5 foolproof ways to keep your gold jewellery safe

If keeping your gold at home is not an option, then you should consider storing it in a bank locker.

A lot of women in the UAE have a considerable amount of gold jewellery, which is often left lying around their homes. Although the UAE is generally seen to be a safe country, it's important to protect your gold against theft, loss and other potential risks. We have shortlisted some tried and tested ways to keep your gold safe.

Get home contents insurance
While most of us take out insurance to protect our other assets such as cars, we often don't give much thought to doing the same for our gold items. Many people don't realise how much their gold is actually worth or just don't see the risks clearly. One of the easiest and most effective ways to protect your gold is to get home insurance. Whenever home insurance is mentioned, the building or structure of our home immediately springs to mind. However, that's just one of the three primary types of home insurance. Everything you keep inside your home, including gold, can be protected through home contents insurance. Make sure you declare the accurate value of your gold while signing up for the policy and keep proof of purchase. Then, in case of theft or damage, you will be covered for the value of your gold.

. and personal belongings insurance
The other type of home insurance that can help you in keeping your gold items safe is personal belongings insurance. It covers all declared items that you carry around with you. You should definitely get personal belongings insurance to protect the gold jewellery you wear while you are away from home. However, make sure the same items are not listed in both your home contents insurance and personal belongings insurance policies. Doing so will remove duplication, which increases your premium unnecessarily. So, if you have gold that is always at home, it should be included in your home contents insurance, and you should only include the gold that you sometimes wear out in your personal belongings insurance policy.

Store it in a depository or bank locker
If keeping your gold at home is not an option, then you should consider storing it in a bank locker. Try to get a locker at a bank near your home because you might want to take out your gold jewellery for parties and other occasions frequently. You can even share a locker with your family members. Most banks provide lockers of different sizes, so you can save money by getting a small locker. You can cram a lot of your gold jewellery into a locker by putting it in without the bulky boxes it usually comes in. Another option for people with large quantities of gold is to store it in depositories, which are private storage facilities. Depositories may even enable you to store your gold overseas.

Buy a high-quality safe
Bank lockers are not the ideal solution for protecting small gold items such as rings, necklaces and earrings that you wear regularly. Keeping a few essential gold items at home can help you avoid multiple trips to the bank locker every week. In addition to home contents insurance and personal belongings insurance, an effective way to protect the gold you keep at home is to get a safe. Consider buying a high-quality safe that's not only difficult to break but also fireproof. Be sure to anchor it in a hidden location. Some people even keep a decoy safe with only a few gold items in place that's easy to find to trick thieves. Only disclose the location of your safes to the people that you completely trust.

Take precautionary measures
Avoid bragging and telling people how much gold you've accumulated. More importantly, don't disclose that you're keeping some of it at home. It's never a good idea to keep all of your gold in the same place, be it a concealed compartment in your cabinet or a digital safe. Store it in different locations across your home or use multiple safes to avoid losing everything at the same time. You should also try to make your home more secure by investing in high-quality locks, an alarm system and CCTV cameras. If you plan to be away from home for a long while, then either store your gold elsewhere or ask someone to tend to your home in your absence so that nobody suspects that it is not occupied. Some people might advise you to hide it in an unobvious place, but if you've heard this, then thieves probably know about this trick too.

The writer is co-founder of ServiceMarket. Views expressed are her own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy.