In my quest to become a fully functional (horrors!) adult (yes, I’m a late bloomer. Why do you ask?), I’ve decided to look into getting a safety deposit box for various bits of paperwork.
Trouble is, my money lives with a local credit union that doesn’t have safety deposit boxes. It looks like Bank of America wants you to become a customer to rent one, and I’ve heard a few stories about BoA that make me a little leery of them. And WaMu doesn’t have any information on their website about the things that I can seem to find, unless my search-fu has gone and given clean out.
What next? Do I break down and sign up with BoA just to rent a box?
Also… how much do safety deposit boxes cost? How much can you fit in one unit? Anything else I’ve forgotten to ask about?
Safe deposit boxes appear to be a loss leader for a lot of banks. IIRC, there exist companies that specialize in this service, but I would think that the cost would be higher.
The smallest are 2" high x 5" wide, but only one company ever made them IIRC. Average smallest will be 3" x 5", but I’ve no clue on what the charges are these days-I just installed and drilled them if you didn’t pay the rent.
3 x 5 x 22 inches seems to be the quoted standard for the smallest size of safe deposit box, but I think that’s the size of the space itself, not the metal box that goes inside it and contains your valuables. That is smaller, especially in the height (3 in) dimension. I can tell you that mine will not quite accomodate a 5 x 5.5 inch CD-RW jewel case, even diagonally, should you get the bright idea of keeping a set of backups from your computer in the box. Papers and so on, which it was designed for, are fine, though they obviously have to be folded. If you use one of those USB housings for a laptop drive for backup purposes, that will fit easily.
The reason for the removable metal box is that they expect to have a teller go in with you (it takes your key and the teller’s to open it), then you can go to a little privacy booth with the box, and call the teller again when you want to put it back. The box for any I’ve had is hinged in the middle of the top so that this long “flap” opens on it.
The larger sizes will be taller and wider, but still the same 22 inch depth, as they are just larger doors in the same vault. The place you’re renting one at should be able to show you the boxes to see what size meets your needs.
I’ve only ever had one free from the same place that had my bank account. Prices for a small one should be something like $20/year, though.
If you don’t plan on moving any time soon, a big fireproof safe is a nice thing to have at home. After we got robbed, my folks got one to store our valuables in. We got it “cheap” at a warehouse store, because the cost of the membership was less than the cost of tax would have been on the safe (members shop tax-free).
They’re a pain in the butt to move around, though. Ours is about 2’x3’x2’ and it’s the heaviest item in our house. They can be bolted to the floor, too.
A fireproof box is also an option, but do note that although they will keep your docs nice and safe in a fire or a flood, they are easy to pick up and move if anyone were to rob you. I don’t remember if my folks’ fire proof box got stolen in our robbery or if we got one afterwards.
Good bet you won’t get robbed, so a fire proof box is a great option for you if you’re looking to save money.
Don’t know if this is the case in the U.S., but in Canada the annual rent for a safe deposit box is tax-deductible, if you use it to store any income-earning documents. There’s no requirement that the income be over a certain amount, so if you rent a box here and put a $100 Canada Savings Bond in it, the rent is deductible.
I think the institution you mentioned charges too much for their safety deposit boxes. I had a box with them for years until last December I got the bill for this year’s rent. I immediately went elsewhere. Look around to see if you can do better.
Box rates seem to vary a lot even within the same general area.
We had the small box from BoA for years, in a St. Louis suburb, and it was about $40 a year. The same sized box with Missouri Bank, 50 miles West, is $20
Funny, I’ve been trying to join the adult community in the same way recently.
My bank, WaMu, doesn’t have any available boxes in a convenient branch in either Queens or Manhattan. I didn’t bother calling the branches that aren’t subway accessable.
The only other bank I checked, Chase, had boxes, but would only rent to account holders. The Chase credit card wasn’t good enough.
If anyone knows of a bank that allows you to just pay rent without an account, I’d love to hear about it. I’ve got a branch of just about everything right near home.
We got one at a small local bank (which later got gobbled by a larger regional bank, then later on by one of the big North Carolina-based banks when it moved into the area). We did have a small account at the bank when we opened it but I know they’d have rented it to us even w/o an account.
A year or so back, they started charging a fee if the account was below a certain level (300 bucks, I think). We thought about closing the account - but it turned out the rent on the box would have doubled if we’d done that. From 75 dollars to 150 a year, or something like that. We bumped up the account balance instead.
We don’t want to do the fireproof box option (though that’s not a bad thing to have, for papers you might need to have ready access to such as your will, as the bank has to seal the SD box if you die), mainly because we keep a few things in there that would not be replaceable, and could be stolen if the house got burgled.
I’d definitely recommend checking out some of the smaller banks, who might be a bit hungrier for your business. Failing that, if you really need a box and have to go to one of the big ones, do what we did and open up the smallest-possible savings account there. I wonder what they’d do if you did that and then closed your account… hmmmm… Would they make you clean out the box?
Rather than forcing you to close the SD box rental, they could impose an outrageous fee schedule for those without current accounts, such that you’d leave anyway.