Note that some items, such as expensive jewelry, will likely need a special insurance rider to be covered up to their full value. With a home safe, you can access the contents any time you want.Īdditionally, anything stored in your home will be covered by your homeowners insurance, which is not always the case with safe deposit boxes. “Buy yourself your own big safe that is fireproof and put your possessions in it, because the banks fouled this up in the aftermath of the banking scandals.”īesides, safe deposit boxes aren’t terribly convenient: You have to get to the bank, and it has to be open when you need your items. “A bank would go insolvent, a branch would be purchased by somebody else, the banks would close and your possessions would go lost in space,” he says.

It’s well hidden and way too heavy for anyone to just walk out with.”Ĭlark says he used to recommend safety deposit boxes, but during the Great Recession, a lot of people lost their possessions when banks shut their doors. Instead, he says: “I keep valuables in a large fireproof safe. Money expert Clark Howard doesn’t like safe deposit boxes for exactly the reason described in the case above. Where To Put Your Valuables Instead of a Safe Deposit Box The man spent thousands of dollars in legal fees suing the bank over his losses but, five years later, had yet to get any sort of settlement, although the bank was able to locate some of his watches and return them to him. There are no federal laws governing the boxes no rules require banks to compensate customers if their property is stolen or destroyed.” “There are an estimated 25 million safe deposit boxes in America, and they operate in a legal gray zone within the highly regulated banking industry. The total value of the items? An estimated $10 million-plus! In 2014, he opened the box to find that his watches - along with some other valuables and documents he had in the box - were missing. That bank changed ownership many times over the years, eventually becoming a Wells Fargo. Why Safe Deposit Boxes Could Be a Bad IdeaĪ New York Times article tells the story of a New Jersey man who had kept his collection of rare watches in a safe deposit box at a local bank since 1983. If you have valuables or important documents stored in a safe deposit box at a bank or credit union, you should know that your items might not have the protection you think they do.

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