We often talk about having a bugout bag that includes a folder with important documents, but despite your preparations and efforts to protect them, sometimes disaster strikes quickly and unexpectedly, and those documents are lost.

Wildfires, housefires, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes – any of these events can destroy important documents.

The loss of vital documents can make it difficult to function in today's society. If you lost everything but your life fleeing a disaster, replacing documents is one of the first steps you'll need to take. You'll need identification, proof of citizenship, and proof of ownership before you can begin to rebuild your life.

Be Proactive Before a Disaster

Many of the major stressors after a disaster can be lessened by taking these vital steps before anything bad actually occurs.

1. Photograph all important documents and store them securely in the cloud. It's important that you don't just keep them on a specific computer because that could also be destroyed.

2. Keep photocopies of documents in a secure location away from your property. Consider procuring a safety deposit box for this purpose. (I have copies of all of our information at my mother's home in another state.)

3 Scan documents and save them on a password protected USB drive that you keep in a different location. This one is particularly secure and has an automatic cloud back-up.

Protect Important Documents

There are some steps you can take to protect documents from fire and flood damage, but don't rely on these alone. They are not foolproof.