A lot of people choose to keep cash in their homes for many reasons. While you may argue that you feel the safest when your cash is closest to you, keeping your cash at home is prone to a lot of problems, one of them being accidental fires.
There are many cool solutions and hacks to protect the cash you keep with you at home from fire. You can get a safe, keep it in your car, get a fireproof bag, use the freezer, keep it in the toilet tank, bury it, or, of course, keep it in person.
In most cases, a fireproof bag, like this one, put inside a quality fireproof box is sufficient protection. Both can be picked up on Amazon.
We will discuss each of these methods in this article. We will also look at some alternative and indirect ways of protecting your cash from fire. Let us start by looking at 6 different ways you can protect the cash you keep at home from fire:
1. Get a Safe
The most popular solution to protecting your cash from fire is to invest in a nice safe. You can also use the safe to store your documents and other valuables. Most home safes are fire and waterproof, so if the worst should happen, you will be able to recover all of your cash and documents.
If you look in the market, you will find plenty of fireproof home safes of all shapes and sizes. I actually prefer to use a locking box since they are much easier to move around when necessary. Here is the one that I recommend, found on Amazon.
2. Keep It in the Freezer
A freezer is a popular place for storing cash, and it will protect your money from fires. You are better off storing your money in some sort of chest freezer away from the kitchen (since most fires start at the kitchen). Also, this method isn’t robbery-proof since using the freezer to hide one’s valuables is a very common trick. Most robbers will know just where to look.
3. Keep the Cash in Your Car
This will make perfect sense to some of you. But to those who live and drive in high-crime areas, this won’t come off as the brightest idea. For most safe and quiet suburban households, the simplest and the surest way to protect your cash from fire is to simply keep it in your car. This solution, however, is only effective so long as you keep your car parked outdoors.
If you’re worried about your car getting stolen, here’s a neat little mathematical illustration that could change your mind:
According to government data, in 2017, there was one house fire every 88 seconds, one general structure fire every 63 seconds, and one outdoor fire every 51 seconds. That roughly amounts to 2 fires every minute. In contrast, there was one car stolen every 40 seconds. That’s 1.5 cars per minute.
This illustrates that it is more likely that you will lose your money in a fire than lose it because your car gets stolen.
4. Get a Fireproof Bag
This is a cheap and simple alternative to a fireproof safe. You can store all of your cash and other valuables in a fireproof bag so that should the worst happen, you can run out and save yourself first and then simply recover the bag and its contents later. Here is the one that I recommend. It’s by far the best one I’ve ever seen.
5. Keep It in the Toilet Tank
We’re slowly getting to the more outlandish solutions. But this is a very effective solution, nonetheless. Toilet tanks don’t get damaged in a fire. So if you put your cash in a sealable plastic bag and then put the bag in the toilet tank, you can rest assured that your cash will remain safe.
This can be an everyday storage solution since your toilet tank is well within your reach and is easily accessible.
6. Keep It on Your Person
This is, of course, a no-brainer. But this method is not effective if you have a lot of cash you need to protect. Keeping small amounts of cash in your person ensures that it survives the fire when you run out to protect your life.
7. Bury the Money
Now, this may seem like a bit of an extreme thing to do. But the surest way to prevent your cash from burning from an accidental fire is to keep it buried underground. Of course, you can’t just bury it in the earth. Get a nice plastic bag with a good seal and put your money in it. Then bury the plastic bag on the ground.
Of course, this method would only be practical if you’re looking to save some money for later. You wouldn’t want to go digging every time you need some cash.
Do You Need to Worry About Fire?
If you think it is highly unlikely that you will ever experience a fire at your place, you are most likely correct. But that’s exactly how accidents work. They are very rare, so it is easy to believe they’re not real. But when they happen, they are very real.
It is reported that more than half of America has no place on how they will deal with a disaster. But in 2017 alone, there were 1,319,500 reported cases of fires in the United States. Let that sink in.
It is better to be safe than sorry. If you have a good amount of cash that you intend to keep with you in your house, you must take the necessary precautions to protect this cash in case there is an accidental fire. Perhaps this cash could serve as your backup after the fire. We shared several effective solutions in this article.
Related How to Build a Fireproof Safe | Constructing vs Re-Purposing.
Banks, Digital Currencies & Gold
We simply could not do an article on protecting cash without mentioning banks. If you have some personal reason why you don’t want to deposit your cash in a bank, that is up to you. But this should be the preferred solution for most people as it is also the most effective.
Banks have always been a great place to store your money and other valuables. They have a better safety system than most homes, and even if the worst should happen, you will most likely be compensated for it.
Most banks even offer interest for the cash you deposit in them. Not only will you be protecting your cash, but you will also actually be adding to it over time.
Digital currencies are the future. The whole world is accelerating toward achieving a cashless economy. Most transactions today can already be done digitally. So storing your money in a digital format would not only be an effective way to protect it from accidents like fire, but it would also be a much more convenient option for you as you can have it in your person at all times in the form of a card or online account.
Finally, investing in gold is another indirect but effective way of protecting your cash from fire. You can always sell the gold back to receive cash. This is a very effective solution, especially if you’re looking to store cash for a long time. Cash will eventually lose value due to inflation. But this won’t happen with gold.
Closing Thoughts
While you should always try and keep your money in the bank, there are plenty of ways you can keep your cash safe in your own home. In this article, we looked at six practical ways you can protect your cash from fire. Some of the solutions may have seemed like they were a bit out there, but they are effective nonetheless. We hope you found them helpful.
For more info, don’t miss How to Store Large Amounts of Cash (With Locations to Avoid).
Jim James is a published author and expert on the outdoors and survivalism. Through avid research and hands-on experience, he has gained expertise on a wide variety of topics. His time spent at college taught him to become really good at figuring out answers to common problems. Often through extensive trial and error, Jim has continued to learn and increase his knowledge of a vast array of topics related to firearms, hunting, fishing, medical topics, cooking, games/gaming, and other subjects too numerous to name.
Jim has been teaching people a wide variety of survivalism topics for over five years and has a lifetime of experience fishing, camping, general survivalism, and anything in nature. In fact, while growing up, he often spent more time on the water than on land! He has degrees in History, Anthropology, and Music from the University of Southern Mississippi. He extensively studied Southern History, nutrition, geopolitics, the Cold War, and nuclear policy strategies and safety as well as numerous other topics related to the content on survivalfreedom.com.