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Paul Spella Facebook Twitter LinkedIn In this story Flood of documents • Difficult to organize • Valuable to you • Off-site safety • Available immediately • Digital vaults’ cost • Security,
privacy important
Most everyone of a certain age has accumulated dozens if not hundreds of important documents:
Birth certificates, marriage licenses, passportsBonds, stock certificates, tax recordsAuto,home and life insurance paperwork; deeds; loan documents; vehicle titlesMilitary discharge papers, medical and funeral directivesVaccination cards, pet records and a host more.
Personal memorabilia and keepsakes are also part of the stash.
From time to time, you may want or need to share these records, even after your death. Family, close friends, caregivers, estate planners and lawyers may be on that list.
What you share with your spouse, kids and parents will surely differ from what your accountant or real estate agent needs to see.
That’s the idea behind digital vaults from start-ups including GoodTrust, Prisidio and Trustworthy. The companies let you store digital versions of important documents and sentimental items
in the cloud.
AARP and Prisidio recently partnered on an AARP-branded digital vault. Think of these vaults as a digital version of a safe deposit box, but a service that lets you determine who gets to see
each piece in that box and when each person gets to see it.
Vaults allow you to organize, find what you needDigital vaults can help you organize all of this stuff yourself, allowing you to gather sensitive and valuable papers from physical filing cabinets, shoeboxes and off-site storage.
As digital documents become more common, you may not even have paper versions of some financials. That means files could be scattered in online storage lockers such as Apple’s iCloud,
Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.
AARP membership add-onAARP and Prisidio have teamed up to offer a $20-a-year add-on to AARP’s regular $15 membership, the AARP Digital Vault, a secure online way to save and share your most important files.
“The metaphor for Trustworthy is the treasure map: Where do you go to find all the important things?” asks Nathaniel Robinson, Trustworthy’s founder and chief executive. “You might have a
safety deposit box at the local bank that has some things in it. But if no one knows it exists, they’re never going to find it or know how to access it.”
Prisidio’s co-founder and CEO, Glenn Shimkus, has a similar take: “What I want to do is help people gain control of their important information and documents, keep it safe, get it to others
securely and ultimately make sure nothing is lost when something happens to you.”