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September 12, 2024
by Jennifer Dietrich
Natural disasters can happen anywhere at any time and affect consumers at every income level. While a natural disaster is impossible to avoid by its very nature, there are steps every consumer can take to help prepare for an emergency to mitigate its impact on their life. Starting over after a disaster invites uncertainty, expense, and a lot of difficult choices.
While it can be hard to imagine life after the worst has happened, the truth is that your financial responsibilities don’t go away simply because you’ve suffered from some catastrophe. Immediately following a disaster, your priority is your safety and the safety of those around you and meeting your day-to-day needs. However, once you’re safe and accounted for, you will need to focus on ensuring your financial obligations are met.
Here is how you can best prepare for an emergency.
A disaster preparedness plan is a general outline of how you and other members of your household intend to respond to the types of emergencies that are most likely to occur where you live, work, learn, or play. It can be impossible to prepare for every predicament, so you should formulate a plan that is applicable to a broad swathe of situations. This plan is intended to ensure the immediate safety of you and your loved ones in the event of a disaster.
You should assign responsibilities to the members of your household based on their capabilities. Plan for emergencies that are most likely to occur where you live, consider what you and your family need to do in the event you are separated during an emergency, and decide what you need to do in the event you need to evacuate to a safer area. Finally, ensure that you have a plan to contact each other after the emergency has passed.
Responding to an urgent situation takes up a lot of one’s attention, leaving little time to think about things like credit cards or student loan payments. It’s important to keep a list of these financial obligations as part of any disaster preparedness plan to make sure you are able to manage your finances while you recover from a crisis. Include any automatic payments so you remember when bills come due, in the event that your finances are stretched thin you may have to ask for extensions or adjustments to your payments.
Immediately following a disaster, you should consider contacting credit card companies, loan servicers, lenders, utilities, and any other entities to whom you may have bill payments due. In the event of an emergency, some companies will waive interest in late fees, allow you to stretch out or defer monthly payments, or provide other options to help you continue your payments even as you work on rebuilding following a disaster.
In the event that your home is damaged to the point that you can’t live in it, contact your utility companies to have them suspend your service since you won’t be using them while you rebuild.
Safeguard Personal DocumentsYou should make copies of personal documents that will are important to have easy access to following a disaster. This includes things such as Photo ID, Social Security information, birth certificates, insurance policies, military service records, Pet ID tags, tax statements, household information, and medical records. These documents should be stored in a safe place at a separate location from your home, such as a fireproof safe deposit box at your local bank.
You can also scan these documents and store them digitally; if you do so, be sure to keep them in a place that is both encrypted and password-protected with multifactor authentication. You do not want this information getting into the hands of hackers.
Take some time to survey your home and create a list of all the important personal and household valuables. Many types of insurance will cover your belongings in the event they are damaged inside of a home that you own or rent; be sure to check with your insurance provider so you understand exactly what is covered by your policy.
Scammers like to take advantage of the stress and confusion that follows a natural disaster or emergency. These scams range from fake disaster relief charities, impostor scams where the scammer pretends to be someone from FEMA or another government agency, employment scams looking for desperate people trying to rebuild after a disaster, and loan repayment scams.
Some simple rules you can follow to avoid being defrauded are:
You can find more about identifying and avoiding scams on our resource page about Fraud, Scams, and Phishing.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is responsible for responding to disasters and providing aid to those affected. If you have been affected by a natural disaster or other emergency, you can visit FEMA.gov for more information and resources to help you recover and rebuild.
By taking the time to plan a disaster response, you will be better prepared for emergencies and reduce the time it takes for you to rebuild your life. You can reach out to your friendly community bankers at New Tripoli Bank for help with things such as setting up an emergency fund, renting a safe deposit box, and identifying potential scams to ensure you are fully prepared for the next big emergency!
Jennifer Dietrich is a Deposit Operations Representative for New Tripoli Bank and has been working for the Bank since 2023. She spends her free time at the various sports fields around the area cheering on her son.
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