This happened to the nearby branch of the same bank. They put a note on the door which said, if you want to access your safe deposit box send a message to such-and-such email; they will get back to you with an appointment time.
Fortunately I had be prewarned that this was going to happen, so I closed my box a week before.
You joke about priceless jewelry you own but never wear. We are a very ordinary couple but my wife got several very expensive gold pieces as wedding presents. It’s traditional in her culture. So we really do have priceless jewelry never worn.
Also, some papers might be a record in a computer somewhere, yet still hard to retrieve. For example, my parents keep their naturalization papers in a sdb. They rarely have to show them, but when they do it’s extremely important. I can’t imagine the hoops and bureaucracy it would take to replace them.
You mean you aren’t Mr. & Mrs. John Wick with (4) 9mm Sigs, 2 (his and hers) double shoulder holsters, 20 magazines, 2 full ammo cans, and 100 Continental Hotel Gold Coins?
Life in the Shire will seem quite dull now…
My gun safe is very large, very heavy, and bolted to the floor. If someone really wanted to I’m sure they could defeat the electronic locking mechanism, but burglars are looking for a quick snatch and grab, not a 45 minute job that requires them to go into my crawl space and unbolt the gun safe and then carry it out the front door without anyone noticing. I sure don’t need a SDB, and I doubt anyone under 70 around here has one. FWIF, our two local banks don’t offer them (we live in a small town).
A gentleman of my acquaintance had several large, heavy, expensive gun safes. His house burned down, and nothing in the gun safes, including the guns, survived.
In his case, he died of injuries sustained in the fire and no original copy of his will could be located. (The lawyer he was known to have used had retired and couldn’t be found either.) The estranged spouse of one of his stepkids finally found a photocopy in their files; the family was able to obtain permission from the court to probate that photocopy. It helped that nobody in the family objected to the contents thereof, but it was pretty much mere chance that any version of any will could be found.
In some areas, you can file a copy of your will with the court or the county clerk in advance, and it stays sealed in their files until somebody shows up with a copy of your death certificate. This is jurisdiction-dependent, however. Also, Colorado is not the only jurisdiction in which a safe deposit box can be accessed specifically to locate a will; Kansas law for example permits the bank employees to deposit the will with the district court if no executor shows up. Talk to the lawyer who prepared the will about what s/he recommends for your area.
I’ve never met a lawyer who wants any part of safe-keeping wills, so I’m going to assume that’s also jurisdiction-specific.
My backup provider will keep extra copies of files for an extra fee, which would also protect against that. Which isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with having a SDB, but, like the general trend of the thread, there are probably solutions for most uses that work fine if one isn’t available.
Thought this might be of interest to some people here.