Five-step plan allows you to have peace of mind
Ray Turchansky
Province
Use a safety deposit box, says Stanley Kershman. — CANWEST FILE
EDMONTON — As baby boomers enter retirement, there is much talk about protecting investments and capital preservation, but often overlooked is the importance of protecting your investment records.
If your house burns down, will you lose your stock certificates and guaranteed investment certificates?
If your car is stolen with your wallet or laptop computer in it, will you be able to access credit-card and bank-account information readily?
The hurricanes in the southeastern United States caused Ottawa lawyer Stanley Kershman, author of Put Your Debt on a Diet, to devise a five-step plan to safeguard your financial records.
“Trying to recreate your financial records after a disaster can be stressful, time-consuming and expensive,” Kershman said. “And in a lot of cases, it just simply can’t be done. If you do it now instead of in an emergency, you end up with peace of mind knowing where you’re going to find all these items.”
Here is Kershman’s five-step plan:
“First, put together a list of all your account numbers — bank accounts, investment accounts, RRSPs, credit cards, social insurance number, insurance policies. Put that list on your computer, save that to a floppy disk, put that disk in a safety deposit box.
“If your computer gets stolen, people can get into your hard drive if they get your password, but also, you don’t have your hard drive any more. And if your house burns down or floats away, you won’t have access to that information.
“Second, you have to know where the following items are: your wills, powers of attorney, property deeds, insurance policies and your safety deposit box keys. And then have a list of the valuables you’ve got and what they’re worth. Those should also be in your safety deposit box.
“Third, check your insurance policy to make sure it’s up to date and covers the concerns that may be in your area, whether it’s flooding, landslides or other possible disasters.
“The fourth thing is to make sure you’ve got an up-to-date will, power of attorney and living will, so that your wishes express what you want now. A will that’s 20 years old probably doesn’t express that. The person you had as an executor may not be alive, or may be living out of the area.
“The fifth step is to create an inventory of everything you own. All you have to do is walk around your house with a camcorder, digital camera or regular camera.
“A digital camera is better because, once you capture all those images, you can take that disk, save it to your hard drive, which can then be saved to a CD or a DVD, and you can put that in your safety deposit box as well.
“There are certain sites that allow you to save your gallery of pictures to them free. You have your own password so people can’t get into it. There are places like Picasa.com or snapfish.com or kodakgallery.com, and they’ll allow you to have access to your photographs from any computer.”
If you take the steps Kershman mentions, you should inform your spouse, executor and anyone else who may need access to the information where it all is.
Besides preserving your documents and records, the precautions will also be most helpful in the case of your death, or when you go to make insurance claims. And as for a safety deposit box, the cost is tax-deductible if the box is used to store securities or other investment items.
© The Vancouver Province 2005
