Protect your Important Documents by Digitising them….
While shares have been held in dematerialised form for many years now, bonds, NCDs, mutual fund units and Sovereign Gold Bonds have option to hold in demat mode in the last couple of years.
The benefits of holding your financial assets in electronic, dematerialised form are many. Firstly, they are safer that way and you need not worry about theft, forgery, loss or misuse. Secondly, owning assets in electronic form also makes them portable and non-location specific.
Natural Calamities like Floods/Earthquake may damage the property documents stored in your bank locker/steel cupboard. While Riots, a man created calamity, can damage your important documents. But acts of god simply do not affect the dematerialised investments in the safe-keeping of NSDL or CDSL. Thridly, with the depositories now providing investors with a monthly consolidated account statement, you get a single-window snapshot of your asset allocation and the marked-to-market value of your holdings with all demat assets. This makes it easy to track your portfolio.
In fact, given the advantages, it makes a lot of sense to migrate from the physical to electronic form for hard assets as well. This means switching from jewellery to demat Sovereign Gold Bonds and storing scanned copies of your property documents as a backup.
The DigiLocker facility, which rolled out by the Government of India, can become your default locker for all key papers (https://digilocker.gov.in/faq.php).
The facility is designed to store a variety of documents issued by different government departments – from your College marksheets and degree to your driving licence and RC book – in electronic format in a digital account that is password protected.
No need to mention storing important document digitally improve safety of you document and is right step to protect you financially.