()– Couldn’t find your birth certificate when it was needed. Maybe it was your tax records from the past seven years that were lost by the IRS?

Think back to the panic that accompanied the first panic, and how it turned out if you had to navigate through government bureaucracy looking for copies. Then consider whether it is time to honor your promises about organizing important financial and family documents. Remember, summer is over and one can only take so much sun and heat while waiting for the fall lineup to be cancelled.

If you want to organize, you must decide whether or not you are ready to embrace the 21st-century in the same manner as your now-ubiquitous smartphone. “vintage”You can pay for a bank security or locked fireproof box that is kept in your closet.

However, it is worth noting that the online storage service was offered by Barron’s magazine before Fidelity Investments introduced it officially a year ago. FidSafe — Get it? “Fid Safe”Five stars for being what it was called “the first cloud-based safe deposit box we’ve seen that’s secure enough to organize everything from financial statements, insurance policies, and real estate records to a will, IRA beneficiaries, and even passwords.”

You don’t need to be Fidelity customer in order to use it. Your approach to getting things in order, regardless of how they are stored, should be the same.

* Start by identifying the documents you need to keep, which can be a cleansing experience unto itself.

* Separate them by category. You might not be required all 10Some experts recommend adding things such as “medical history”And “legal documents”A good place to start is with more basic financial topics.

* Tell a trusted family member or friend where everything is. “Having an effective system in place cannot exist in a vacuum,”Andrew Peterson, FidSafe vice president and product manger, notes.

FidSafe’s end-to-end encryption is what makes it stand out in security terms. Your documents are scrambled while they travel, while you upload them, as well as on the site’s servers.

This alone is quite 21st-century. There is also up to 5GB storage available, which allows you to store a lot of material (including video from home upgrades that you wish to preserve for insurance purposes). You can also add trusted contacts such as family members and advisors to share documents.

If you don’t care about being able to access all your information from anywhere using an iOS app or web browser, there’s always the fireproof box in your wardrobe.

However, unlike FidSafe the box will not automatically transfer your documents after your death to a designated recipient of your choosing. This ensures that loved ones are spared from the trauma FidSafe’s creator claimed he tried to avoid. “People shared stories like, ‘My dad died, and my mom doesn’t know where anything is,’ and vice versa.”