Financial emergency box
The oft repeated but ignored idiom ” Save for a rainy day” really happened for many of us in Chennai.Though the city not only recovered from this punch from nature, it has more or less stood up thanks to thousands of volunteers, armed forces and workers. Now comes the damage assessment and its financial impact, which is not going to be easy. Some pointers for the future & how you can have a financial emergency box :
- Keep at least 6 months expenses in an investment that can be sold easily like a short term FD or a short term debt fund.
- Digitize all documents from education records, passports, voter id etc., Make a pdf copy of all these and send a mail to yourself so that you can download them again when needed, you can also have a copy in file sharing apps like dropbox.
- Make a simple spreadsheet of all your documents details such as passport no, bank acct no, debit/credit card no etc and save them too. Use a password vault like keepass or Norton vault for storing passwords, if you are worried about the same being hacked you can memorize first part of password and save the second to make it safer.
- Consider householders insurance that covers the contents of the houses but ensure that the cover is against all types of calamities, no point in having fire insurance only but not floods since there was never flood in your area.
Saving 6 months expense may sound tough job but work on it, tracking all the data and digitizing it will be tough but do it still. Be prepared as the scouts,say.