Financial Information

Think for a moment about how much of your life is stored on electronic devices? Think about this for a few moments. Telephone numbers and contact details on your mobile phone, email messages and addresses on your laptop and all your most recent family pictures on your digital camera.

You may also have a PDA (personal digital assistant) on which you may have stored all of your contact details. Consider for a moment what would be the impact on your life of losing the data stored on these gadgets?

If we just consider your mobile telephone there is a high probability that, sooner or later, your phone will become damaged, lost or stolen. Last year alone over 200,000 mobile telephones went through washing machines, over 55,000 were left in taxis and 600,000 were dropped down toilets. Have you recently backed up the data from your phone sim card. At the very least you should consider some cheap mobile phone insurance. While this can’t protect your valuable data it is an affordable way to get a replacement.

Like moble phones, cameras are small, portable and easily damaged or lost. Modern, small, lightweight cameras are particularly susceptible to loss and damage. They can be bumped around inside luggage, dropped and have heavy item placed on top of them. Like mobile phones there is no way that camera insurance can compensate for the loss of images stored on the camera, but it is an affordable way to get yourself a replacement if your camera is damaged or lost.

For me my laptop computer is absoluted vital to both my work and my personal life. Luckily for me I rarely need to take it outside of my home around 17% of laptop users routinely take their laptops when travelling, making them vulnerable to theft and damage. So how much of your laptop data is safely backed up to some form of secure media? I actually use my laptop as my backup storage for my telephone data and camera images so if I lost my laptop it would be a complete disaster.

As for other gadgets, some laptop insurance can’t ensure that your laptop will not be stolen or damaged but it can make it less financially painful to get a replacement.

I strongly recommend that you back up your vital data from all of the electronic devices where you currently have it stored. Then get yourself some affordable gadget insurance so that if the worst does occur at least you can get a replacement quickly and without any major expense.