Safe At Home Alternatives For A Fireproof Safe

While owning a quality fireproof safe is the ultimate in protecting valuables like cash, coins, and documents that quality usually comes with a price. Even the less expensive safes are a couple of hundred dollars and fewer of us have the disposable cash to spend on a safe right now.

Setting a little money aside and building up enough to buy a safe should be high on the priority list. It is no argument that spending $150 for a home safe to protect your social security card, the box of replacement checks for your checkbook, and credit cards is nothing in comparison to what it would take to replace any of these items if they were stolen or lost. Not to mention the red tape involved with recovering any fraudulent activity if they were stolen.

In the meantime, there are some low and no cost methods you could employ until you are ready to install a hidden wall safe or floor safe in your basement.

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In addition to these 7 home burglary safety tips start thinking like a burglar to outsmart their limited time in your home. One of the first places burglars look for valuable items is the kitchen drawers, bedroom, and family or living rooms. The family rooms are usually the targets for items like TVs, game systems, and DVDs (hint: don't hide cash in DVD cases). The home office is another target for robbery of documents that could aide a burglar in identity theft.

Think about storing your valuables and documents in odd rooms like the laundry room, or stored with cleaning supplies. Storing some valuables in a box marked Christmas lights in the utility room of a basement is better than in some of the most common rooms that burglars hit first.

Inside of these rooms you can store envelopes or papers in places like taped on the underside of a drawer, inside a box of cereal. Some items can be wrapped in aluminum foil or wax paper and placed in the freezer. Marked as chicken of course!

If you look at most burglaries caught on video, you will find that all of the robberies last only a few minutes including the break-in itself. If this is known then you have the advantage of making it more difficult and less likely that they will look in these odd places for your cash and cards.

These are great ways to hide cash, small jewelry, and credit cards. If you haven't heard of them they are normal looking books (hard covers work the best) that are hollowed out in the center affording a small compartment for undetected storage.

A couple of notes about these book safes: First, never use the Bible as your safe. Crooks know that people will store cash in them. You should choose uninteresting book titles that not many people identify as a title that they must have in their library.

Also place it on your book shelf with similar looking book spines that blend well at first glance. And never tell anyone that you don't want to know it's there.

You have two options in having your own book safe. You can make your own out of a book that you may already have. Here is a video link on how to do it yourself. Or secondly, if you want a quality made book safe here are some inexpensive ones that are professionally punched for cleaner edges.

Here is a quick tutorial on how to make your own book safe. It's a good option but if you get it wrong; you're not fooling anyone and your stuff might as well have a big blinking arrow on it that says "STEAL ME."

While still within the budget, these professionally made safes are meant to fool the most keen burglar. Consider this method to tide you over until you make the plunge for a fireproof safe.

These are great devices to store cash or jewels. Basically they are ordinary household product containers that at first glance look like they belong under the kitchen sink or in the refrigerator.

Available types are shaving cream cans, furniture polish cans, and even soda or beer cans. You will want to buy the ones that have name brands on the cans themselves like Pledge, Barbisol, or Coca-Cola.

The cans have false bottoms that screw on and off giving you a hollowed out area for storage. Some of the more quality devices are weighted to simulate a full can of product.

You can make these hidden safes yourself too, but we have found that once you buy the necessary materials to construct it the cost is close to the same as buying ones professionally made. You also run the risk of not making the precision cuts needed unless you have the proper tools. Here are links to buy and construct one yourself and for you to choose which is better for you.

Does the job but the quality is definitely not the same as the manufactured ones.