need a document bag to protect those items that are so important to your life and business. It can’t just be any type of document bag, but a fireproof document bag. A fireproof document bag means that when you are digging through the rubble of your home or business, you will find those important documents.
The best fireproof document bags out there will cost you extra but think of how much they can save you in time when you are rebuilding. How easy it will be to prove who you are so items can be replaced. This is why a fireproof bag is so vital to the safety of your life and your identity, as well as your business. A fire-resistant document bag will keep the documents inside safe, even as the flames roar around it. It will be there waiting for you when you begin to sift through the ashes, and it can be a little beacon of hope as you begin to put everything back together after such a terrible incident.
Protecting Documents to Prevent Identity Theft
Apart from worrying about fires, there is another concern, and it is identity theft. Each year, 49 million people fall victim in the United States to identity theft. Those thefts create hundreds of billions in financial damage. It is bad for people and bad for the economy.
In 2020 alone, it is estimated that 47 percent of all Americans were victims of some sort of identity theft. Some of them were minor, some of them were life-altering. It is forecasted that identity theft could get even worse and cause a financial cost of $721.3 billion, up from $502.5 billion in 2019.
If you are the victim of identity theft, you need to prove that you are not the one making the purchases. You have to prove that your identity was stolen. It is not an easy process, and it can take a lot of time. In some cases, it can take years before you can repair the damage created by an identity thief. It is like a virtual fire that blazes through your life, leaving only rubble and you have to not only rebuild but prove to everyone that you weren’t the one to destroy everything.
Protecting important documents from thieves is more important now than ever before. Identity theft doesn’t just happen online. It can happen when a thief comes into your home and steals your vital papers right out of your desk. It can happen at your business when someone goes through your filing cabinet.
Don’t let that happen. Put your documents into something that is secure and more of a pain than it is worth stealing.
You don’t want to go through identity theft. It is difficult to fix, and it can decimate your credit score in the process. This is why something like a document bag that you can hide somewhere in your house, or a locking bank bag that you can secure somewhere. In these bags, you can contain items such as your social security number, birth certificate, passport and other items that could be used by thieves to steal your identity.
Don’t let yourself be caught in the web of an identity thief.