Financial Statements – A Print Out Can Make Your Life Easier

March 21, 2011

I was at LAX flying home to Northern California about 3 hours after Southwest Airlines computers went down and stayed down the other day.  Let me explain what this meant:

  • No boarding passes could be printed
  • No check-in at the Kiosks
  • No ability to access their website
  • No bag tags
  • Everything went manual with paper boarding passes filled out by agents

Can you imagine the interesting situation at the Southwest counters?  First of all, I have to say they handled it extremely well – props to Southwest Airlines.  Their agents were obviously trained for emergency procedures and handled everything with ease, class and with grace under pressure.

Now consider the passengers checking in and imagine who the fortunate ones were.  It was not the travelers with their iPhones and Blackberry’s trying to access the website to prove they were on a flight since they didn’t even have their confirmation number – the website was down.  It was the old school travelers who had a copy of their itinerary with them or printed out their boarding passes.  Fortunately, I was one of the latter with a printed itinerary – my husband makes fun of my penchant for organization and calls my “on the go” travel file a “pee-chee folder” from grade school.

Without it, I would have been in trouble.  But since I did have it, I was able to check my bag and check in for my flight in record time (considering it was an emergency).  After going through an unusually rigorous TSA security screening (this time I got the pat down which I referred to later as the full body massage), I was able to get on the plane arm in arm with an older gentleman from Atlanta since we both claimed to be #A29.  Southwest handled the whole thing beautifully.

What would happen if your financial institution had a black out or worse a virus that wiped out your account?  Science fiction?  I don’t know but yesterday brought to light how dependent we are on technology.

I felt uncomfortable when the whole financial world went paperless.  Though I love to be “green” and save paper.  Consider what would happen if you needed to prove that you indeed had a bank account or a brokerage account and the web site was down.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have a copy of your statement handy?

Consider printing your year-end statements from your banks, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, whole life insurance policies, and 401(k)s and keeping them in a folder.  This way you have your account numbers and your year end balances in case something around you crashes.

A print out made my life a lot easier.  It could make your life a whole lot easier too.  You never know.