Financial Emergency Preparedness: What Happens After You Pack the Bag?

When wildfire smoke settles over your community for days at a time, it has a way of making emergency preparedness feel a lot less theoretical.

But wildfires are only one example.

A major ice storm can knock out power for days. Spring flooding can force people out of their homes. A severe storm can damage property overnight. 

And sometimes the emergency is more personal—a sudden illness, an accident or something else that changes your plans very quickly.

Those moments usually get us thinking about the practical things first.
Where are the passports? Do we have medication packed? What would we take with us? Where would we go?

All important questions. But there’s another one that tends to come a little later:

What happens financially after you leave the house?

Packing an emergency bag helps you get out the door. It doesn’t tell you how you’ll pay for ten nights in a hotel, what happens if you’re out of your home for six months, whether your insurance will cover temporary living expenses or where you’ll access money while everything is being sorted out. These are exactly the kinds of practical financial questions Smith Rogers considers part of preparing for risk.

Financial Emergency Planning Starts Before the Emergency

You can’t wait until something happens to pack the emergency bag. 

Financial planning works much the same way.

You don’t need to spend every Tuesday evening preparing for the next natural disaster. You do need to know what you would do if life suddenly stopped operating normally.

Start with some very practical questions.

• Do you have money you can access quickly without having to sell an investment at an inconvenient time? 
• Could you comfortably cover a hotel, meals, transportation and other unexpected expenses for several days or weeks? 
• Do you know what your home insurance covers for temporary living expenses? 
• Who is your insurance contact? 
• Could you find your policy information quickly?
• If an illness or injury affected your ability to work, what income protection do you have in place?

These aren’t particularly exciting financial conversations. They become considerably more interesting when you suddenly need the answers.

Know Where Your Important Financial Information Is

Know where your insurance policies, identification, account information and other important financial documents are kept. Make sure the appropriate people in your family know too. Make sure there are copies in your emergency bag, make sure you have designated a trusted contact person and you have shared your digital access with someone you trust in case they need to access accounts on your behalf. 

To do this, you need an organized system, secure copies where appropriate and a clear understanding of who needs access to what.

We regularly hear from people after something happens close to home — a relative dies, someone becomes ill or another family experiences an emergency—and suddenly the insurance policy they haven’t looked at in years moves to the top of the list. 

It’s human nature. 

Things tend to feel more urgent when they happen close to us. 

You don’t have to wait for that reminder.

Who Would You Call During a Financial Emergency?

If you had to leave your home tomorrow, there are probably a few calls you’d make quickly: your family, your property insurance provider and, ideally, your financial advisor. 

That last call is where having an advisor who already knows you can make a meaningful difference.

They should understand your financial situation, what can be accessed quickly and how one decision could affect another.

You’re not calling a 1-800 number and explaining your financial life from the beginning while sitting in a hotel lobby.

You’re calling someone who already knows your situation and can help answer the question you actually care about:

Are we going to be okay?

That personal access is something Smith Rogers sees as part of the value of advice, not simply having a financial plan on paper, but having a real person available when you need an answer.

A Financial Plan Should Help When Life Doesn’t Go to Plan

We spend a lot of time planning for the things we want to happen: retirement, travel, helping our children, selling a business or leaving an estate.

A good financial plan also needs to account for the possibility that life may have other ideas.

We can’t rebuild your house. We can’t prevent an illness or make an emergency disappear.

But we can help you understand the financial decisions that come next.

When life becomes more complicated, that’s when having comprehensive advice, and someone who already understands the bigger picture, can become particularly valuable. 

And ideally, we’ve had those conversations long before you need to make the call.

Not sure how financially prepared you would be if something unexpected happened? Get in touch with us or visit our website to learn more about our team and how we can help.

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