This is what I do too, but be warned about “fire proof” - a fire that results in the total loss of your house will create enough heat for enough time that fireproof gun safes and smaller fireproof lockboxes will be destroyed, or even if not, their contents will get hot enough to combust anyway.
A bank safe deposit box offers a different security profile that’s probably more robust against fire because banks burn less often than houses.
It’s probably not practical to really be robust against fire without being buried several feet deep.
While the fire resulted in the total loss of the house it was actually the water from the fire department not the heat that did proportionally more damage.
As a mental model you shouldn’t think of it as “what if my house burns down?” so much as “what if nice strangers roll up to my windows and chainsaw through my roof and spray 50,000 gallons of water in here?”
Yes everything in the mechanical room melted but everything in the rest of the house got hot, smoky, soaked and then moldy.
For root of trust materiel like social security cards, cash, passports put in a ziplock bag in a fireproof, waterproof safe. But for other storage I use clear “Ezy Storage” brand stackable 50L tubs labeled with Homebox QR codes. In the US, Target and Home Depot frequently stock them. I am very anti black and yellow tubs.
The majority of work post-fire goes to itemizing your house inventory for insurance. Even cataloging all your bathroom’s soaps by brand name rather than generic can make $100 difference. Multiply that by 500x different things.
From a threat model perspective I look at rooms from a “what would be salvageable in here if I emptied a swimming pool’s worth of water from some fire sprinklers”. Furniture and TVs are easy to replace. Other stuff less so.
We did that with major hail damage a few years ago. I learned that in a disaster, you should count on everything being junk, and you're lucky if you can salvage anything. We also learned the value of itemized lists.
1500/piece for 20 junk windows I was building a greenhouse with that I dug out of the trash the year before. $250 for a bird feeder because they couldn't find one outside of specialty stores. $40k instead of 10k for a new roof on the shed because it was heavier gauge metal than standard.
Exact replacements can be expensive, but you need to make sure your insurance has 100% replacement instead of adjusted for age or like-kind replacements.
After that experience, we itemized EVERYTHING in the house with make, model, serial number, and color. It was a bitch to get set up, but took the value of our home contents from around 75k to over 250k for exact replacements.
Copies of these records along with our master password for our keepass database are in two bank deposit boxes about 45 minutes apart. For $50/year we can sleep easy.
We have keys. In the event those are lost or destroyed, they will provide access to an approved list of individuals and drill the lock for $40.
Also they're small town banks, so that makes it easier as well. We don't really need to worry about providing ID, but if we did and couldn't access ID or something like that, we have four other people listed with access, one of which lives hours away in case of a disaster impacting everyone else on the list. They don't have keys but could get into it for us. So for a few hundred dollars, we're set and insured for the declared value of the contents of the boxes (250k max for another $15/year) if the banks are both destroyed as well!
Bank vault can be key+combination (eg three letters) or dual key or others. For example in a dual key: one key from the bank and one key being your own key.
If a key is lost, you go and prove your identity (easier if any bank employee is familiar with you) and ask for a new key. A date is set and a locksmith shall come, you are next to him and next to the bank employee while he uses the bank's key and lockpicks your lock. Then he configures it for a new key (or replace the lock).
It's cost you something like $300 or whatever.
Source: been next to locksmith opening a bank vault, twice, in two different countries. Once for a bank belonging to a deceased family member (we had the key but not the three-letters combination) and once not because I lost my key but because the bank's lock (on my vault) went defective.
So it's not "my key from the my vault at the bank melted during a housefire, so I can never access my vault at the bank anymore" nor is it "I forgot my three-letters combination, so until the end of the universe that bank vault shall stay locked".
In general, identity (the bank checking who you are) is often involved in regular unlocking and there will be an identity-only recovery procedure that will work even if you lose your usual credential (key, passcode, card, whatever). This may involve drilling a lock and the bill for that.
My insurance agent has recommended that once a year or so I carefully walk through the house with a video recorder, opening every cabinet and drawer and tool box and so on. It's easier than constructing a detailed inventory, but gives you the raw data you need to construct one in the unlikely even that you need it.
The plastic used in the black/yellow brand is brittle when it gets cold — it breaks upon simple impact/sliding. Also, you cannot see inside them without opening the lid.
The clear plastic is usually a bit thicker, and more rubberized — it'll still break, but more difficultly.
As to why they're against them, I don't know their reason, but there used to be only one size of tote. There there was big and small. And then, for some fxcking reason, they decided to make ones that were roughly as big as the big ones. Just enough that you have to take half a second to re-eyeball-ruler measure them. But in isolation, if you've got one in front of you, you can't know if it'll tetris properly with another one until they're side-by-side and it turns out they're not.
In December 2025, items worth an estimated €30 million were stolen from a Sparkasse bank in the Gelsenkirchen suburb of Buer, Germany. The thieves used a large drill to break into the bank's underground vault and proceeded to crack over 3,000 safe deposit boxes.
Don’t need events that extreme. Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them. It can be hard to find articles about them because they don’t make the news like the more remarkable incidents do. Examples of boring security box failures (but that were noteworthy in other ways so they did make the news): Jennifer Morsch, Roberta Glassman, Lianna Sarabekyan (multiple customers affected), Philip Poniz, Wells Fargo in Cape Coral FL, Wells Fargo Katy TX (many customers affected, blamed on road construction down the street), lots of individual stories where banks just totally stopped following their own procedures on ID checking and logging.
The vast majority of these don’t make the news because there’s no proof there was even anything inside the box in the first place so anyone could be lying.
> Mr. Pluard, who tracks legal filings and news reports, estimates that around 33,000 boxes a year are harmed by accidents, natural disasters and thefts.
> Oddly, the bank returned to him five watches that weren’t his. “They were the wrong color, the wrong size — totally different than what I had,” Mr. Poniz said. “I had no idea where they came from.”
> Regular branch banks have stuff go missing from the safety deposit boxes shockingly regularly. The locks aren’t particularly secure and various people are able to access them.
My late wife had a safe deposit box in the Almaden Valley (San Jose) branch of US Bank. Her key to the box was nowhere to be found. So I had to get the box drilled open.
This would normally require a hefty fee. But the branch was moving to a new location, so they invited customers to make an appointment to show up a Saturday with proper ID for a lock drilling party.
I showed my ID and the death certificate, and we went into the safe to have the lock drilled.
But there was no real drilling involved. The locksmith had a little handheld gadget that she pushed into the lock, gave it a little twist, and the door came right open.
The ironic part? All that was in there were a few pieces of costume jewelry, worth maybe $50 in total.
She was paying more than that per year for the box rental, and if I'd had to pay for the "drilling" it would probably be more than that.
I was with my mother when she went to close her safe deposit box. Her key did not work, so after checking her ID (could be fake), they used a tool that very quickly removed the lock. We were then left alone in the camera-less room with all of the other boxes and the tool...
Sure... if you don't have a spouse, leave it with a sibling. I put my Bitcoin key in my brother's safe. And if you don't have a sibling or parent or best friend, you can usually rent a locker at a bank.
A real innovation from the Bitcoin world! There are several physical password store systems that they have suggested for this kind of use case. The simplest is basically using a nail to punch out a password onto a piece of sheet metal.
Only thing about safe deposit boxes - make sure that things needed in the event of your death, especially your will, are not there.
The bank will seal the box as soon as they discover you are dead, and require a court order. Without a will, the executor will be whatever statutory person your state calls for.
Is there a better class of safe one could use that might be more successful even if not a guarantee? F/e even with a safe deposit box, one might still have some lower-tier items that would be impractical to store in one but you might want to do better than just out in the open.
do you store stuff in a bank? could you tell me more about it? my account gives me access to one for free and been meaning to put a yubikey there for a while but never have
I do. I have a small safe deposit box in my local branch for about $1 a year.
It's great if you want to store some documents. But don't expect _real_ security. It's guarded by a minimum-wage employee, and the keys are usually laughably insecure. Banks know this, so they cap their liability for the loss of the deposit box at around $1000.
So don't even think about storing gold bars there, like they do in movies.
There _are_ companies that provide safe storage for high-value items, but they are pretty exotic.
What if you RAID01 it, so you have four safety deposit boxes, two with the first half of your password, two with the second half of your password? Then no snoop at a particular bank would be able to get your password, but also if one or two go missing, the password won't be lost. And you just check all four boxes once or twice a year to make sure everything is good.
My (large) bank is yanking their safety deposit boxes out. They let subscribers know that they have, like, 1 or 2 years to go. They're doing it across the branches. They basically feel it's not worth the liability any more, and the way it was presented to me, it's not just them, but other banks are also doing (or at least considering) this.
Things we take for granted. When my father passed, I was digging stuff out of SDBs that he had for decades.
Maybe not safe for valuables. What about stuff that has no value to anyone else? I'm not a villain from Ocean's Eleven, no one is stealing my passwords to break into my elaborate safe.
What I found out when I was burgled, was that they don't care. I had nothing valuable in my firesafe but they still took it wholesale. I found some papers from it drifting around outside afterwards like they had dumped it out. But not my passport or SSN card. The lock was even broken so they could have just opened it to see that and saved themselves the lift. But again, they don't care.
A bank safe deposit box offers a different security profile that’s probably more robust against fire because banks burn less often than houses.
It’s probably not practical to really be robust against fire without being buried several feet deep.